The 23-year-old Upper Canada College graduate is the co-founder and CEO of TerraCycle, a company that uses waste in a unique way to create a cheap and environmentally safe plant food.

The idea behind the product is simple: waste is fed to worms, and the worms' waste becomes the key ingredient in TerraCycle products.

"I came up with the idea when I went to Princeton," he said. "I was the only Canadian living with a bunch of Americans and I wanted them to see Canada. We went up to Montreal and I saw a worm box at a party. I started to come up with the idea from there."

While TerraCycle is the young entrepreneur's biggest success, it is far from his first venture into the business world. He started up his first company, Flyte Design, at age 14.

"It was just as the Internet was starting up and it was a web development company," he said. "It was great being so young and working with a lot of cool clients. We did some stuff for Roots, which was our biggest client, and some government-type things."

Having gotten a taste of web design, he later started up three more web companies during his UCC days. The ability to be his own boss appealed to him from a young age.

"I like the control of being able to work for myself and the freedom to grow things aggressively in a certain direction," he said. "If I worked for a corporation, I'd be limited in the amount of risk I could take and the amount of creativity I could have."

Szaky credited his experiences at Upper Canada College with helping him learn to tackle monumental projects and think big. While most schools might have reined him in, UCC allowed him to grow and test boundaries.

"They let me get away with a lot while I was there," he said. "We had a fashion show while I was there and it was so big we had to bring in power generating trucks because we'd used the school's power supply. The lighting rigs were like you'd see at a concert. If they were any bigger, might have brought the roof down. In a lot of places, I would have gotten a slap on the wrist for doing something so big."

Szaky has never been one to shy away from big challenges. He once cycled from Toronto to Vancouver to raise $4,000 for the Ontario Naturalists, setting a national record by making the trip in only 21 days.

He added that growing up in Canada gave him a unique perspective that helped him when developing the business with Americans. While Canadians tend to have more environmental sensibilities, American business is often driven more by the bottom line.

"It's interesting when you combine the Canadian psyche with American capitalism," he said. "In the U.S., people are extremely entrepreneurial and more likely to take risks. The irony is that we're doing something big now with a Canadian mentality. We have an eco-capitalist paradigm that works better than the existing paradigm."

Of course, creating a product that is made completely from waste - TerraCycle plant food even comes in used pop bottles - was never by design. Though the product is the first to actually leave a negative environmental footprint, actually reducing waste as it is produced, Szaky said the initial plan was to make money first and foremost.

"It's all about coming up with the best product and making it cheap," he said. "It's one of the most environmentally conscious products on the shelves, but I didn't set out to make that."

While the product is completely organic, Szaky does not want that to be a major selling point. He said he wants to be able to compete with large manufacturers and as such, does not want to be pigeon-holed as a niche product.

"The fact that the product is completely organic is only on the back label," he said. "The strategy is to create a product that can go up against the biggest people, go after Miracle-Gro. Otherwise, what's the point?"

In the long run, however, the eco-friendly angle could become a successful part of what separates Szaky's brainchild from other products in the field. Because it works better than chemical products, is odourless, does not harm plants the way some chemicals can and is actually cheaper than the alternatives, Szaky said the green angle could prove to be a final selling point.

"If you go to a grocery store and you see bananas for 50 cents and pound and organic bananas for a dollar a pound, most normal people would just go for the regular bananas," he said. "But what I was thinking is what if the organic bananas were the same price? What if they were a penny cheaper? Then it's a no-brainer. That was the goal."

Toppling the industry giants may not be far off. The company is progressing in leaps and bounds, with its growth seemingly limited only by the amount of waste they can come up with to create TerraCycle Plant Food.

"Literally every part of the product was at one point headed for a landfill and it can be hard to come up with waste to meet the demand," Szaky said. "We're shipping across Canada and the U.S. and we may have to ship out millions more bottles by next year."

Low costs and a growing consumer base have Szaky hoping that TerraCycle will grow faster than conventional companies.

"We're just going to have to work to make sure we can keep up," he said.

From his humble beginnings in dot-coms and school fashion shows blown up to outsized proportions, it would appear that Szaky should have no trouble with that.

For details on TerraCycle products, visit www.terracycle.ca

A MOMENT WITH...

TOM SZAKY