Do you know what Tom Szaky thinks of everything you own, eat, wear, poop and drive, from the plastic container that contains your hair product to the pricey phone you tuck into your back pocket to the discount drone you use to wage drunken dogfights with your next-door neighbor?
It’s garbage.
Really. Pick a spot on the space-time continuum, and the material world ultimately becomes junk. If necessity is the mother of invention, this is one inventive mother.
“Garbage is such a good topic because everything in the world, one day, will be owned by the garbage industry,” says Szaky, 35, CEO and founder of
TerraCycle, a Zen-like startup that specializes in finding the value in processing the most unrecyclable stuff on the planet.
For green entrepreneur Tom Szaky, his interest in recycling started in college about 16 years ago—with worm poop and a few childhood friends. “We were growing up in Toronto. When we got into the universities we wanted to get into, we decided to start growing ‘certain plants’ in our basement,” he says.
But when they couldn’t quite get those indoor plants to thrive, one of Szaky’s friends decided to try using one of nature’s great recyclers to jumpstart their efforts—worms. Specifically, he used their castings, the nutrient-rich recycled organic material that has passed through a worm’s body, as fertilizer. The plan worked. “That was the genesis. That was how our company began,” Szaky says.
Thus, TerraCycle was born. They started small, selling liquid worm castings through companies like Walmart and Home Depot, but have since evolved, branching out from soda bottles and collecting many more former waste materials. The company’s in-house R&D department and laboratories then come up with closed loop systems for turning collected waste into something new. Today, TerraCycle has become a global leader in the recycling industry. “Since then we’ve had straight growth. We operate in 23 countries around the world, and we’ve had really good success,” Szaky says.
Across the world, their waste collection programs work for even the hardest to recycle items—think baby diapers and cigarette butts—keeping them out of landfills and oceans with innovative ways to reuse them, like turning them into tote bags or park benches. Although they do produce products, like flower planters made from crushed computers and fax machines, TerraCycle’s main focus is on the waste itself.
A big part of how they do this is through partnerships with large and small companies, retailers, municipalities, and regular people. On a small scale, individuals can send their hard-to-recycle waste (like alkaline batteries or automotive parts) to TerraCycle for a fee, knowing their waste will be recycled into new products. Or, individuals can get involved in one of the company’s many free recycling programs sponsored by a company, organization, or municipality looking to reduce their environmental impact.
Even the largest companies are getting onboard, Szaky says, knowing doing so will make their products and image that much greener and more attractive to an increasingly environmentally aware market. Organizations like Colgate, PepsiCo, and Brita are sponsoring collections that allow consumers to send in their spent products to be recycled for free. Municipal programs such as cigarette butt collection stations are also popping up in cities around the world, as are industrial waste solutions.
As TerraCycle has evolved, it’s become known not only for its methods and products but also for its company culture. In the Trenton, New Jersey office, everything from walls to desks are made of reused and recycled materials, local graffiti artists redecorate the facility on a regular basis, and employees’ work lives have become something of a cult hit with their reality TV show, Human Resources.
“Every aspect of our business echoes our mission,” Szaky says. “Whether it’s our physical office being made entirely of garbage or our belief in transparency, where not only our walls are transparent but the way our people interact is completely transparent.”
Although the company has come far from selling worm poop in old soda bottles (and yes they do still offer their famous liquid fertilizers), their mission has remained the same—to solve the problem of waste no matter what it takes.
gb&d: One of TerraCycle’s most prominent brand statements is about “solving for waste.” How are you doing that in ways other companies aren’t?
Tom Szaky: We realized, after a few years building a multimillion dollar worm poop business, that if we focus only on the product as the hero, we won’t necessarily be able to solve for all types of garbage because it will take the very best types of garbage to make, effectively, the very best products. So we changed our model and refocused on the garbage as the hero. We built a business model around figuring out how to collect it and process it in a circular way, primarily focusing on things that are
not typically recyclable.
gb&d: As a green business owner, what is your biggest challenge?
Szaky: It all has to do with making people care. We are trying to solve something—garbage—that goes out of sight, out of mind. We are asking a person to invest their time and money to be able to do something with it that’s significantly better but not nearly as simple. And that’s not necessarily easy.
gb&d: How have you convinced the more than 63 million people who’ve participated in your collection programs to care?
Szaky: It’s all about making it personal to the individual. Because the environment is such a broad topic, it’s sometimes very difficult for people to figure out what’s in it for them—whether that individual wants to fulfill their personal sustainability goals or something else. Many entrepreneurs, especially social entrepreneurs, they do the
inverse. They go around saying, “Please, help me because it’s the right thing to do,” and that really just doesn’t go far.
gb&d: What new TerraCycle developments are you most excited about?
