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Terracycle

In Terracycle’s hands products have a life beyond their original intent. The ultimate goal for all upcyclers is to eliminate the concept of waste. But first you have to collect the material you want to upcycle. Terracylce incentivizes community organizations to collect the raw material it needs for its products.

Products Made From Waste

Terracycle is living proof of the old cliché: one man’s trash is another’s treasure. The flagship and first product, Terracycle Plant Food™, is a product made from biological waste, packaged in manufactured waste, and sold the big box retailers and others throughout North America. Terracycle Plant Food™, like all of its organic gardening products, is made from worm castings and sold in discarded soda bottles.

“Garbage is something we haven’t been creative enough to solve yet.”

Tom Szaky
Co-Founder
Terracycle

Terracycle is in the upcycling business; creating useful and maybe better things from the waste of others. Terracycle finds inventive ways of using the original item as a raw material for a new product, they’re not using energy to refine the waste and then re-make it as something else. At the heart of their process model is the acquisition of raw materials; the ‘waste’ wrappers, bottles, and pottles that are components of Terracycle’s products. 1700 organizations in North America – schools, churches, community groups – are incentivized to collect bottles for Terracycle. Their payments are often funded by the companies that originally made the bottles. And, as Terracycle accessed new material to upcycle thanks to new relationships with other container and wrapper makers – think cookies, chips, energy bars, yoghurt pottles – they’re creating new products to satisfy growing consumer demand.

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