A Feel-Good Tale: Terracycle's "Bottle Brigades"

Thought I'd start the week off with reason for optimism: the bold big-think energy of TerraCycle, a start-up that might make a triple-bottom-line capitalist out of an unrepentant marxist.

TerraCycle makes good-quality products with impeccable eco-credentials including naturally derived and nontoxic cleaners, tote bags made from upcycled packaging materials, rain barrels and composters, and lawn & garden products (including, most famously, the company's original product -- plant foods enriched with worm poop). From the get-go, the company's core idea -- bring great, competitively priced products to market that are entirely made from, well, garbage -- has made it a media darling, and the company's products can be found everywhere from Target to Home Depot to Walgreens.

Not that I was paying much attention. Looking back, I know I've heard about TerraCycle many times over the last few years but -- as I'm a fairly standard-issue guy, with approximately zero interest in shopping for anything other than tech gadgets and outdoor gear -- the company never struck me as especially newsworthy ("... yet another all-recycled-materials tote bag is on the market.... now that's man-bites-dog, I tell ya!"). I certainly didn't take in the whole of the company's business model.

This Ecopreneurist story prompted me to look further, and now I get it: TerraCycle's special genius lies in the way the company enlists consumers as partners in its enterprise. The raw materials for many TerraCycle products are sourced via brigades that collect items that'd usually go in the trash -- wine corks, plastic bottles, cookie-package wrappers, yogurt cups, and juice-pouch packages to name a few. Brigade members then send the items in to TerraCycle (in postage-paid envelopes the company provides), and in return the company donates two cents per wrapper/bottle/etc to a charity or school of your choice.

When I was around 11, 12 I used to drag a big plastic garbage bag around the campus of a local technical college, going from garbage can to garbage can collecting redeemable bottles and cans. I bought baseball cards (note: gratuitous, nepotistic link to my brother's worthy blog) with my earnings, but I might just as easily have done this to raise money for my Little League team or an environmental charity. TerraCycle's garbage-gathering brigades are perfect for kids, and families -- one family's contribution would be small potatoes, but can't you just see how participation in such a project might spread quickly through block and neighborhood associations, or take hold at the workplace? And in the process, a lot of people -- especially the young -- might begin to learn how to thin out the gargantuan waste stream we produce in the United States.

For more on the TerraCycle, see Forecast Earth's interview with wunderkind CEO Tom Szaky.