Szaky: Last month at the World Economic Forum, we launched the world’s first shampoo bottle with Head & Shoulders made from 25% ocean plastic. This is an interesting case study because ocean plastic is especially difficult to source and it’s expensive, more expensive than recycled plastics. And it’s less capable. This plastic has been floating in the ocean. It’s degraded. So why would P&G put a plastic into the world’s top shampoo brand that is both more expensive and turns their iconic white bottles into gray ones? The reason is that it will actually create value for them. Rather than investing capital in TV commercials or advertising, they’re investing in something like this. Now, if we just went to them and said, “Hey, guys, ocean plastic is a problem.” They’d say, “We agree, but we don’t see a business way to solve it.” Instead, we go in and say, “If you do something with ocean plastic, you can really win big against your competition.”
gb&d: You’ve gone into countries like Mexico and Brazil and offered recycling programs with great success. How did you approach those markets?
Szaky: We offer services no one ever offered. So when we go to places like Mexico or Brazil, or just recently China, there’s usually very, very big interest in that. The issue is getting someone to pay for it. In China, for example, Colgate is the company we work with who funds our ability to nationally collect and recycle toothpaste tubes.
gb&d: How do you get these large corporations behind the idea?
Szaky: It depends on the stakeholder. If it’s a consumer products company, what we pitch them is that by working with us you can make your waste nationally recyclable and that will allow you to increase your market share, win at retail, and beat the competition. With retailers as a stakeholder, and we work with about 100,000 retailers now on collecting waste at their stores, it’s more about how to drive foot traffic. But in each case, you’ll notice we don’t go in and say, “Do it because it’s the right thing to do” or “Do it for sustainability.” We say, “Do this because it will fulfill your key goals. It will help you grow your business.” If you can’t nail that, then you have to be able to demonstrate to them that not caring will cause the inverse of those benefits. And that’s the unlocking mechanism.
In 2014, Mark Lefko began writing a book on global sustainability to capture the knowledge and best practices of sustainable businesses. The book sought to prove how global sustainability is shaping the growth of the most progressive profitable multinational, Fortune 500, middle-market and startup companies around the world.
The following chapters highlight interviews with leaders discussing strategies for diverting food waste, developing sustainable agriculture, recycling and creating better packaging. They are meant to inspire other CEOs and executives to participate in the sustainability movement and evolve their organizations.
Package lightweighting
Pacific Seafood’s Greenshield boxes are an example of a growing practice known as "package lightweighting," which means exactly what the term suggests. Honest Tea’s Seth Goldman recommends this practice, not just because it benefits the environment by cutting down on the amount of plastic used, but also because it’s cheaper.
"We’ll certainly look for packaging savings," said Goldman. "My point of view on the packaging in general is that its value is neutral. And if I can lightweight my packaging, that’s a good step for our business financially as well as environmentally. I’m happy to look for the cheapest sustainable option I can find."
TerraCycle’s Tom Szaky agrees, although he finds the subject to be a bit more complex.
"So the idea of the circular economy when it comes to consumer goods is, how do you make the packaging easier to recover and put right back into the same product? That is a simplified example, but every major consumer-product company in the world is lightweighting their packaging. They are using fewer resources to make the package, which has a very good short-term sustainability story to it, without question. There is less resource use. However, when you move away from a glass jar to package your pasta sauce in a sachet, you have used fewer resources, but you have also made it significantly less recyclable. This is the challenge. There is huge discussion about sustainability and its derivatives, and about what constitutes a circular economy, and so on. But what actually happens, in many cases, is not what is being discussed. That is the part that is the overall challenge.
"So it is a journey. We need to keep showing as many strong case studies as we can, but there are huge forces out there … that we have to contend with."
一般人眼里往往需要花钱处理的垃圾在他看来不再是垃圾，而是具有某种独特价值的商品。于是，他创办了TerraCycle公司。他把别人视为垃圾的东西作为原材料，把食堂的剩饭剩菜喂食给蚯蚓，再用蚯蚓的粪便制成肥料;把葡萄酒园废弃不用的酒桶改造成旋转堆肥机和收集雨水的雨桶;用旧软木塞批量生产软木板;用果汁袋做成手提包、铅笔盒和背包;用奥利奥饼干包装纸制成垫布、托盘、台布、环保袋和浴帘;他还将电子垃圾与被人们视为垃圾的涂鸦艺术相结合，开发出“城市艺术花盆”……
如今TerraCycle已经是知名的环保绿色企业，拥有几百种独特的升级回收的产品。可以说汤姆·萨基创造了一个又一个奇迹，而闪耀在这些奇迹的背后是他的创新思维。他的创业之路从一开始就不同寻常。
