🌐 Profits at Recycling's Edge: TerraCycle Finds ROI in Trash No One Wants

99% of what you buy becomes the legal property of a garbage company within one year.

Not recycled. Not reused. Just… gone.

Because once it’s classified as waste, it enters a system built to remove it, not rethink it. A system that’s been with us since the 1950s—since the dawn of TV dinners and single-use everything.

Tom Szaky has spent the past two decades showing how to break it.

He dropped out of Princeton at 19 and started with worm poop, bottled as fertilizer (in used soda bottles), and sold at Walmart, Target, and Home Depot. That was TerraCycle’s first product—and proof that even waste could hold value.

I first met Tom back then, almost 20 years ago, when he came on The Lazy Environmentalist, my old radio show on SiriusXM. He was in his early twenties, just named Inc. Magazine’s Top CEO Under 30, talking passionately about worm poop and his mission to eliminate the idea of waste.

Two decades later, that mission hasn’t changed. But the man playing the game has. I asked him how it feels now.

“Same energy,” he said. “But I understand the chessboard better.”

Today, he is at the table working to move the pieces, whether at the World Economic Forum or the United Nations.

He’s challenging a system that wasn’t built to be fixed. And he’s built a business in the blind spots where no one wanted to look—where value was negative, incentives were broken, and innovation never showed up.

Turning Waste into a Customer Acquisition Engine

TerraCycle doesn’t recycle everything. It recycles the stuff no one else will touch.

Not because it’s technically impossible. Because it’s financially irrational.

These materials—cigarette butts, cosmetic tubes, chip bags—cost more to collect and process than they’re worth on the market.

“Every single TerraCycle program operates at negative economics. Someone has to choose to fund it,” said Tom. “The only way to scale it is to show how funding it helps their business.”

That’s the unlock. TerraCycle doesn’t depend on regulation or donations.

It builds the business case where none exists, so waste gets recycled, because solving it helps businesses grow.

✅ Salons attract new customers (see SalonCycle)
✅ Labs retain top talent (see ScienceCycle)
✅ Retailers gain foot traffic
✅ Brands build loyalty
✅ Consumers feel part of something bigger

“It’s logistics. It’s operations. It’s marketing,” Szaky says. “Most recycling companies stop at the first two. The third one is what unlocks growth.”

• In Canada, TerraCycle handles 30% of all coffee capsules

• In the UK, it’s over 12% of pharmaceutical blister packs

• In Australia, more than a million people participate in its programs

Today, TerraCycle operates in 21 countries.

Loop and the Vision of No Waste

Recycling is reactive. It waits for waste to exist, then tries to mitigate the damage.

But that’s not the vision Tom Szaky set out to build. He doesn’t want to improve waste. He wants to eliminate it.

So he built Loop: an in-store reuse platform where everyday products come in containers designed to be cleaned, refilled, and reused—rather than thrown away.

“The rule is: each package has to last at least 10 cycles,” Szaky explains. “And when it finally wears out, it has to be recyclable back into itself. That way, the material never becomes waste.”

The idea came from looking backward.

Before the 1950s, packaging was built to be reused or to naturally biodegrade. Milk bottles. Wool clothing. Paper wrappers. Materials had built-in afterlives or just returned to nature.

“Everything we made used to be made from materials nature didn’t mind,” Tom said. “You could throw a wooden chair in the forest and the forest would say, ‘Thank you.’”

Packaging waste was not yet a cultural concept.

Then disposability took over. Packaging became the consumer’s problem. Companies only needed packaging to do the job once.

Loop reverses that shift without giving up the convenience of modern life.

Same shampoo. Same brands. Same shopping experience in a supermarket aisle. But when an item is empty, you drop off the container—no rinsing, no sorting, no friction.

Loop turns packaging from a cost into an asset. It helps companies invest in containers that are stronger, more durable, and beautiful.

Why Reuse Works in France—But Not in the U.S.

Today, Loop is live in over 500 stores across France and Japan, with 400+ products in reusable packaging.

