One man’s trash is another’s treasure — and Tom Szaky is living proof.
The Hungarian native’s fascination with trash goes back a long way. While studying at Princeton, he and his mates cultivated a huge worm farm, which they fed with cafeteria waste. They then sold the resulting Worm Poop (very effective fertilizer, or so we’ve heard) in bottles they’d found in the trash. It was a win-win: they made money, and the project was environmentally friendly too.
Fast forward to 2012, and Tom, as the founder and CEO of TerraCycle, Inc, one of the world’s foremost leaders in eco-capitalism, recycling and upcycling, was named #1 CEO in America Under 30 by Inc. Magazine.
Today, with a projected $15 million in revenue and clients like Kraft Foods, Nestle, L’Oreal, Mars, GSK and Kimberly-Clark Professional, TerraCycle is a post-consumer waste solution force to be reckoned with. They’re even teaming up with cigarette companies — talk about an odd couple!
TerraCycle isn’t just good business — it’s ‘good’ business. They’ve expanded their recycling and upcycling fundraisers, which pay schools and nonprofits to collect used packaging and products, into 20 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brasil, UK, Ireland, most EU countries, Israel and Turkey.
TerraCycle could arguably be named the world’s most innovative business. And after a long journey of invention, passion and hard work, TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky, 30, is certainly in the running for world’s most innovative young businessman. CL chatted with him about his road to success, his take on internships and how to achieve your dreams.
TerraCycle began over 10 years ago in the dorm room of then Princeton University freshman Tom Szaky from—surprisingly—worm poop. The idea sparked over Princeton’s fall break when Tom visited some friends in Canada who were using worm poop as fertilizer. He began harvesting his own worm poop after returning to campus.
“When I saw a lot of food on campus being thrown out, we decided to use the garbage to feed worms and create a potent fertilizer from worm compost,” he said.
There is profitability in waste. Join Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, as he shares his thoughts on the state of sustainable packaging and the paths he sees for the CPG industry in the face of the rising costs of resources, packaging taxes and EPR laws. He will tell how TerraCycle has helped hundreds of brands turn wasted packaging into massive brand equity and consumer engagement.
Brittany Lowe, an eighth-grader at Citrus Hills Intermediate School in Corona, has collected candy wrappers — thousands of them — in less than two months. And someday, those wrappers may help people with a genetic muscular condition that most children won’t survive past their first year.
The timing couldn’t have been better as candy wrappers typically appear out of nowhere around Halloween. Since then, Brittany has collected and shipped 32 pounds of wrappers, and has plenty more to send to TerraCycle in New Jersey, which pays two cents per wrapper and then “repurposes” them into binders, notebooks and tote bags.
PTO is excited to announce that our school is going GREEN! We teamed up with a program called TERRACYCLE. We are going to be collecting a number of items to recycle and earn CASH. Each classroom will have a bin to place collected items, which may be brought from home or just saved from lunch/snacks at school. Please consider getting involved as we strive to make God’s creation a beautiful masterpiece one community at a time. Below is a list of all items we are going to collect. PTO will keep everyone informed throw here as to our progress throughout the year.
From worm poop to cigarette butts.
When you really think about it, there is a connection. They’re both disgusting, the sorts of things you would not want to touch, and the quantities of them are astronomical.
For a Trenton-based recycling company named TerraCycle, which made its name selling worm-generated fertilizer, there’s a potential gold mine in cigarette butts.
TerraCycle has found a way to recycle cigarette butts into plastic lumber, pallets, bins and ashtrays. A house, for example, could be framed from the recycled material.
Through its Cigarette Waste Brigade program, launched last month, TerraCycle collects discarded cigarettes, melts the filters and mixes the material with other recyclables to create plastic pellets, which are then used to create industrial products.
The Times of Trenton features TerraCycle's cigarette butt recycling program on its cover.
The Brighton Memorial Library, 2300 Elmwood Ave., will host "Recycling Beyond the Blue Box: TerraCycle and the Monroe County Ecopark" at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 23, 2013.
Guests may learn how Cheryl Bertou and her son were able to partner with TerraCycle, an company focused on reducing waste through the recycling of previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste, to raise funds for a school building project in South Sudan.
Have ink cartridges? Old laptops? Batteries? Or any old tech that you're no longer using? Bring it to one of our TerraCycle boxes, located conveniently in the Riepe computer lab or the mailroom. We'll recycle it responsibly for free, and you get the benefit of helping the environment without leaving Riepe.
