Gary Hirshberg's new book (STIRRING IT UP) is about to hit shelves. It is a fantastic read, so if you get a chance buy one!
Here is an excerpt:
Chapter 1| Natural Profits
For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been turning green ideas into greenbacks, and if that seems far-fetched, I’m here to tell you that nature and business are born allies—potentially the richest partnership in the history of capitalism.
Sustainability is the key to that alliance. A sustainable system is nature’s version of the proverb “waste not, want not.” Our solar-powered planet doesn’t exude waste. Our planet is a wondrous system of interdependent processes that nourish themselves. In my view, the more any business emulates this model, the more it can generate true wealth for its owners, customers, and all humans.
How I became an eco-entrepreneur is a story that began in the late 1970s when I was executive director of the New Alchemy Institute, an ecological research and education center on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We built a solar-heated greenhouse that used no fossil fuels, herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Yet it produced enough food to feed ten people three meals per day, 365 days per year. Even when the yard was covered with snow, it was toasty inside—a haven for everything from birds and bees to bananas, figs, and papayas. Tanks of water absorbed sunlight by day and radiated heat at night. Each tank raised about one hundred pounds of fish per year. Their waste fertilized plants, which, in turn, provided food for the herbivorous fish. Wind systems provided electrical and mechanical power.
All this seemed to be a worthy achievement to this young idealist until 1982, when I visited my mother, then a senior buyer at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. There I rammed into one of those epiphanies that change your life forever.
We toured the Land Pavilion where sponsor Kraft Foods was touting its vision of future farming. In tribute to the blessings of supposedly endlessly fertile land and unlimited resources, Kraft displayed, in a building both heated and cooled by fossil fuels, rivers of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides swooshing around the naked roots of anemic-looking plants grown hydroponically in plastic tubes. In this paean to fertility, there was not a single grain of actual soil. Natural farming is all about creating great dirt, rich with nutrients. This was a cartoon scene of chemistry gone mad. As I saw it, nothing grown the Kraft way would sustainably nourish a laboratory rat, much less soil itself.
Kraft underscored its bizarre message with “Kitchen Kabaret,” a pseudo-musical featuring the four food groups and Bonnie Appetit, the show’s only live character. The other “actors” were animatronic robots named Miss Cheese, Miss Ice Cream, Miss Yogurt, and the like, who sang lyrics I wish I could forget:
Your taste buds I’ll appease.
I know how to please.
It’s known that I am too good for words.
Oh, isn’t that right, big boy?
As bad as the lyrics were, I left feeling that the singing foodstuffs were secretly humming a very different and troubling tune:
Just buy Velveeta, please.
So what if it’s not real cheese?
Real is what we’ll say it is,
And Mother Nature’s on her knees.
Every day, twenty-five thousand people paid to see this spectacle—more than visited my own New Alchemy Institute in a year. After viewing the Kraft-sponsored pavilion twice myself, I came away deeply disturbed.
While stewing about all this, I had a eureka flash that eventually shaped my life, built my company, and led me to write this book. I blurted out to my mother: “I have to become Kraft.”
Don’t misunderstand. I was still convinced that Kraft was crazy and only sustainable practices could save the planet. But now I faced the reality that people like me were unheard voices preaching to ourselves in an uncaring world. To change anything, we needed the leverage of powerful businesses like Kraft. If we had their cash and clout, people would listen and begin to make changes, which led to my key point: To persuade business to adopt sustainable practices, I would have to prove they were profitable.
Ever since, the challenge of proving that sustainability pays—and hugely—has driven my career. Somewhat to my own surprise, I have succeeded. After years of work and many experiments, I have discovered that sustainable practices not only make money, but are invariably more profitable than conventional business methods. Now I want to share what I’ve learned and persuade other businesspeople to join the cause.
Once corporations like Kraft realize that businesses can derive big profits from cleaning up the planet and operating in green, sustainable ways, the battle will be won. Business is the most powerful force on Earth. Unlike governments, which are usually bound by consensus and convention, business can lead. Unlike churches, community groups and nonprofits, business has money to back up its ideas. It can act quickly, get rules changed, and overcome entrenched interests. In one of those ironic twists that make life so interesting, the same boundless thirst for profit that got the planet into trouble can also get us out of it
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Chapter 6 | No Such Place As Away
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Terracycle, Inc.—Worming Its Way to Success
Mother Nature’s got nothing on Tom Szaky—well, not much, anyway. There is no waste in her world, and there’s precious little in Tom’s, either. Tom understands that what most of us consider to be waste is nothing more than raw material for production.
