AP Photo/Mel Evans
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Ok, so for our new show, G Word, I took a trip out to Trenton, New Jersey the other day to do a story on a pretty amazing company called Terracycle. If you're a gardener, you're probably familiar with the benefits of worms and their poo. Well, Tom Szaky, the 25-year-old CEO of what is now a multi-million dollar company, decided to bottle up this "black gold," as growers call it, and sell it in recycled soda bottles.
When he started the company, he had no money to package his worm poo, so he went around collecting soda bottles and realized that they're uniform and have basically the same size caps, so refilling these containers was totally doable! Now, companies come to him to help them figure out what to do with their waste. For example, the makers of Capri Sun came to him recently to ask if he could come up with an innovative way to reuse the non-recyclable drink pouches that get dumped into landfills by the millions every year. So now he's making them into bags and pencil pouches, setting up recycling centers at schools all over the country. And it's all profitable…for him, the schools that get money for their containers, the PR win for these drink companies… But I just thought it was really cute that, at the end of the day, he's just a young guy who loves his job and, apparently, sewing! Yeah, I was kinda eco-crushing... Check out our encounter in the video below.
Video courtesy SuChin Pak.
More on Recycling and Plastic Bottles from TreeHugger
Plastic Bottle Recycling is a Dying Dream
San Francisco Mayor Bans the Bottle
A World of Reasons to Ditch Bottled Water
Coca-Cola to Step Up Recycling, Improve Image
How Can I Recycle This?
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