Trenton Times, July 16, 2002
Garbage Diet May Fatten Wallets
by Robert Stern, Staff Writer
PRINCETON TOWNSHIP - Tom Szaky's idea of a high-flying business venture used to be some sort of Internet startup.
That was before last year, when the budding Princeton University entrepreneur got to thinking about down-to-earth things like garbage, worms and soil.
So Szaky and a group of fellow Princeton students hatched a business plan that would use tiny worms to turn trash into cash while benefiting the environment.
Now, the group - which formed Toronto-based TerraCycle International Inc. - hopes its plan becomes a global enterprise in the next few years, said Szaky, a Canadian getting ready for his sophomore year at Princeton.
He said the concept behind TerraCycle actually is pretty simple: composting.
It relies on voracious, tiny red worms to convert heaps of organic waste - everything from food to paper to fallen leaves to grass clippings and wood - into nutrient-rich garden soil and organic fertilizer.
"This idea has been around for over 30 years, but has never been considered as a global waste-management solution," said Szaky, 20, who is studying economics and social psychology at Princeton.
That's because traditional composting is smelly, requires large swaths of land and is both labor- and time-intensive, said Princeton graduate Noemi Millman, TerraCycle's vice president for administration.
TerraCycle claims its plan minimizes the disadvantages that make traditional composting impractical on a large scale.
The startup firm says its system is speedy, efficient and odorless and requires much less land than a typical composting system would need.
It has just started testing a small prototype that Szaky says can convert up to a half-ton of waste into soil daily after its initial week-long run. The system is set up on the back of a pick-up truck trailer in a corner of Princeton's campus. To save land space, it uses a patented, multilevel conveyor system dubbed the "worm gin" by its Florida-based creator, Harry Windle.
The prototype processes waste from one of the university's kitchens, which serves food to some of those on campus for summer programs, in exchange for Princeton hosting the prototype run.
If those tests - slated to last until sometime this fall - are successful, the company hopes to win large institutional clients like Princeton and Rutgers universities and build a large plant somewhere in central New Jersey, Szaky said.
Such a facility would be able to process 60 to 100 tons of garbage daily in a 6,000-square-foot space, he said.
The idea, eventually, is to have at least 100 such composting pods throughout North America, Europe and other parts of the world, said John K. Ashbee, chairman and CEO of Tropika.
Ashbee said his firm usually backs Internet-based businesses. TerraCycle is the "first non-Internet venture we've looked at in quite a long time," said Ashbee. He learned of the Princeton students' proposal from Szaky because the two belong to the same rowing club, he said.
He said it was not the rowing friendship but the idea behind TerraCycle that convinced his firm to back the venture.
"It's got a couple of real up sides from a revenue point of view," Ashbee said.
On one hand, TerraCycle claims the firm will get rid of organic waste - which Szaky says represents about 75 percent of the waste stream in North America - for much lower rates than most commercial waste-disposal services that send garbage to landfills or incinerators.
On the other, it will recoup at least some revenue it might have made from higher disposal rates by selling the highly fertile, nutrient-rich soil and the fertilizer its system produces, Ashbee said.
The plan's financial potential, combined with a built-in environmental incentive that would keep more trash out of landfills or incinerators, make it hard to pass up, Szaky contends.