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

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

But here's what you don't get at all from their cool TV show: Yes, it is doing $7.2 million in sales, but not everything is made here, in this one cool factory. Another thing you can't help but notice on the factory floor is that the blue-collar workforce at TerraCycle is not made of employees with job security. The workers are temps from LaborReady.

Capitalism's effect on the Earth has been disasterous. The purer the capitalism, the worse the debacle: market fundamentalism and an unregulated finance sector wrecked the market economy. TerraCycle isn't interesting because it proves that the free market can fix the environmental crisis. TerraCycle is rather one of the most interesting ways that capitalism can destroy itself and then reinvent itself in the future.It is  a harbinger of industries to come.

In the TerraCycle office, the furniture looks like what you'd find in the dumpster at Princeton at the end of the spring semester (it was.) The paychecks come in reused envelopes from the newspaper company that used to occupy the factory. The company even believes in upcycling the graffiti art that bourgeois America thinks is trash: Terra throws parties with local graffiti writers who have decorated the factory with eye-popping glossy fluorescent murals. Last year, the graffitists were brought in to do custom artwork on a line of flower pots made from recycled plastic.

In modern life, garbage is everywhere. In nature, it doesn't exist. Capitalism is the tin man still looking for its heart. It had better listen to people like Tom Szaky and TerraCycle, fast. Szaky says companies need to become like trees. Trees take from the earth but give back in equal amounts. These days, too many companies are like fires out of control.

The company's new top-seller is a product in home décor: clocks made out of vinyl records. The company now makes organic drain cleaners, pet products and a fertilizer in a more concentrated, eco-friendly form. 

So, what's next for TerraCycle?

Last week, the company announced a deal that Szaky says is "much bigger" than anything else it has landed thus far. Mars, Inc., maker of Snickers, Wrigley's Gum, Skittles, etc., has committed to upcycleits  excess and used packaging with TerraCycle for all 20 of its leading brands. Szaky gushses that this will enable his company to go "completely global." The company is on track to bring in $12 million $15 million in revenue this year. 

"TerraCycle perpetually rides on the edge of billion-dollar success and bankruptcy," Szaky said last week on Garbage Moguls. It's almost like TerraCycle has greened up the 50 Cent motto and made its mantra "Change the world or die trying."

But you should personally cheer them on, because all of that plastic in the Pacific is putting toxic petroleum byproducts into your food, your fish, in your kitchen. This damaged world needs innovators like TerraCycle to thrive, before every last ice cap melts into an ocean full of plastic. 

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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