Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Terracycle Founder Tom Szaky On Building The Circular Economy

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours, welcome to sustainability in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host. Mitch Ratcliffe, thanks for joining the conversation today. We're talking with a recycling legend.

For decades, our relationship with waste has been defined by disposability and denial. Disposability of everything from coffee cups and cigarette butts to smartphones, and denial about where it all goes when we're done with it, humans generate over 2 billion tons of waste globally each year, with Americans alone throwing away 290 million tons of stuff annually. The convenient fiction is that recycling solves the problem, but the reality is stark. Much of what we think gets recycled ends up in landfills or might even be shipped overseas for somebody else to deal with entire categories of everyday products, from cigarette butts to flexible packaging, have no viable local recycling path.

A fundamental rethink of the 100 year old recycling system is needed, and our guest today, Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, has spent over 20 years proving that the impossible to recycle is really just the unprofitable to recycle. Since dropping out of Princeton at 19 to chase a vision of eliminating waste entirely, Tom has built TerraCycle into a global operation that pioneers recycling solutions for major brands. He created the reusable packaging based consumer good service Loop and tackled some of the world's most challenging waste streams, like dirty diapers, both cigarette butts I've mentioned, chewing gum and complex packaging that municipal recyclers cannot handle profitably.

TerraCycle now operates in over 20 countries and has collected hundreds of millions of cigarette butts since it started in 2012 The company partners with major brands including Procter and Gamble Nestle and Unilever to fund free mail in recycling programs for packaging and products. Even as TerraCycle proves that many materials can be recycled with the right economic model, Tom has concluded that recycling alone won't solve waste at its root cause. This realization led to the creation of Loop, a revolutionary platform that resurrects the milkman delivery model. You get products in durable, reusable packaging that's collected, cleaned and reused dozens of times before eventually being recycled.

As consumer packaged goods companies grapple with 2025 deadlines after promising 100% recyclable or reusable packaging, many are discovering that those commitments are hard to fulfill. So drawing on decades of experience turning trash into treasure and challenging brands to take responsibility for their packaging and its entire life cycle, Tom argues that the waste crisis isn't just about recycling better, it's about redesigning our consumption. We'll explore all of that with Tom in just a few minutes.

You can learn more about TerraCycle and Loop by visiting terracycle.com and you can find Tom's latest book, outsmart waste on Amazon and at Powell's books. So let's get unwasted right after this quick commercial break.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Welcome to the show. Tom, it's a real pleasure to have you here. How you doing today?

Tom Szaky
Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Mitch Ratcliffe
I have to start with, how did you convince Procter and Gamble Nestle, Unilever and these other companies to sponsor free recycling programs for their products and packaging? I mean, that is quite an accomplishment.

Tom Szaky
Thank you. I think, you know, two parts, honestly, like they care that there's this issue there, right? Like it's not a good thing that a package or a product is not recyclable. So there's this intrinsic sort of need to somehow solve that problem. And I think the magic sauce to how we're able to convince them, and not just convince once, but maintain these programs for decades, is we really focus on how to make sure that an investment in sustainability also benefits whatever their core goals are.

So we're not just going into an organization and saying, Hey, you have this problem, and here's the bill to solve it. Would you like to pay the bill? It's saying, Hey, you have this problem. You know, you can fund solving it, but funding the solution will also help you in your core goals. Whatever that may be, maybe it's Walmart driving foot traffic or brand preference if you're a Nestle. So how do you characterize the brand benefits to somebody like a CPG company who doesn't have that direct consumer interaction, but depends on their reputation Absolutely. So we try in as many different ways as possible. I think this is the key part is the more we're able to show it, the more the organization leans in and wants the programs to be bigger and more scaled, and also it insulates around.

Around moments in time like what we're living through now, where the economy is struggling and maybe sustainability is getting headwind. It survives those moments as well. And so it's many different things, right? So one is, we look a lot at consumer insights. What do consumers care about in sustainability? And turns out, in consumer goods, in packaging, the number one thing they've consistently cared about for 25 years is whether that package is recyclable. Everything else goes below that. So that's important. But then we also think about, how do we make sure that the actual recycling of that package drives benefit to the organization?

