The amazing thing about eco-capitalism is that you can create business
models where everyone truly wins: the environment, the consumer, the big business, the retailer and your business. In other words, all stakeholders (even the environment) can benefit. What's amazing about this kind of solution is that it creates the opposite of a death spiral -- a growth spiral. That is exactly what happened when we launched what we call "sponsored waste."
The concept of
TerraCycle came up when my friends and I were trying to figure out how to grow "better tomatoes" in our basement and figured out that worm poop did the trick. The fascinating thing for me was that the worm poop itself was made from waste, a commodity that people are willing to pay you to take. Within six months of that serendipitous moment during my fall break (freshman year at
Princeton) I left school to corner the market on worm poop.
Inc. magazine wrote about us in 2002, giving our
business plan a rating of 4 out 10. Little did anyone know that three years later we would be on the cover as
The Coolest Little Startup in America.
Tom Szaky is the 26 year old Founder and CEO of TerraCycle, Inc. the world’s first company that manufactures and packages products from garbage! Tom left Princeton University during his Sophomore year to follow his dream of founding a truly eco-capitalist company. After an inauspicious start in a friend’s garage with no investors, TerraCycle and Tom have become an environmental thought leader pushing sustainable products and practices through mainstream outlets.
