© Janet Davis
Here’s a fairy tale with a happy ending -- or happy beginning, if you’re 23-year-old Tom Szaky.
It goes
like this. A young man graduates from
Toronto’s Upper Canada College and heads south to Princeton University to
fulfill his academic dreams. But at the
beginning of sophomore year, he suddenly has a brainwave. So he drops out of the Ivy League to start
his own company.
And what does the company do? It sells liquefied worm poop in recycled pop bottles as organic plant food. That’s right, worm poop.
Although composting using redworms (a.k.a. “red wigglers”) has been popular for decades, turns out no one ever thought of working the critters on an industrial scale. But the young man sees worms as a golden opportunity. Big enough to sacrifice his studies and sleep on the floor of the company’s new office for 18 months while looking for investors. And when this bright idea wins a business plan contest – one of seven competitions it wins – he’s offered a cool $1 million by Carrot Capital, a New York-based venture capital fund. But he and his buddies turn it down. Why? Because although Carrot likes their idea, they want them to stop using garbage from the New Jersey landfill to feed the hungry worms.
“We actually walked away from a million bucks with $500 in our bank account because we didn’t think it was the right business decision,” says Szaky, now CEO of TerraCycle, Inc., based in Trenton, New Jersey. “And the total irony here”, he continues, “is that we had no money, so that’s why we started packaging in used plastic soda bottles.
TerraCycle
now runs fundraising drives in more than 100 U.S. schools, offering students
interactive recycling seminars and half-a-cent for each plastic bottle turned
in. Cleaned and capped, they’re filled
with TerraCycle™ organic, ready-to-use liquid fertilizer.
In tests conducted at Rutgers University’s Eco-Complex, a high-tech two-acre greenhouse on the New Jersey landfill, the worm poop almost always outperforms synthetic ready-to-use fertilizers. And the fact that it comes in recycled bottles, says the company, makes it “the first mass-produced consumer product to have a negative environmental impact”.
With 30 employees, a slate of investors and projected sales of $3 million (U.S.) this year, TerracCycle just bought an inner-city Trenton warehouse to handle bottling. And Tom Szaky is in Toronto this week to supervise the launch of his plant food at Canadian Wal-Mart stores, joining Toronto-area Loblaws and Fortinos stores in giving those worms their turn.