Can Everything Be Recycled_ Welcome to TerraCycle _ One Small Step _ NowThis

When I think about what's recyclable, paper, aluminum cans, and plastic bottles come to mind. But those typically recyclable items are only a fraction of the waste I interact with each day. What about everything else? According to the EPA, Americans recycle and compost only about 34% of our waste stream. And even if more of us did recycle, there isn't an economic incentive for companies to process most of our waste. That's because it takes a lot of time and energy to clean and sort it. And the final product might not be valuable enough to cover costs. So, few companies hassle with the tricky stuff. Until now. TerraCycle is a company with a mission to make our waste stream 100% recyclable. So, I'm curious. Is it possible to recycle everything? 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 going to 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 Zaki. He started the company in 2001, selling fertilizer made from worm poop and 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, Zaki pivoted the company to help recycle everything. No, seriously. Anything you can think of, they will recycle it. Fritted filters, toothpaste, classroom supplies, lip swaps, athletic balls, plastic bags, old kitchen supplies, alkaline batteries, corks, snack packages, sandwich wrappers, and power cords. They collect 300 unique waste streams in the millions of pounds per week. 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 100% of the waste you make can be technically recycled today, and we recycle a very small percentage of that. Now, maybe half of that you can put in your blue bin. And again, we don't even do that really well. But everything can be recycled. It just depends on cost. 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, okay, 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. And we're not letting them off the hook because they have to pay for it. The whole idea is to say, well, you know, 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 going to 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. All of those large, you know, systems, Amazon, Walmart, you know, Coke, Pepsi, are all looking at the consumer and doing what the consumer wants. Okay. And so we are the power. The crazy part is we don't realize it. Globally, 2% of the world's waste is recycled. Which means every time an object is made, only 2% of that is regenerative, and the balance is taking it out of the ground. For the last couple of weeks, I've collected snack packages, contact lenses, and gum. Now TerraCycle is going to show me how to recycle them. This is Rick Saltner. He's the 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 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 it's fine. Feel for it. Hi, gum. And I've got some. I've been collecting it for like a week or two. It's better. 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. Sticky stuff. We'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, these are made of actually two different plastics, polypropylene and polyethylene. Those are one of the two of the foundational building blocks for most of our consumer goods items. We 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. Dailies, I'm sorry. No, that's fine. A lot of people have contacts, so that's why we have waste stream collection programs for all 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. Oh, wow. So we can melt this and recover the plastic, and we can smelt this and recover the aluminum. Why is that better than not just like putting things in the trash and having to go to the dump? It seems like, you know, shipping to you, shipping back, that's a lot of, you know, carbon feet being covered. So what is the environmental benefit of recycling these obscure waste streams? So if you think about it, what we're 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 remelting 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. Now that my items are collected, it's time to see what they get turned into. This, when you mix together all the different colors in here, it actually turns into this gray-green color. Beautiful. Yeah, 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 out of it. So chewing gum is actually a plastic. 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? Yeah, this. All of it's gum, or was it mixed with more gum? 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 7.7 billion pieces of waste and partnered with big brands like Colgate, Tide, and Unilever. Visiting TerraCycle has taught me that all of our waste has value, and we should think twice before we toss things in the trash. I think the ultimate goal is to reduce the waste we create, reuse what we already have, and to use more easily recyclable materials. But in the meantime, I'm happy that TerraCycle exists as an option. What would be one small step that the average person could take? So I'll give you two small steps, if that's okay. The first small step I would say is try each day to not buy one thing you would have bought. And then the second small step is try to recycle one more thing than you would have done the day before. You're an interesting contradiction because you're in 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. I hope that people change their behavior and put me out of business. I'd be thrilled. I'll start a different company, and totally cool. 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!