Making Garbage Useful

Posted by A. Caleb Hartley on July 8th, 2008 filed in Uncategorized, business

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with representatives of TerraCycle, a cutting-edge company for the environment, about their most recent announcement: a sponsorship from Kraft Foods!

First, a little history on TerraCycle. The company was founded by Tom Szaky in 2001, while he was a student at Princeton. TerraCycle’s first product was a natural fertilizer made out of worm poop - and that product is still the core product of the company. Szaky got the idea while he was visiting friends during college, and he noticed that they were making compost for their - ahem - “herb” garden.

Ultimately, Szaky dropped out of Princeton to run the business - whose product consisted of liquefied worm poop bottled in used bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. TerraCycle actually uses what most people and companies consider waste at every level of their manufacturing, from the product itself (worm poop) to the bottles it is packaged in (discarded soda pop bottles), to the packaging that the product is shipped in (misprinted or otherwise unusable cardboard boxes), to even the spray mechanisms themselves (overruns or discards - did you know that companies throw away thousands of perfectly functional spray heads if a bottle design is slightly changed? TerraCycle uses these discards!)!

Without going into terrible, boring detail (I love this stuff, but I know you, my readers, may not), TerraCycle has great information about basic economics and how the law of supply and demand has worked against the planet since the beginning of the industrial era. But instead of tearing down what big business has always done (profit motive overriding social and environmental benefit), TerraCycle shows how, with a little creativity, the tradeoff between profit and the environment can be made into an illusion. It’s called the triple-bottom-line (profit, social, & environmental), and it is the idea that TerraCycle uses to base its business model off of. Quite successfully, I might add.

Suffice it to say that TerraCycle is taking what most people consider garbage, trash, or waste, and turning it into something useful again, which it can then sell for a profit. This keeps garbage out of the landfill and provides material for manufacturing that is free, nearly free, or even sometimes less than free (less than free? Wha…? Look on TerraCycle’s website to find out)! This allows them to sell an environmentally-superior product at the same or sometimes even cheaper prices than conventional alternatives. Amazing!

So what’s this Kraft deal? TerraCycle needs to get supplies from somewhere, right? In the early days, the company’s founders would “liberate” plastic bottles from recycling containers in the middle of the night…. But today, the company does something a little more socially responsible (and a little less “illegal”) - they pay schools and other organizations to collect stuff for them! Check out the left side of their website to see what their “Bottle Brigade” has turned into - schools and other organizations can now collect cookie wrappers, drink pouches, energy bar wrappers, yogurt containers, even wine corks, in addition to bottles.

4000 organizations signed up in 2007 to collect bottles and other material through this program. TerraCycle’s cost (to pay for shipping the collection boxes to schools and then back to the company, full) was $40 to $50 thousand PER MONTH! Corporate sponsorships help pay for this cost, allowing companies like Kraft to help control their impact on the environment not only from a manufacturing perspective, but also on the other end of the product’s life-cycle! Kraft is making the news right now because they are the #1 food and beverage manufacturer in North America, but the original sponsor of this project for TerraCycle was Honest Tea, whose co-founder Seth Goldman is good friends with TerraCycle’s Tom Szaky.

TerraCycle will accept any packaging, regardless of brand (Kraft and other sponsors are committed regardless of which manufacturer’s waste is collected). TerraCycle is focused on diverting waste from the stream, so the company makes its products out of material from any brand. Not that there isn’t enough from Kraft alone - 597 million packages of Oreo and Chips Ahoy are manufactured every year. Yes, thats 597 million plastic packages in our landfills, littering our streets, and floating around in our rivers and oceans. TerraCycle would like to take a chunk of that mess away.

So look for TerraCycle’s products next time you need a fertilizer or glass cleaner, or trash can, or planter, or any of several products they offer! Or sign up your school to help raise money for programs that get the short shrift, like theatre and arts and music education. This will all help TerraCycle solve manufacturers’ waste problems, solve the world’s landfill problem, and support schools and other organizations.

All while offering eco-friendly products without the eco-friendly premium.

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

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I was in no way paid or compensated for writing about TerraCycle, I just strongly believe in their mission. I was also sent a few products to test and review, which I will do in an upcoming post soon. Watch for it!

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Have any of you used TerraCycle’s products? What did you think? Bring us up to speed in the comments!

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