Why there? Not because consumers care more about sustainability.

"You couldn’t tell the difference in the data between a Canadian and American, a French, a UK and a Japanese consumer,” says Tom.

The difference is structural:

• In France, supermarkets are required to dedicate 10% of shelf space to reusables by 2027.

• Reuse systems are subsidized up to 75% through 2029.

Those are the rules and incentives that make reuse cost-competitive with disposables.

"It’s already becoming cheaper to do reusable than disposable," he added.

Loop handles reuse. TerraCycle handles what reuse can’t. Together, they close the loop.

How Climate Solutions Win

TerraCycle employs about 500 team members, divided almost equally between logistics, operations, and sales and marketing.

“The third component—marketing and business logic—is what most recycling companies leave out,” Tom says. “And it’s the reason we’ve grown.”

Because hard-to-recycle waste doesn’t fund itself. Someone has to say yes—to paying for the program, running it, promoting it, growing it.

“Procurement comes to the sustainability team and says, ‘I see the cost. Where’s the value?’ If it doesn’t show up on the P&L, it gets cut.”

So, TerraCycle’s marketing and sales team does the real heavy lifting—turning programs that look like cost centers into drivers of growth.

They show salons how recycling boosts bookings. Labs how it improves retention. Brands how it drives loyalty and repeat purchase.

“People want to do the right thing,” Szaky says. “You just have to enable them to justify it.”

Most sustainability efforts lead with principles. TerraCycle leads with proof.

That’s why it gets to yes—when almost no one else does.

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

TerraCycle doesn’t try to make waste less bad. It proves the system never worked.

🔍 It creates value where others only see cost.

🧃 It sells reuse as an upgrade to convenience, not a tradeoff.

📈 It doesn’t win through guilt or regulation, but by making growth the incentive.

That’s how you eliminate the idea of waste—you show it’s not inevitable.

Listen to this podcast episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 6.9%

That’s the percentage of the 106 billion tons of materials used globally that are recycled. That’s 98 billion tons used once and gone forever—and that’s why initiatives like Loop are vital to defining the future.

Quote of the Week:

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Related

TerraCycle Raised the Bar. Others Are Reaching for It.

TerraCycle proves that waste can be designed out of the system when the economics align. But it’s not the only one pushing circularity into the mainstream.

Forward-thinking companies are now building their own systems to eliminate waste at scale.

Here’s how that looks in three very different industries:

🛋️ IKEA: Furniture, Reimagined

IKEA plans to become fully circular by 2030, with every product designed for reuse, refurbishment, or recycling. Its Buy Back & Resell program gives store credit for returned furniture, which is then repaired and resold. It’s also piloting IKEA Preowned, a peer-to-peer resale platform live in Madrid and Oslo, and exploring subscription models to decouple ownership from use.

🚗 Renault: Cars, Remade

Renault’s Re-Factory in Flins, France, is the company’s flagship circular economy site, aiming to process 120,000 vehicles annually by 2030. It refurbishes used cars, reconditions engines and batteries, and retrofits gas vehicles into EVs—cutting emissions and raw material demand at every stage. The site also serves as a testing ground for new business models that prioritize reuse and repair over replacement.

💡 Signify: Lighting-as-a-Service

Formerly Philips Lighting, Signify offers a “Pay-per-Lux” model, where customers pay for the light, not the lights. Signify retains ownership of the fixtures, handling installation, maintenance, and end-of-life recycling.

The result: more durable, energy-efficient systems that benefit both the customer and the environment. At Schiphol Airport, the switch to Lighting-as-a-Service reduced energy use by 50% compared to the previous system, while keeping hardware in circulation and out of the landfill.

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Where Supercool traveled this week:

Article:

For Fast Company, written by Josh Dorfman: The Climate Tech Making Retail Smarter and More Profitable

Podcasts:

Home Green Homes: Creating a Super Cool Future with Josh Dorfman

MADPO3T: Climate Conversations and Innovations with Josh Dorfman

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