Here's company representative Sue Lock(ph). TerraCycle talks a big game on its packages, saying it's better than a leading synthetic fertilizer. Scotts Miracle-Gro, the industry giant in lawn and garden fertilizers, is suing TerraCycle for false claims. And it's one of the things that we try to do is make and package everything out of garbage.ĭOUGLAS: TerraCycle is projecting $5 million in sales this year, which means it would finally turn a profit after five years in business. So these are all bags and bags of soda bottles that have been delabeled. SZAKY: So we're walking through right now our bottling zone, where we take the liquid worm poop and bottle it in used soda bottles. He fed the worms garbage and collected their nutrient-rich leftovers. He constructed a standing worm farm, basically a giant poopery. SZAKY: I came back to Princeton and sat down with my friends in, you know, our dorm room and said, look, let's corner the market on worm poop.ĭOUGLAS: He dropped out of school and invested everything into this idea. Worm castings are often used by gardeners and farmers. SZAKY: They were doing amazingly well and it turned out worm poop fixed everything.ĭOUGLAS: These college kids hadn't exactly discovered fire. SZAKY: It's one thing, you know, for guys to be gardening, especially when you're 19.
Some of his friends were trying, unsuccessfully, to grow marijuana in their basement. Tom Szaky's passion for worms began somewhat inauspiciously when he was a freshman at Princeton. JOE WILLIS (Director, Plant Research, TerraCycle): And all I do is just harvest and wait, and this one was 300 percent more growth than this one.ĭOUGLAS: TerraCycle makes all kinds of plant fertilizers with worm castings.
The worm castings are pushing the plants up faster and making them bigger.ĭr. Joe Willis feeds plants with various fertilizers, including Szaky's liquified worm castings, as worm poop is more delicately called. You breed and you eat, and that's what you do.ĭOUGLAS: This greenhouse in Trenton, New Jersey is full of experiments testing his fertilizer against others. TOM SZAKY (Founder CEO, TerraCycle Incorporated): So we have a pile of worms and a pile of garbage, and they're eating the garbage, making worm poop. The giant of the fertilizer industry is suing a small start-up company that sells worm droppings in old soda bottles.ĭIANNA DOUGLAS: Tom Szaky, the 25-year-old founder and CEO of TerraCycle, picks up a couple of worms from a blue plastic tub. And as the summer gardening season winds down, we have a story about a dispute within the garden fertilizer business.
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