The College is taking steps to implement TerraCycle, a new waste management program, which will hopefully be introduced to the student body during Spring Term. MiddCORE suggested the program over Winter Term, and the group has since been working out the finer details of the project. Founded in 2001, TerraCycle is a recycling system that converts collected waste into a variety of useful products. The organization currently collects waste from over 28 million people in 20 participating countries. MiddCORE, a Winter Term course that focuses on social entrepreneurship, originally developed the idea to bring TerraCycle to Middlebury in early January “This started as a MiddCORE project where an alum and senior vice president of business development for TerraCycle, Jo Opot, challenged my students to identify waste streams at Middlebury that could be diverted from landfills and upcycled into usable products,” said Associate Professor of Economics Jessica Holmes.

Parents and kids at the K-2 school finished fifth in a statewide recycling contest sponsored by TerraCycle, a company started by a Princeton University dropout who sold organic “worm poop” fertilizer in used soda bottles and then branched out to make lunch bags, fences and other products from hard-to-recycle materials. TerraCycle partners with major brands to create products from packaging that otherwise might pose a public relations problem for them. The company was founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old freshman at Princeton. When his worm fertilizer idea only finished fourth in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, he left school to develop the concept and won a $1 million competition. He turned down the money to retain control of the company. TerraCycle now operates from a Trenton headquarters decorated by graffiti artists. The company has turned nearly 2 billion pieces of trash into a line of 246 recycled and “upcycled” products sold by the likes of Walmart and Whole Foods Market. More than $1.6 million has been generated for schools and charities. On Earth Day 2009, Tom Szaky published Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle is Redefining Green Business.