While Szaky won't disclose exactly what his worms are fed (think of it as Coca-Cola's secret formula), he will say that about half their diet consists of nitrogen-based items, like grass clippings and coffee grounds, and the other half consists of carbon-based items, like paper products. The important thing to remember is that the food the worms eat is essentially garbage. So in one swoop, TerraCycle takes garbage people want to get rid of and feeds it to worms in order to make a product it can sell. Waste, indeed.

BEFORE THE WORMS feast on it, their grub is composted and cooked in a vat. The food and the worms are placed together on a conveyor belt, creating a feeding frenzy that would make Homer Simpson sick with jealousy. "On one end, you put in cooked material, and the worms eat that, and [when it's gone], they'll move out of their own poop and into new food," says Szaky. As the worms eat, the conveyor belt moves in the opposite direction of their travel at the pace of their ingestion, about an inch every five hours. "They're on a perpetual conveyer belt - food at one end and poop out the other," he says.

The poop alone isn't the product, of course. To get the actual plant food, which is technically known as vermicompost tea, TerraCycle adds oxygen and water and then brews and stirs the mixture for 48 hours. "We make this really potent organic tea, and the liquid becomes our plant food," says Szaky. The brew then goes into the recycled soda bottles, which have been cleaned and wrapped in a colorful TerraCycle label, and is sent to retailers. In keeping with the mission of the company to create no waste, TerraCycle takes the by-product created by brewing the tea and uses it as the raw material for other products like potting mix.