Today, I visit TerraCycle headquarters to find out. I'm Lucy Biggers and this is One Small Step. Today, I'm in New Jersey at TerraCycle and I'm gonna find out how to recycle these old snack packages, my old contact lenses, and my old chewing gum. Let's go. But before we do that let's meet TerraCycle Co-Founder and CEO Tom Szaky. He started the company in 2001 selling fertilizer made from worm poop in upcycled plastic bottles. The company was so good at using recycled bottles for their fertilizer eventually larger companies asked them to help solve their waste problems, too. Seeing an opportunity Szaky pivoted the company to help recycle everything. No seriously anything you can think of, they will recycle it. Brita filters, toothpaste, classroom supplies, flip flops, athletic balls, plastic bags, old kitchen supplies, alkaline batteries, corks, snack packages, sandwich wrappers, and power cords. Now back to the interview. I've heard the statistic that 75% of our waste is recyclable but we recycle like 30% of it. Well I would say that maybe half of that you can put in your blue bin and again we don't even do that really well There are two ways to recycle with TerraCycle. For individuals, there are dozens of free programs which you can sign up for online, fill up a box, and print a free shipping label. Or you can pay extra to get a zero waste box. These boxes range from $50 to $500 and are great for companies or schools trying to cut down on their waste stream. Anyone can order a zero waste box and once you fill it you can send it back to TerraCycle for recycling. Shipping is covered in the cost of the box. What would you say to like the idea that like ok, you're taking these really difficult packaging to recycle and you're now recycling them so you're letting producers off the hook. Because now they don't have to be smarter about the packaging that they're creating is that something you guys think about? We absolutely do. The whole idea is to say, you make diapers or you make chip bags and today 100% of them end up in the garbage. You can help fund the solution and that is actively taking responsibility for that waste stream with your money. And there's been examples where companies have been funding you know TerraCycle programs for six, seven years and were motivated to figure out a design solution to re-engineer their packaging so it can be locally recycled and when they do that they don't have to fund these programs anymore and now they're locally recyclable. And do you think the pressure for that's really gonna come from the consumer is that where you've seen it so far? It really has to I think, you know, consumers many times feel like you know individuals that we're not powerful right that it's big companies, government, you know, these large systems that have to solve it. But this is the crazy part although those large you know systems Amazon, Walmart, you know, Coke, Pepsi, are all looking at the consumer and doing what the consumer wants. And so, Which means every time an object is made only 2% of that is regenerative and the balance is taking it out of the ground. This is Rick Zultner. He's a director of process and product development. Being a recycling company everything in here besides basically the computers and the phones was at one point garbage. So over in this area is where we have the zero-waste hallway. And in here we have all the collection boxes that we collect all the different materials in. Find the gum first because that's going to be the the most interesting one. So yes here's our gum box. So I should just spit it out? Yeah, you can put it right in there. We've got a liner in there. So that's fine go for it. And I've got some gum. I've been collecting it for like a week or two. I didn't want it to go to landfill. Well, it's better in that bag than on the bottom of someone's shoe. Exactly. It's stuck to the bottom of the container. So you stuff you've got a bunch of snack wrappers. Yeah, so everything in here can go directly into our candy wrappers recycling box. So wrappers like these are made of actually two different plastics, Those are two of the foundational building blocks for most of our consumer goods items. You can actually melt down this wrapper into an individual plastic pellet and we can blend that with a couple other things and make new products out of it. The final one I have my contact cases. Daily's. I'm sorry. That's, that's fine. A lot of people have contacts so that's why we have waste stream collection programs for all of these. And so what are these I think it's plastic and it's foil. So we have the polypropylene. This is polypropylene plastic on the bottom here and it is laminated to a multi-layer plastic with a full aluminum layer. So we can melt this and recover the plastic and we can melt this and recover the aluminum. Why is that better than not just, like, putting things in the trash and having them go to the dump? It seems like, you know, shipping to you, shipping back, that's a lot of carbon feet being covered. So what is the environmental benefit of recycling these obscure waste streams? So if you think about it, what were generally offsetting is a virgin material. i.e. a brand-new piece of plastic that at some point was in the U.S. at least oil. It had to get extracted out, shipped to shore, refined two or three times. There's a fair amount of energy that kind of isn't obvious when you're holding a wrapper but it actually has already gone through several thousand miles and a lot of chemical processing just to get into that form. What we're doing is, we're basically just re-melting it and turning it into a simple shape. When you compare the scales of the two for almost everything we've ever touched, we're seeing an environmental benefit. When you mix together all the different colors in here it actually turns into this grey-green color. Beautiful. Yeah, it's, it really is a beautiful color. But this is a polypropylene plastic and that goes into a variety of things. So we've made everything from trash cans, to dog bowls here. We actually made cooler liners. My mind is blown by that. But I guess it makes a lot of sense. Because it's a plastic and it's fairly rubbery we can basically use it for those rubbery properties. And just as a fun example this is a gum collector made out of gum that we had in Brazil for a while. So this material used to be gum. All of it's gum or was it mixed with something else? This is about 50/50. Very cool. By breaking down items into their rawest form TerraCycle's process can turn our waste into almost anything. During TerraCycle's tenure they've recycled over What would be one small step that the average person could take? So I'll give you two small steps if that's ok? You're an interesting contradiction because you're a recycling company where you want all these materials coming in but at the same time you're telling people not to consume as much. That does it for this episode of One Small Step. Thank you so much for watching and if you enjoyed it please share it we'll see you guys next time bye.