Sustainability In Your Ear: Terracycle Founder Tom Szaky On Building A Service-Centered Circular Economy

"For decades, our relationship with waste has been defined by disposability and denial. The disposability of everything from coffee cups and cigarette butts to smartphones, and the denial about where it all goes when we're done with it, means that humans generate over 2 billion tons of waste globally each year, with Americans alone throwing away 290 million tons of waste annually."

"The convenient fiction is that recycling solves the problem. But the reality is starkly at odds with that comforting idea, and today we explore the challenge with a recycling innovator. Meet Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, who has spent over 20 years proving that what is considered impossible to recycle is really just unprofitable to recycle-by making the hard-to-recycle profitable."

"Even as TerraCycle proves that many materials can be recycled with the right economic model, Tom has concluded that recycling alone won't solve waste at its root cause, which led to the launch of the reusable packaging-based consumer good service Loop, which offers reusable packaging at stores in the U.S., Britain, and France. This realization led Tom to the conclusion that the waste crisis isn't just about recycling better, it's about redesigning our consumption."

Humans generate over 2 billion tons of waste globally each year, with Americans discarding 290 million tons annually. A culture of disposability and denial obscures where waste ends up and fuels overreliance on recycling as a cure-all. Economic barriers, not technical impossibilities, often prevent recycling of items like dirty diapers, cigarette butts, chewing gum, and composite packaging. TerraCycle has created profitable systems to recycle these challenging streams and now operates in more than 20 countries. Recycling alone cannot address root causes; reusable packaging services such as Loop demonstrate the need to redesign consumption toward reuse.

Read at Earth911