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