Making garbage useful with Tom Szaky of TerraCycle

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. So How much garbage do you throw away? And how much of it is actually reusable, and I don't just mean recyclable, lots of things come in plastic packaging that says it can be recycled. But how many products come in something that can actually be used again and again, like a glass jar or a stainless steel container? Well, not many, and so garbage piles up.

And that's where today's guest sees opportunity. Tom Zaki is co-founder and CEO of TerraCycle, it's a recycling service that collects an assortment of waste and turns it into raw materials, materials that can be used to make other things. Terracycle was started back in 2001 actually as a fertilizer company. Tom started the business during his freshman year at Princeton. When he and a couple of buddi made a surprising discovery. After they took an interest in growing a certain type of plant. in a basement.

Let's just say they're much more legal today than they were back then. Yeah. Um story short, my friends took the plants to Montreal. They were going to Miguel, and so they set up the shop there and started uh trying to make the plants work and I got this exciting call from my friend Pete who goes, Finally they're working, you gotta come visit. And I walk in and yeah, the plant was doing phenomenally well and uh that was really exciting, of course. But I asked Pete, like, you know, so what did you do? And he uh took me very proudly to his kitchen where he was showing me how he was taking his food scraps. And feeding them to red worms.

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