TerraCycle: Worm Poop and So Much More

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What we do is we go in and work with companies like Honest Tea, Capri Sun, Kool-Aid -- these all became our sponsors -- and enabled them to help us run a nationwide collection program. So, today, if you have kids, and they're drinking Capri Sun or Honest Tea juice pouches, and you'd like to get paid to reuse them, you go to our website, you sign up, and for free, we send you collection boxes. You send them back, and then we donate $0.02 per pouch to any organization you want. Typically, it's like your school or something. And that's where it begins.

Then we get this material in, and we say, "Look, well, what can we do with it?" Well, juice pouches are cool because they're very durable, and if you sew 'em together, you can make it into a material that could be made fundamentally into anything, or anything you want. And that's where it really begins.

Then we go and we mock up some ideas. We meet with some retailers. And this year -- and the juice pouch idea is only seven months old -- we have backpacks, homework folders, locker organizers, pencil cases, and all these products available in aggregate in over 15,000 stores.

MW: It's really amazing to see what you can do with waste, with just sort of turning the production model on its ear a little bit.

Beyond just like purely reuse of an old drink pouch, turning it into something new, you're also taking waste in the form of -- well, e-waste, and then turning it into a waste receptacle. Explain to me a little bit about how the waste bins came about.

TS: So there, we were looking at e-waste. What's interesting about e-waste is that it's like 30 different polymers together. And typically, recycling centers have trouble recycling a bunch of different polymers. And so what we did is we worked with a company, and we created a method where we could take used -- or all sorts of mixed polymers and make it into a finished product.

And that first started by us launching a pot, an eight-inch pot. And what we did to sort of make it even more unique is we had all these graffiti artists painting our building all the time, so we hired them, and we created the graffiti pot where all these inner city artists painted these plastic pots made from crushed computers, and that became the TerraCycle Urban Art Pot.

Then from there, we took an expansion and said, "Well, what if we did waste bins?" And we took the exact same concept. We didn't do graffiti with OfficeMax, but they have these waste bins made from 100 percent recycled plastic, all from crushed computers. And we now have this division of plastics, if you will, that we're growing and developing into all sorts of different products that are made in this concept.

MW: What can you tell me about product lines that may be in the works? Do you have any waste streams in mind that you're trying to look at how to incorporate those into new product lines?

TS: Yes. We get approached all the time by major companies to say, "Look, we have a waste stream. Can we make a solution with it? Can we do a collection program? Can we get into the sponsored waste thing, and then can we have TerraCycle turn it into some cool product?" And so we get a lot of that.

MW: That must be like a revelation for companies to realize that there's somebody out there who actually wants to take all the waste and turn it into something new. Is there a benefit for the companies beyond not having to deal with this potentially toxic waste?

TS: Yes. Typically, we don't really work as much on the toxic waste side. The real benefit to these companies is right now -- take like a Clif Bar, for example. They produce hundreds of millions of Clif Bars. And the wrappers all end up in a landfill. Today, when you have a soda bottle, you have a choice on that. It could either become waste, or you can recycle it. And that choice is created by having a recycling logo, and that enables you to recycle it.

What we are becoming is the reused logo on these packages. And now, because Clif is engaged with us this program, we can take those Clif Bar wrappers and collect them and turn them into other products. So what it does is it changes the waste stream from just garbage to a reusable commodity, if the customer chooses to do that.