Tom Szaky is the cofounder of TerraCycle, a Trenton, New Jersey, startup whose flagship product is liquid plant fertilizer. But it’s not what he does that warrants the comparison with natural systems; it’s how he does it. Tom’s fast-growing company uses waste to make waste. He then packages it in bottles made from waste and sells the product to a growing legion of satisfied customers who like it enough to, well, not waste it.
Let’s break it down some more. What Tom and TerraCycle do is take organic waste—composted vegetables, for example—and feed it to a quarter million worms that eat their body weight in landfill-bound trash every day. Then TerraCycle collects the worm poop—that’s the indelicate word the company prefers—and sells it in a liquefied form quaintly known as “tea.” Even the packaging is derived from waste material—namely used twenty-ounce soda bottles they collect from schoolchildren, among other donors. (They pay a nickel a bottle as a fund-raising contribution.) All Szaky and company do is wash those bottles and remove the labels. Then they put on a label of their own, screw on a spray top they’ve gotten as surplus from another manufacturer, and load the finished product into someone else’s misprinted shipping boxes. Before sending them out into the gardening world, TerraCycle takes care to ensure that every box of bottles has a variety of colors and shapes, just to reinforce the recycled nature of the packaging.
TerraCycle began its young life as an entry in a university business-plan competition in 2001. Szaky and a fellow freshman Princeton University student named Jon Beyer wanted to prove that a business could be run with a nearly negative cost structure, and to them, selling worm poop sounded like the way to put the theory to the test. They had a friend who grew plants of a particular species in his basement, and they had seen what repeated applications of worm poop could do for that guy’s production, so they thought, why not try to commercialize the idea? When it came time to write the plan, it certainly didn’t hurt that Beyer’s father was an ecotoxicologist who knew plenty about worms. Szaky and Beyer came in fourth, which was great, but that wasn’t good enough to win a cash prize.
They won the next contest they entered, however, and received a check for $200. Then they entered another low-stakes contest and won that, too. And then another, and another. All told, they entered seven business-plan competitions, capped by Carrot Capital’s very prestigious contest, which offered a $1 million purse. Much to their shock, they won that one, too. But they turned down the payday—and walked away knowing they had only $500 in the bank to come home to. Turns out Carrot Capital, a New York–based venture capital group, wanted to let everyone go except Tom, making him something akin to a spokesman for what would become their fertilizer. Tom wasn’t interested. He rather liked the idea of running his own company, surrounded by people who shared a passion for literally pulling profit from trash cans.
So Tom went his own way, leaving school to devote his full energy to TerraCycle. Beyer stayed in school and eventually graduated, but remained involved in the technological end of the company. Szaky’s first significant move was to borrow money from everyone he knew and max out his credit cards to buy the “worm gin” that would be central to the TerraCycle process. It was essentially a series of conveyer belts stacked atop one another to bring garbage to the worms, and it was available from its Florida developer in prototype form at a price of $20,000. The money was raised, but just barely.
Then Szaky, with Beyer’s help, amassed the necessary production vats and tanks for mixing the worm-poop potions. Each was recycled from some other purpose and found in a landfill—some were horse tanks, others were thousand-gallon storage tanks that had their tops cut off. Eventually a headquarters building was purchased in a tough neighborhood of Trenton and painted with graffiti by can-wielding locals who were invited to use the walls to showcase their work. Tom furnished the HQ with cast-off desks and computers, and put lots of college interns in front of them.
One of the competitive aces TerraCycle has always held is its ability to offer retailers higher-than-average margins, because TerraCycle’s own margins are so high. The worms work for free, after all. Still, no one is quite sure how Szaky managed to talk the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot into carrying his products. Then as now, Szaky greets the world in rumpled jeans and a T‑shirt. But I can bet how he carried the day during those crucial presentations. When Tom Szaky opens his mouth, he doesn’t miss a cue or a beat. He may have started his company as a nineteen-year-old college dropout, but he has matured into the role of a most persuasive twenty-four-year-old eco-entrepreneur.
