Entrepreneur blazes new trail with old packages

PHILADELPHIA — In 2003, an investor offered 21-year-old Princeton dropout Tom Szaky a million bucks.

Szaky turned him down.

Not that he didn't need the money. He was sleeping in a makeshift office, showering in the gym, and pondering a cash balance of zero.

The guy wanted Szaky to lose the environmental pitch with his business plan, except that was the plan.

Today, Szaky is glad he didn't give in.

Szaky has become a titan of trash. His company, TerraCycle, transforms waste headed for the landfill into new products.

TerraCycle makes kites from Oreo cookie wrappers. Reusable bags from Capri Sun drink pouches. Coasters from the center of old vinyl records.

New uses for milk jugs, circuit boards, and yogurt tubs.

He calls it not recycling, but upcycling. Better yet, "TerraCycling," which he hopes will join the common lexicon, like "googling."

TerraCycle sales have doubled every year since 2004, projected to be $12 million to $15 million this year.

Along the way, last year he was able to send back $100,000 to thousands of schools, charities, and other groups that collect the trash he wants.

And the spiky-haired guy who defaults to scruffy — stubble, jeans, and a T-shirt — is worth more than $3 million. He's not quite sure. Who has the time to keep track?

"It's been a wild ride," Szaky says.

He doesn't see garbage anymore, just opportunity.

"My worldview is that garbage doesn't exist in nature. It's a man-made idea," he says. "It can't exist in the long run, or we won't be around."

This is big. He's headed for an Earth Day interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." He'll probably talk about his book, released April 1: "Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle Is Redefining Green Business."

On Wednesday, the National Geographic channel debuted "Garbage Moguls," a special that follows Szaky's zany cadres to odiferous locales — a landfill, an auto junkyard — to mine for materials.

Could his world possibly look any better?

Szaky's story — part luck, part pluck — started with worm poop. His plan was to have a massive vermiculture operation, making compost with worms that would then fertilize gardens.

When he needed cheap containers for the product, he and a few buddies scrounged plastic bottles from recycling bins. (Princeton police who caught them in the act were suspicious but let them go.)

Gradually, the no-waste notion took hold. And evolved.

Turns out companies that used unrecyclable packaging wanted to help.

TerraCycle offers them an opportunity to green up their image by funding a "brigade" program that signs up schools, churches, and other groups, paying them two cents an item for the stuff TerraCycle needs.