So in contact lens recycling, you know, we work with a company, Bosch and loam, and for them, it's very important that optometrists are, you know, excited about their brand. So we really focus that the recycling points become optometrists, and there's 10,000 optometrists that have recycled 100 million contact lenses as a as a result. Or if you look at, say, wetsuit recycling, say, with a brand like Rip Curl, there a big business logic is, how do I make sure you're buying my brand when you need your new wetsuit? Then someone else's so there they set up recycling programs, or bring in any brand, and maybe you get a few percentage points off their brand. There's always some business logic that needs to be there, because that's what's going to fuel what is needed, which is the economic flow to finance the collection and recycling of all these things.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Let's talk a little about the economics. I personally have answered more than 15,000 consumers recycling questions over the past eight years, and you've commented that everything technically has a recycling solution, and I hear that from the consumer all the time. It rings true to me. But the challenge is making those economics work. The difference between a technically recyclable item and one that's economically viable to recycle.

Tom Szaky
Great question. So first, everything is technically recyclable, as you just mentioned. So I don't put any weight in the concept of technical recyclability. That is why terms like recycle ready or design for recycling are, you know, I wouldn't put too much weight on those.

Practical recyclability is everything, will that object actually get recycled? And you know, if you ask, why is a cardboard box or an aluminum can very recyclable, very recycled, while a toothbrush or a bicycle helmet not it's because the cardboard and the aluminum can is profitable to recycle. We have to remember all recycling in the world, whether it's procured by your municipality or anywhere, is carried out by for profit garbage companies, who are only going to and there's no law, by the way, forcing any of them to recycle anything they collect.

So recycling is really urban mining, and the things that you can collect and process, and then those are costs and still make money on. Those are what people will recycle. And everything else that costs more to collect and process and the results are worth will be disposed, which is synonymous with get rid of it in the cheapest possible way. Right? So our economics are we charge a stakeholder. Now the stakeholder, if it's a free program, free to the citizens, could be a brand, it could be a retailer, it could be maybe a building, you know, something like that pays for whatever it costs for us to collect the waste and process it, minus what the results are worth. The results are worth something, but usually not enough to cover those two aforementioned costs. So we're talking a lot about extended producer responsibility in the United States. Now, finally, although there are headwinds.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Is that really the solution? Do we need everybody who's producing products and packaging to be contributing to the collection and processing rather than disposal of that stuff?

Tom Szaky
Yeah, so I'd say yes and no, right? The yes part is that it's an economic flow. But let's really double click on on EPR, because it can function brilliantly, and it can also do harm at this at the same time. So what EPR really does extended producer responsibilities. It moves the cost of recycling from municipalities, which is expressed in our property taxes or in the rent we pay to products, and it's such expressed in the price of the product. What really needs to be looked at when you shift the tax from one type of tax to another is, has the total amount of money increased, stayed neutral or decreased? In some cases where EPR has come in, the total money flows actually gone down and what gets recycled goes down. In some cases, the money flow has gone up and what gets recycled goes up. That's the critical point is to understand how much more or how much less money is in the overall system.

Mitch Ratcliffe
After 10 years of doing the TerraCycle journey, you asked whether or not recycling would solve waste and concluded No. Then launched Loop your reusable packaging platform. Why did a recycling expert decide that recycling wasn't enough? And how did you, how did you communicate that to your team?

Tom Szaky
Yeah, so our mission has always been to eliminate the idea of waste. And I would argue that waste is a very modern idea. You know, probably 1950s is when it really emerged. And so the goal is, how do we get back to a world. World where the concept doesn't exist, and recycling is the first step.

And you know, still today, the majority of our revenue at TerraCycle is recycling, and we are growing that and investing in it. But recycling is a band aid to the to the issue of waste, and almost depends on waste existence, right? You if there's no waste, there's no recycling. So it's more of a solution to the symptom, like taking a Tylenol if you have a headache, but it's not solving the root cause of waste. And that's where we believe reuse goes one step further, because in reusable systems, there is no waste at the at the outset, and that's why we've, you know, made Loop, our company's biggest investment, we've put close to $50 million into it. It's been quite a journey, successful in some cases and not in others, but we believe that moves back to almost the way the world was before waste came onto the scene, where we darned our socks and cobbled our shoes and the milkman delivered our milk and motor oil came in reusable packaging. That is the dream we have to, you know, to get to the funny part is, in our world, recycling is what pays for that dream to, you know, to be enabled.

