Thanks to a horde of ravenous worms,
TerraCycle is turning garbage into dollars.
Tom Szaky is convinced that he's found a miracle substance that
will both make him millions and save the world: worm poop. Yes, it
may sound laughable, but don't be too hasty to judge. Szaky, a
scruffy 25-year-old
Princeton dropout who founded TerraCycle, a
small company based in Trenton,
New Jersey, that makes organic
plant food by using worm excrement (known as castings) as the key
ingredient, can weave a pretty compelling case.
See, to Szaky, there are some fundamental, perhaps even fatal,
flaws in the way our capitalist system currently functions. Most
companies, he says, are concerned only with profits and are more
than willing to pollute the environment and create mountains of
waste for others to clean up if doing so means boosting the bottom
line. Szaky believes that companies that go against that paradigm -
in other words, those that are socially responsible - usually have
to raise their prices and lower their profits. "That's why, in
general, organic foods, fair-trade foods, eco-friendly products
cost more," he says.
Not only do those products cost more, Szaky says, most people just
aren't willing to pay a premium for them simply because they're
green - which is why TerraCycle's worm-poop-fueled plant food is no
more expensive than similar nonorganic products. What Szaky sees as
necessary for the future, and what he believes TerraCycle is an
example of, is a new model for doing business: eco-capitalism.
Forget recycling and trying to reduce Americans' consumption, he
says. Instead, get rid of the idea of garbage and waste altogether.
Do that on a worldwide basis, and pollution goes away, the
environment is healed, and people can still buy and consume what
they please. "Waste is a man-made concept. In nature, waste doesn't
exist," he says. "The only reason waste is waste is because we
haven't figured out what to do with the material once we use it the
first time. If you can find uses for waste, you can eliminate the
idea of waste."
BY "WE," OF COURSE, Szaky really means
everybody else. He and his colleagues at TerraCycle have done just
fine jettisoning the whole concept of waste. Their plant
fertilizer, which is available in the
United States and
Canada at
Wal-Mart,
Home Depot,
Target, and
Whole Foods Market, is packaged
in soda bottles collected by what TerraCycle calls its Bottle
Brigade, made up of school groups and nonprofit organizations
around the country. The groups collect bottles and send them to
TerraCycle, which pays them for their efforts. It's a virtuous
circle: The groups get cash, and TerraCycle raises its profile,
generates goodwill, and, most importantly, gets the bottles it
needs. The containers aren't the only secondhand goods TerraCycle
uses; the company's computers are castoffs from corporations, and
some of its furniture came from
Princeton University dorms that
were undergoing an upgrade.
Then there's TerraCycle's product, which itself is waste-based. A
good way to get Szaky, who grew up in Canada after his parents fled
then-Communist
Hungary, fired up is to ask him about the virtues of
red worms. Night crawlers, which are what most of us see when we
dig up a spade full of soil, are all well and good, he says, but
they burrow and don't eat all that much, which is not cool if the
success of your business is dependent on huge volumes of worm
excrement. Red worms, on the other hand, don't burrow and are, to
say the least, eating and pooping machines. "They eat [the
equivalent of] their body weight every day, and they double in
population every 90 days," says Szaky, with more than a little
enthusiasm. "They're fantastic for this type of process."
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.
None of this would mean much if the resulting plant food, though
ingenious, were ineffective. But judging by sales - which have
grown from just $70,000 in 2004 to $1.5 million in 2006 to $2.5
million for the first half of 2007 - plenty of consumers think it
works. Szaky insists that the 70,000 microorganisms living in it
are what make it so powerful; picking up a bottle, then, means
buying something that is, in effect, still alive and kicking.
"These microorganisms help fight disease; they help bring nutrients
to the roots - it's like an ecosystem," he says. "One of the big
problems people have, especially in
America, is they douse their
garden with chemicals, which wipes out all the bugs that live in
your garden. But the bugs actually help your garden."
SZAKY COFOUNDED TerraCycle in 2002 with one
of his Princeton roommates. With the company's growth has come a
maturation. What started as little more than a collegiate lark has
slowly evolved into a more serious enterprise, albeit one whose
founder wears a uniform of a baseball cap and jeans and whose
employees at the company headquarters in an inner-city area of
Trenton never don a tie. As the business has added staff, Szaky has
brought in people with a lot of experience at large corporations.
His leadership style has also evolved, although Ellen Gaughran,
TerraCycle's head of human resources, says one of the bigger
challenges for the company's more seasoned executives is to keep
Szaky focused. "Because of his entrepreneurial
energy, he wants to
do so much, and we have to rein him in," she says. "He wants to
produce 25 new products next year. Well, it's almost physically
impossible to do it. It's about harnessing his energy and passion,
because he's got so much of it."
Szaky’s passion for changing the world through worm poop remains undiminished, and his approach to eco-capitalism continues to lure new people to TerraCycle. While he’s happy to talk about how green the company’s products are, he feels like he’s already making progress, because so many of his customers don’t know a thing about his philosophy: “People are buying it and don’t even realize how eco-friendly it is, because they’re buying it [based] on price and performance,” he says. “Isn’t that the best reason to buy it? It should just be made that way anyway, and then when people find out how green it is, it’s awesome.”