Life Among the Eco-Capitalists: A Revolution Takes Hold in New Jersey

By Sander Hicks, AlterNet. Posted May 6, 2009.

Somewhere between California and Hawaii is a big plastic trash dump floating in the ocean. Twice the size of Texas, it's known as the "Pacific Trash Vortex."  

Spiral-shaped currents concentrate thousands of acres of non-biodegradable plastic waste. Birds and fish that get tangled up in the mass die with stomachs full of plastic. High-speed, high-tech modern life is not exactly working in sync with Mother Earth here. Maybe that's why the global ecosystem is on the verge of collapse.  

But don't get bummed out! The Pacific Trash Vortex is one of the many things that inspires Tom Szaky (pronounced "Zackie"). He's the scruffy 30-year-old CEO and founder of America's most kick-ass green company.

TerraCycle makes good-looking products out of garbage. It sells hip messenger bags made out of printed vinyl salvaged from billboards, with a neat seatbelt clasp. It keeps millions of nonrecyclable Oreo wrappers out of landfills by making them into 30,000 kites, which are then sold to Wal-Mart, of all places. Someone can do something with all that plastic. 

Melting and recycling plastic requires energy and produces a weaker material. TerraCycle instead thrives with the practice of "upcycling" -- cleaning and reusing stuff, like 20-ounce soda bottles.

When Szaky was developing his first product, a worm-feces-based plant food, the company was short on cash. So he rounded up the interns and hit the streets of Princeton, N.J. They collected bottles from curbside recycling to fill their first big order from HomeDepot.com.

Scaling up a couple of years later, the company has a diverse and ever-evolving product line, $7.2 million in revenue, strong annual growth and venture capital backing. Profitability is somewhere around the corner. Szaky's new book, Revolution in a Bottle (Portfolio/Penguin), came out last month, and a vivid, funny TV show, Garbage Moguls, just premiered on the National Geographic channel. 

When you step into the world of TerraCycle, you leave all your old ideas about trash at the door. Here, there is no waste. "Garbage" does not exist -- there are only opportunities to upcycle, i.e. rethink, reuse and then sell like a hustler.

"We're eco-capitalists, we make money selling garbage," Szaky says on Garbage Moguls. On the phone with AlterNet, he adds, "You can't feel bad about saving the world and making money." 

In the book, we read about "monstrous hybrids," products impossible to recycle because they are layered and fused, like the plastics and light aluminum in a Capri Sun juice pouch. TerraCycle can turn those pouches into sturdy pencil cases and book bags.

But what about all those protected corporate trademarks and brand logos? Well, TerraCycle gets sponsorship from Kraft foods, where the new vice president of sustainability agreed to slap a wrapper-gathering mail-in campaign on the back of every package. Szaky and Co., invented a new term for this: "branded waste." It's free advertising.

Szaky was born in Hungary, and he has that tenacious immigrant drive. Revolution in a Bottle gives the full back story on the worm-poop fertilizer that birthed the corporation.

The idea was organic: Szaky saw the way worm crap saved his favorite pot plant. He dropped out of Princeton, put all his chips on a "worm gin" contraption and began to produce a great fertilizer made out of tiny drops of wormy shit. The book gives a blow by blow: He scrapes a company together out of nothing. It's a trial by fire. It builds character. It reduces him to nothing. Oftentimes, Szaky is about to give up in exhaustion when a small investor pops up to save the day. Soon, Szaky refines his sales pitch. He begins to land 10,000 unit orders at big-box stores and scrambles to fulfill them.

See more stories tagged with: environment, waste, terracycle

Sander Hicks runs the Vox Pop/DKMC media machine and coffeehouse. He is publisher at the New York Megaphone newspaper and author of The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up. He lives in Brooklyn.

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