Mitch Ratcliffe
So Loop promises to make reuse as convenient as disposability. What have you learned about what consumers will and won't do when it comes to their reusable packaging?

Tom Szaky
The biggest lesson in Loop by far has been really two. One is a fierce dedication to the idea of convenience. Because why did disposability win? We voted for it. We vote for it all the time, and I believe it wins. And it's not just the consumer. It's also and very importantly, the industrial actors. It is incredibly convenient, right? It is a for a consumer to buy and consume and dispose, incredibly convenient. But it's also very convenient for manufacturers to have one way systems and to have no muscle for thinking about the product coming back and being restaged and so on. That is extra work. There's no no question. And what we saw in in a lot of reuse models, it's there's a lot of extra work put on to stakeholders. You know, if we look at refill stations, consumers have to go and do the reuse themselves. It's also more work for the industrial actors. So our motto in Loop, what's really been helping us is we want to make reuse feel like disposability and put convenience on that pedestal.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Well, one of the things that you mentioned earlier, consumers want to know stuff is recycled. Do they want to see the results of their impact?

Tom Szaky
Sure. Yeah. So in recycling, you mean, or in reuse?

Mitch Ratcliffe
In reuse, just to know that I have avoided waste, or that I have reduced my environmental footprint. How do they want to understand why they're participating?

Tom Szaky
Yeah, so there's three things that really appeal and reuse. One is certainly the environmental part, right? I'm eliminating waste, and that appeals to some consumers, more women, by the way, than men, tend to care about that.

Then there's the economic benefit in certain cases, like today in France, if you go into a supermarket and buy, say, a bottle of wine or, you know, any more heavier packaging, the reusable is going to be cheaper than the disposable, because it's cheaper to clean and and refill than it is to, you know, than it is to make that package from scratch.

But the third, in some cases, the reusable packaging is just more beautiful. It is, you know, moving from a sort of cheap, disposable package to a more elevated package, those are the three major virtues, right? And for each consumer, it plays differently what they care about. Some only care about the economics. Some really gravitate towards the environmental side. And our job is less so to focus on one but to sort of deliver all of this and and then to modulate, depending on on what drives people to both purchase and to return, those are the two key things we have to look at in reuse.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Not just “are they buying,” but are they bringing it back? Loop has sort of an implicit deposit system in it. Is that a key to creating an incentive in order to achieve that savings you described?

Tom Szaky
Absolutely. I think the the fact that there's a deposit on every package is absolutely critical. We experimented with many other methods, like, do you just have a subscription? You know, when you pay a monthly fee and then you can access whatever you like, or is it a penalty if you don't return net? Net, the deposit is the one that really functions well. And look evidenced by look at all the big reuse systems in the world today, like here in the US. What about propane tanks that is like a same, the same concept, basically, and the deposit is really central to that. It encourages people to bring it back it. It also allows the manufacturers to make the right decisions, because the deposit is always set at something around what that object costs to make, right? So there's a lot of it just makes the model work very smoothly, overall.

Mitch Ratcliffe
And like you just said, you're expressing the fact that there is a cost to making this thing and bringing people into thinking about the loop.

Tom Szaky
Now, that's right, that's right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. You know, the other I'll tell you some unintuitive examples of what we've learned is for consumers, especially in reuse. And this is maybe why some of the early pilots, you know, even in Loop. But in other examples, struggle is there? Is this a part of convenience for consumer? Isn't just what I call sort of the mono SKU, convenience, in other words, like, what happens on that one item? You know, how do I buy it? How do I return it?

