The topic at the Rozsa Center on Sept. 24 was an unusual one: garbage. That night, Tom Szaky, the founder of TerraCycle, gave a free lecture titled “Revolution in a Bottle.” TerraCycle is a company that bases its business on using garbage to create new products.
The lecture largely described the history of the company. The first slide on the PowerPoint presentation behind Szaky read, “What is Garbage?” That question is the basis for much of Szaky’s and TerraCycle’s work. In nature, Szaky explained, waste becomes the “food” for the next generation of life. However, the waste that humans create doesn’t contribute towards future life. In fact, he continued, it is the only commodity with a negative value, i.e. people are willing to pay to for someone else to take it.
TerraCycle got its beginning when Szaky observed some of his friends working to grow certain plants. Though the plants were difficult to grow, he and his friends observed that the plants fed by worm fertilizer grew the best. Eventually Szaky realized that it could be possible to feed large numbers of worms organic waste, collect the droppings, and sell the resultant fertilizer, and thanks to the rule above “get paid on both ends.”
Eventually the company convinced Wal-Mart to carry their product, and it took off from there. Over the years TerraCycle diversified, and now the company develops ways to reuse all garbage. One of their more famous techniques is “upcycling” in which waste products like wrappers of drink pouches are used to form new, more useful products, such as pencil cases or backpacks.
In a sense, then, TerraCycle is a fairly successful “green” company. Szaky explains its success compared to other “green” companies that went under has having a specific focus. TerraCycle is by all appearances an ordinary company, except that it the products it makes by design reduce the amount of garbage going into landfills. In the process, TerraCycle has gotten really good at what it does, as it is able to make something out of almost any garbage, even just melting or grinding stuff down to start over with it. It’s success is so great that the company even has its own TV show on the National Geographic Channel, Garbage Moguls, where each episode the TerraCycle engineers focus on an engineering challenge related to garbage, such as turning Oreo wrappers into kites.
Overall, the presentation was well received by the students. MTU student Becky Bender was greatly impressed overall by Szaky’s concept, saying, “To do a new idea and put it into an old business model …[it’s] just a good idea.” Other students expressed interest in Szaky’s idea, and discussed it excitedly as they left the theater.
The Rozsa Center periodically offers free lectures to students. The next free lecture will be by Cambodian survivor Loung Ung on November 9.