TerraCycle

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TerraCycle is a young company whose main products are natural plant foods, listed with OMRI™, the Organic Materials Review Institute. TerraCycle's concept is to manufacture products made from and packaged entirely in waste. By feeding organic waste to worms, TerraCycle is able to create a powerful natural plant food made completely from the resulting worm poop. The worm poop is liquified and brewed into a compost tea. The final product is then bottled in used soda bottles, many of which are collected through "Bottle Brigade" fundraising programs at schools and charities around North America. Each bottle collected by the "Bottle Brigade" represents five cents to be donated to a charity of each school's choice.

A new word being used to explain TerraCycle's business plan is "eco-capitalism"; this term describes a company that is for profit, yet approaches every task from an eco-friendly perspective.

[edit] Founding

TerraCycle was founded in the fall of 2001 by Upper Canada College graduate Tom Szaky, and Jon Beyer, two freshmen at Princeton University.

The initial idea came about as a submission to a business plan contest sponsored by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club. The following summer, Szaky and Beyer made arrangements with Princeton Dining Services to take dining hall waste and process it in their prototype "Worm Gin". By the end of the summer, TerraCycle had found its first investor. The company shortly moved into their first office at 20 Nassau St, Unit 14, Princeton, NJ.

Szaky took an extended leave of absence from Princeton in the spring of 2003. In May of that year Szaky entered the Carrot Capital business plan contest, which offered $1 million in seed capital to the winning team. TerraCycle won the competition, but turned down the money because of the direction in which Carrot Capital wanted to take the company.

[edit] Recent Developments

Funded by prize money from various contests and angel investors, TerraCycle was able to persevere despite not accepting the million dollars. A major breakthrough came in May of 2004, when Home Depot began offering TerraCycle Plant Food™ on their website. TerraCycle continued their growth in 2005 as Whole Foods Market, Home Depot Canada, Wal-Mart Canada, Wild Oats Markets and Do-It-Best began carrying TerraCycle products.

TerraCycle has since been named one of the 100 most innovative companies by Red Herring Magazine and has received the Environmental Stewardship Award from Home Depot Canada. The company has been featured on CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNBC, RobTV, CBC, and Citytv, and has also received coverage in TIME, Profit, Canadian Gardener, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, The Vancouver Sun, the Chicago Sun Times, National Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In July 2006, Inc. magazine ran a cover story calling TerraCycle "The Coolest Little Start-up in America".