With a few rare exceptions, you are surrounded by future garbage. From your shirt to your glasses and the furniture around you, almost everything is likely to become the product of a waste management company someday, says Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle.
“It’s because of all the single-use items we buy,” Szaky says. TerraCycle has taken aim at waste by using it to create consumer products, but it was a conversation with Virginie Helias, chief sustainability officer at P&G, that tipped the company toward a new way of thinking about sustainability.
“We started asking ourselves, is recycling, and making things from recycled content…the answer to garbage?” Szaky recalls. “And we both landed on that it’s an answer to the symptom of waste, but not the root cause of waste.”
The root cause, he says, is a proliferation of single-use items and packaging. In this month’s Signal Conversation, Szaky laid out how his company is working to create multi-use systems via Loop, a platform that helps consumers use recyclable packaging across a range of products and brands.
Watch more in the video below:
