Buying The Farm

Here’s an article on the founder of TerraCycle. This guy’s a personal hero of mine, as he mixes all of my favourite topics: environmentalism, entrepreneurialism, and savviness.

He learned about vermicomposting when a friend showed him the salutary effect worm castings had on pot plants, and has since built an empire based on the stuff others throw away.

TerraCycle collects organic waste to feed to their worms, whose castings and tea is sold in reused plastic bottles salvaged from the waste stream.

Szaky’s second “aha!” moment was “when we saw that the soda bottles people were discarding, or perhaps recycling, were also a perfectly good raw material. We had always been Dumpster diving for our office furniture, but that was the first time we realized that greatly expanding our Dumpster diving could fuel our production line. We had discovered that contemporary America is a vast Dumpster of industrial products that manufacturers are constantly throwing away or recycling — even when they’re in perfect condition.

One man’s trash is another man’s multi-million dollar fortune. More power to him!

http://www.princetoninfo.com/index.php?option=com_us1more&Itemid=6&key=05-13-2009%20terracycle

The world is starting to chatter about aquaponics, which is a relief to those of us who have been singing its praises for the past few years.

I first came across this gardening system a few years ago, long after I’d established a mental image of my future farm. Within five minutes of reading of it, I had not only wiped away that imaginary layout, I’d started telling my coworkers about its revolutionary nature. (As you’d expect from tech company employees, none of them seemed to grasp the excitement of it.)

With different food crises erupting globally, and an economy that has created a sinkhole in middle America, it’s no wonder those who might once have been nonplussed are sitting up to take notice. One aquaponics evangelist suggests that this system could help not only to reduce America’s “food miles” footprint, but also make the Great Plains the largest area of fish production in the country. Can you picture those factories in the Rust Belt, shuttered by the industries that have died, bursting from the inside with fish, fruit and vegetables? Brings new imagery to the terms “factory farming” and “industrial plants”, doesn’t it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/garden/18aqua.html?pagewanted=all