This post is about one of the coolest startups I bumped into recently called TerraCycle.
A little background – My next startup, after I finish with all this web stuff, is going to be around recycling/reusing. Yup – the business I aspire to get into is – just like Tony Soprano – the waste management business.
My dream is to invent the ultimate contraption that descends upon landfills, chews up all the garbage, and spits out useful products on the other side.
That’s why I loved everything about TerraCycle, though I have to admit that I’ve never bought or used their product which is basically a fertilizer (NYC apartments are not particularly famous for their spacious backyards…).
What they do is basically release a bunch of worms on a pile of garbage, and collect the worm-shit (hmmm… not sure that’s the most scientifically accurate term…) and package it as plant fertilizer. In their words:
TerraCycle Plant Food is the first mass-produced consumer product to have a negative environmental footprint.
But obviously there are a bunch of products in the market that claim to be organic/recycled/eco-friendly/whatever. The thing is, that usually these products pay the minimal lip service needed to be able to claim eco-friendliness (for marketing purposes), and then do all the rest in some of the most eco-unfriendly ways.
Here’s an example:
Organic Valley produces organic milk. They claim that “Organic dairy farmers do not use any chemical pesticides or fertilizers on their land. This protects our soil, water and air resources and also protects the health of wildlife and people.”
So they get all the good will and great eco brand image, but then they go ahead and package that wonderful milk in a box that’s pretty much a disaster to the ecology (the embedded plastic cap being the icing on the eco-disaster cake…). It’s not recyclable, not reusable, and doesn’t degrade elegantly when dumped. Yuck.
And that’s where TerraCycle gets really cool. Their product is driven by passion to be eco-friendly, not by passion to gain some PR points or appeal to amateur tree-hugger shoppers. Their whole product, end-to-end, is truly eco-friendly. The full story is on their website, but I’ll just point out one feature that I LOVED – their amazing packaging:
Take a good look at the bottles on the right (not sure what I’m talking about?.. scroll down to see the graphical explanation). I can’t give enough kudos to the product designer that made the design decisions on the TerraCycle bottles. Simply brilliant!