From today’s perspective, TerraCycle seems to have done everything right thus far. It was Szaky who realized that all soda bottles take the same size cap, meaning that these recyclable bottles were the ideal and most available source of cost-free packaging. He was also smart to seek and obtain organic certification for his plant food, because it lent the company instant credibility with gardeners. Certainly it didn’t hurt in those early days when The New York Times called TerraCycle’s plant food “the most eco-friendly product ever made.” With that endorsement, plus literally dozens of high-visibility free-media opportunities each year, the transformation to hot-company status has long been complete. TerraCycle crossed the $5 million revenue threshold in 2007. The new waste-based TerraCycle products that are coming on line—including planting soil, seed-starter trays, and a deer repellent—are expected to generate a new spurt of growth to move the company toward $10 million in years to come—or to spur its public offering, whichever comes first.
None of this should suggest there haven’t been glitches along the way: Szaky and Beyer found their first source of organic waste in the Princeton University dining halls, abundantly so, but they couldn’t always get it to the worms before it became putrid. The two were forced to sort the reeking bags by the scoopful themselves because employees balked (or worse, became ill). Talk about hands-on. They almost quit the business before it got started.
Szaky also nearly got into trouble some years ago when he decided that the best way to find lots of soda bottles for packaging would be to gather them from curbside recycling bins throughout Trenton. Lo and behold, the practice turns out to be illegal. That’s why schoolchildren are pocketing TerraCycle nickels today.
TerraCycle’s latest hurdle is a lawsuit filed by Scott’s, the lawn-and-garden behemoth that markets MiracleGro plant food. Scott’s alleges that TerraCycle’s packaging looks too much like theirs, both products having a circle on the label and some yellow (although TerraCycle’s looks more goldenrod-toned, and no fewer than 120 other products on the market feature green-and-yellow labels).
Scott’s and TerraCycle are also arguing about their respective research claims, but at last word, neither was allowing the other a look at the data. Szaky earned the ire of Scott’s by publicizing a study conducted at the Rutgers University Eco-Complex that concluded that TerraCycle’s liquid plant food performed as well or better than Miracle-Gro on most compared indices, and that unlike Miracle-Gro, TerraCycle can’t be overapplied and cause plant burn. So far, Szaky and company are not cowering from the fight. They’re emphasizing the David-and-Goliath nature of the dispute on their Web site and taking the issue public, encouraging customers to write to Scott’s and tell them to back off. The message from TerraCycle to its customers is that Scott’s is trying to prevent waste-based plant foods from succeeding in the marketplace, and must be stopped.
Beyond these inevitable consequences of doing well in business, Szaky faces only two significant challenges to fulfilling the business-from-garbage scheme he envisioned five years ago. The first is, will he ever actually achieve the negative cost stream he still thinks is possible? On the TerraCycle Web site, Szaky and company offer a long economic treatise on the theoretical feasibility of running a waste-based business with a negative cost structure. Still, Szaky has not yet found an economical way to get people to pay him to haul away the waste he feeds the worms, so that’s kept him on the plus-side of the cost ledger. But he hasn’t given up trying to drive the company toward the minus side.
Szaky’s second problem looks smaller, but it may prove to be almost as tricky to solve as the first. It’s the bottle caps; what to do with all those bottle caps that come into the factory with the soda bottles. Szaky and all his bright, creative employees are stumped. They’ve thrown it open to all comers now, through a contest on terracycle.net. Figure out what to do with all those bottle caps, and you win a lifetime free supply of—what else?—liquefied worm poop.
If you’ve come with me this far, you probably agree that the Earth needs more Ray Andersons and Tom Szakys—desperately and right away. It’s fine and fitting to lament the oncoming decades of global warming and Katrina-like disasters; the disregard for nature that increasingly endangers all living creatures. But hand-wringing gets us nowhere; alarmists are only slightly more useful than polluters. The times cry out for pragmatists more than idealists; for hardheaded, profit-hungry entrepreneurs who see the looming crisis as an opportunity to be seized and leveraged like any other.
To make a long story short we saw the dress for the first time yesterday at a photo shoot Soyeon did for the New York Times. 6,000 used Honest Kids juice pouches never looked so glamorous! This is a close up of the material. Designer Nina Valenti asked that we cut out the center of the grape flavor of Honest Kids to make the dress. Then like fish scales the various sized squares were sewn together. It is an ingenious idea by Nina since it makes this non breathable material completely breathable. 