I have mentioned Terracycle before on this blog where I recognized their truly innovative business model for making high quality organic lawn and garden products out of waste. From it’s inception in 2001, the company has done an amazing job with it’s brand, and has expanded it’s product line beyond fertilizers to cleaning products and others including the Firelog made from a very problematic bio-diesel byproduct, glycerin. Now they have partnered up with one of the worlds largest food and beverage companies in their first effort to up cycle Kraft products packaging into a new category of eco-friendly consumer products.

What a traditional capitalistic enterprise would consider a limitation, Terracycle has turned into an advantage. There aren’t many marketing or development teams that would embrace the challenge of creating products completely out of garbage. Terracycle is thriving by doing exactly that, turning waste into an asset, their business model is based on trash, no pun intended. Their whole product development process is based on using waste as the raw material in every aspect including the packaging. Terracycle’s model is one of the most inspiring working examples of eco-capitalism, by taking material that is generally considered an industrial and environmental liability and turning it into an asset.

Now that Terracycle has implemented the most difficult parts by organizing the relationships with the conglomerates, kick starting the collection brigades, and developing the processes to make the system economically viable, it’s easy for me to now see how they could take this much further. I would love to see them push the envelope with their consumer product and take them to the same level as their lawn and garden products. What I would recomment next is to invest more in design and develop more technical “higher end” consumer products that are more functional and desirable than the usual recycle/reused commodity type products poping up everywhere. This way we can further delay the material “garbage” from entering the waste stream and hopefully by then we will have figured out ways to deploy closed loop material cycles that can go on for ever without generating any waste. An amazing innovation opportunity for an enthusiastic and informed sustainable design team to really cut loose on.