INTERVIEW
Tom Szaky Terracycle
’ ‘
T
We want to go
bigger and faster
– it’s never enough
From its accidental beginnings to a multimillion-dollar turnover, Terracycle is an unorthodox model of a company that took a multi-tracked road, including recyclable pouches and a reality TV series. Its co-founder, Tom Szaky, tells Erik Jaques how making deals along the way opened up further opportunities to grow
om Szkay’s business success is down to pot luck in more ways than one. Terracycle, the company he founded as
a 19-year-old Princeton dropout, claims to be the fastest growing eco-friendly manufacturer in the world, with exclusive deals to “upcycle” the irritant non-recyclable waste streams of the consumer packaged goods overlords (Kraft Foods, Frito Lay (Pepsi), Mars Wrigley and the like).
A Doritos packet becomes a speaker, a Capri Sun pouch is magicked into bags, Oreo wrappers take flight as kites, Brooks Brothers scraps and Warner Brothers film will become whatever Terracycle wants them to be – over 200 products for home, garden, school, office, pets and beyond are up for grabs at all the usual major retail suspects. Terracycle’s raw materials are better than free – as it is paid to deal with burdensome waste streams products that can be priced way below the usual, frequently off-putting green premium. It also enables the funding of armies, or “brigades” – 9.4M-strong – of people to gather the garbage, who are then rewarded with a donation to a charity of their choice for each submitted item. Now 27, Hungarian-born Szkay is buzzing with kinetic energy and grand schemes. Spiky-haired, handsome and charmingly ebullient, he talks up the concepts of “eco- capitalism”, “sustainable business 2.0” and about becoming “as big as, or bigger than, the idea of recycling”. Soon, Terracycle will be a verb like Google, he says, or the company could be the “Wal- Mart of garbage”. Terracycle is headquartered in Trenton, a deprived area of New Jersey that wouldn’t
seem out of place in a David Simon script, with gun violence rife and drug-busts the norm. While initially moving into the 20,000- square-foot local [ED: locale/warehouse?] for price reasons, Szaky has decided to stick around, generating jobs where previously there were none, and cultivating a unique environment for his youthful company – the average age is 30 – to creatively blossom. Everything from the building itself to the office equipment is recycled, music blares all round, and local graffiti artists are commis- sioned to decorate the walls on a weekly basis. “That’s typical Terracycle,” Szaky smiles. Despite a mere workforce of 74, the compa- ny last year expanded from the mean streets of Trenton to Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the UK. This year Szaky has set up shop in Turkey, and has designs on Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Columbia and a clutch of countries across Europe. “We want to go bigger and faster,” he says emphatically, “it’s never enough! “We would like to become, basical-
ly, the ultimate solution for all waste. That’s our ultimate goal and we hope to get there if possible.” Last year, turnover stood at $7.6M and is projected to rise to $15M this year. And although Szkay’s ambition often hurtles beyond reality (he was quoted as saying 2010 would yield $50M), he is at the helm of a profitable, one- of-a-kind company. To think it all started with worm poop and, yes, pot.
In the twilight of their high school years, Szaky and some friends were
22 April 2010 ❘ Sustainab le Business
trying to grow their own stash but meeting with consistent failure. The horticultural experiment was still dead in the water when they all parted ways to attend university, but when Szaky dropped by during the fall of his freshman year, a revelatory breakthrough had taken place: feeding worms with compost and fertilising the plants with their excrement pro- duced the bud mother lode.
While sampling the harvest, Szaky had a Eureka moment. What if somebody bottled this fertilizer and sold it? Not only could waste be recycled for utilitarian use, but chemical fertilizers could also be trumped by a price-competitive alternative. People with even the slightest environmental inclinations would lap it up.
That summer Szaky maxed out two credit cards, borrowed bar mitzvah money from a friend and convinced his reluctant parents to chip in for a $22,000 machine that could rapidly supply garbage to millions of worms. Working from a garage, he and the company’s co-founder Jon Beyer spent the summer wading through tonnes of olfactory-abusing Princeton cafeteria waste to sal- vage their precious feedstock. Yet at the end of it all they were still no closer to alighting on a commercial route to market.
But while the fledgling venture teetered on the precipice of failure, word had gotten out about the quirky worm poop entrepreneurs, and Szaky and Beyer were invited by a local radio station to tell their story live on air. Luckily, their brio
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