In Tom Szaky’s vision of the new economy, nothing is garbage. Not cigarette butts. Not dirty diapers. Not even used tampons.
TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky shows a shampoo bottle made with recycled plastic collected from beaches and oceans. (Phil Gregory/WHYY)
The United Nations has recognized a Trenton-based recycling company for creating a shampoo bottle that’s made with plastic waste collected from beaches and waterways.
TerraCycle chief executive officer Tom Szaky said 25 percent of the world’s plastic ends up in oceans, rivers, and lakes.
A Trenton-based recycling company has received an award from the United Nations for creating a shampoo bottle that’s made with plastic waste collected from beaches and waterways.
Tom Szaky, the Hungarian-born CEO and founder of TerraCycle, dreams of chewing gum, cigarette butts and ocean plastic. His Trenton, New Jersey-based company aims to accelerate the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, a breakthrough in materials science, energy storage and other technologies, by cleaning up after heaps of waste and inventing inputs for items spurned by ordinary recyclers.
Who in the world would ever invest in worm poop?
In the very beginning it was pretty much just one person, Tom Szaky, who began by investing his time and energy in 2002 as a Princeton University freshman. Szaky had seen friends in his hometown of Montreal feed kitchen scraps to worms in a composting box and then put the worm poop into the soil of their indoor plants, which were thriving. Szaky thought that the worms could be put to some profitable use. The summer of his freshman year he contracted with the university’s food services department to compost food waste. In his sophomore year he borrowed $30,000 from his family to form TerraCycle.
Tom Szaky, Founder and CEO of TerraCycle, talks about the company's partnership with Colgate's Save Water campaign, whose global ambassador is Michael Phelps.
