TerraCycle

TerraCycle is one of those tiny start-up brands that get so much free publicity that it can forgo advertising. And it’s easy to see why there’s interest. The founder is a 25-year-old Princeton dropout. Its flagship fertilizer products are packaged in used plastic bottles, many collected through a nationwide recycling program the company itself has organized. And a key ingredient in the fertilizer itself, as the label announces, is “liquefied WORM POOP.” Waste packaged in waste makes TerraCycle the “ultimate eco-friendly” product, the company asserts, putting it in line with organic and earth-aware consumption trends. “We kind of ride on the fact that all these things get a lot of press, and get people interested in the product” and the “young, hip company” that makes it, explains Albe Zakes, the company spokesman.

Eco-hipness notwithstanding, you don’t hear much about worms, or their waste, from the various big-box retailers, globe-trotting pundits and good-looking guests of Oprah Winfrey who appear to be leading the conversation about environmental concern these days. But TerraCycle’s plant food is actually a mass-oriented variation on something that hard-core eco-people talk about all the time: the worm bin. Containers filled with shredded newspaper and worms, such bins are used for composting food scraps. Worms eat this waste and digest it, and “compost exits the worm through its tail end,” one online guide explains. These “castings,” the result of vermicomposting (to use more formal gardening terms), happen make good plant food. Flowerfield Enterprises even sells “Worm-a-way” home composting kits (a pound of red worms included) and the book “Worms Eat My Garbage” through its Web site, WormWoman.com.

It was a worm bin that Tom Szaky started in his college apartment that eventually led to his founding TerraCycle. He was trying to grow “certain plants” in order to “harvest the buds,” as one account put it. High on the effects that vermicomposting had on his gardening project, he and a fellow student wrote a business plan that turned on making effective and earth-friendly products for gardeners who didn’t happen to have worm bins of their own. TerraCycle began to appear on store shelves in late 2004. The packaging explains that the stuff comes courtesy of “millions of worms” that are fed “premium organic waste” — and slags “synthetic chemical” rivals. By 2006, Inc. magazine judged TerraCycle “The Coolest Little Start-Up in America.” The plant food is now available at Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Target.

Producing mass amounts of worm waste proved less difficult than figuring out what to put it in. This has led to the company’s “Bottle Brigade Program,” which involves sending boxes to people and organizations (about 3,100 so far, according to Zakes) across the country, to be filled with empty 20-ounce soda bottles and shipped to TerraCycle. Its bottle shapes are thus inconsistent on retail shelves — but that has become part of the brand’s look, and the company is trying to trademark the packaging style.