How did you get your start in the industry?聽
I started TerraCycle as a freshman at Princeton in 2001 as a fertilizer company. Our original business model was to feed Princeton’s cafeteria food scraps to worms, liquefy the castings into an organic fertilizer, and package it for sale. We nearly took a $1 million investment early聽on,聽but turned it down because the investors wanted us to abandon the聽waste聽angle and just run a conventional fertilizer business. That left us with almost nothing in the bank, and we still needed a way to package our fertilizer without spending money we didn’t have. So we started asking schools to collect used soda bottles for us in exchange for a few cents聽each,聽and packaged our fertilizer in those instead of buying new containers. We called it the Bottle Brigade.
About a year later, Honest Tea, Stonyfield Yogurt, and Clif Bar approached us. They’d seen what we were doing with the Bottle Brigade and asked if we could build similar collection programs for their own hard-to-recycle packaging: yogurt pots, juice pouches, energy bar wrappers. That’s when we shifted the entire focus of the business from the product to the garbage itself, and that shift is what turned TerraCycle into the recycling company it is today. From there, we kept expanding in the same direction: one hard-to-recycle item at a time, one brand partner at a time, until we were running recycling programs for over 600 waste streams. Twenty-five years later, that same idea has grown into a company working in 18 countries.
What is your current role today?
I’m the Founder and CEO of TerraCycle and Loop, where we operate across 18 countries under our mission: Eliminating the Idea of聽91仓库.
What important lesson have you learned over the years?
My favorite life-lesson quote is from Anna Lapp茅, who said, “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” That idea drives everything at TerraCycle. I’ve also learned to hold onto your identity, especially when things get hard. In our early years, when we had no money and no office space, there were plenty of chances to pivot toward something more conventional. We stuck with our core mission instead, and that decision led to more growth than any pivot would have.
Who was your biggest influence?
Honestly, my biggest influence growing up was聽the parents of my friends.聽My own parents are physicians, and while they instilled a real love of education in me,聽it was watching my friends’ parents build things from nothing that聽made entrepreneurship feel possible. I remember one friend’s parent聽who’d聽started out with almost nothing and built a major career in the music industry. Seeing someone go from nothing to everything, in聽the flesh聽rather than on a magazine cover, made it feel attainable instead of like a fictionalized success story. That’s what really made me fall in love with entrepreneurship.
What do you love most about being in the industry?
What I love most is watching an idea I started in a Princeton dorm room 25 years ago turn into something that actually changes how people think about their trash. When I see our logo on a product in a country I never expected to reach, it tells me that the idea did not just survive, it took hold in people’s daily lives. That is proof of something I have believed since college: business can be a real force for good, not just a way to make money. Profit and purpose are not in conflict. They reinforce each other, and building a company where that is true every day is the best part of this job.