But another component of convenience is the entire shopping cart. So we found that if, if we have, say, a display in a store that has five reusable products on it, and then we do the same store, but we have 50 reusable products, your chance of purchase and return on a per product basis goes up about 500% when you go from a small assortment to a large assortment, because there's a convenience. And I just want to, you know, get everything in this model, and then my chance of returning also goes much higher. Because if I'm returning one bottle, maybe I get 10 cents back, but if I'm returning a bag of bottles, maybe I'm getting a few bucks back, right? So there's that's sort of an unintuitive example, but a critically, critically important one.

Mitch Ratcliffe
This is a great place to take a quick commercial break. We're going to be right back to continue the conversation with Tom Szaky.

[Commercial Break]

Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. Let's continue to talk waste, or rather the lack of waste, with TerraCycle, founder and CEO, Tom Szaky. As you know, many brands have made commitments, Tom, to 100% recyclable and reusable packaging by 2025. And you've said these companies are going to have a hard time meeting the goal. The evidence is clear. So what's missing from the US recycling infrastructure that would make these commitments less challenging.

Tom Szaky
So these commitments, and they many came around the sort of Ellen MacArthur Foundation commitment set are global commitments in many cases. So I'm going to, if I may, answer this broader US issue, right? Many times we sort of put down the US, right? When we look at it in the global landscape, it's like, oh, the European system is so much stronger, net, net. When you zoom out, it's the same. Almost everywhere. There are subtleties, little differences.

But, you know, a a razor blade is not recyclable in any country in the world, you know, and an aluminum can is recyclable in most countries. And maybe the rate of recycling shifts a little bit, right, but it's pretty, pretty similar. The big issue and why the commitments failed is that most organizations didn't center on the white elephant in the room, which is it's only about money flow. And a simple way to think about it is this, if I want an object to be circular, I think there's only two ways to do that.

And imagine if I put an object in front of you right now, and my goal was that you leave happily giving it a new life, right? And then there's only two possible methods. Either the object I put in front of you has to have enough intrinsic value that you're like, great. Thank you. Like, please. You know, give me another one, right? If I gave you a luxury watch or $100 bill, right? I'm sure those would happily go and have a new life very quickly with me doing nothing else. The other though, if I give an object that is not valuable right in front of you, like a dirty diaper, a pile of you, cigarette butts, whatever it may be, I believe the only way I can get you to do something happily is to pay you right?

And at some number, I hit the magic number where you're like, Okay, that's enough cash to have me happily deal with this stuff. And that's the white elephant in the room. A lot of the organizations, I think, were challenged because they were hoping for silver bullets, like chemical recycling will save the day, or compostability will save the day, or these sort of things. And the definition to me of a silver bullet in the space is I don't have to spend money, and magically, something that doesn't have value will become circular.

Mitch Ratcliffe
It requires thinking about a system rather than a point solution.

Tom Szaky
Exactly right. Yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe
And so our municipal recycling system is where a lot of effort is going right now, and we'd love to be able to back the dump truck up to a building, put the garbage in there, and product come out the other side, but that's a long way from this here. And you called out earlier, private companies do all that work. How do we need to rethink the recycling system so that both public and private initiatives can combine to eliminate the $2.3 trillion worth of raw materials we buy every year and then just throw away.

Tom Szaky
Yeah, I think that net, net, the idea of the object maker being responsible is smart, because they make the object in the end, right? They are the decider of what is the object I'm being put putting out. And simply speaking, if I'm putting an object out that has intrinsic value, I should be applauded and maybe subsidized. You know, that could be a fiscal form of applause. And if I'm putting out an object that then has cost to have to deal with where I'm at. Have to go pay to make it circular, I should be penalized and maybe pay more fees. The key though is to make that actually cover the real costs of collecting and recycling. And if that was the case, the cheap packaging wouldn't be cheap anymore, you know.

Mitch Ratcliffe
And less convenient, and therefore the companies need to rethink what they're doing in order to have the consumer connection that they want to have. So if you could redesign the system from the ground up. I mean, we're 100 years in, we've learned a lot. Let's just imagine we throw it out. Where would you start rebuilding it?

Tom Szaky
So what I would start with is this idea of and this, I think, is the macro issue in all sustainability, is the externalities are not embedded in the economic decision. So if we take that narrow lens just on waste, it's first embed that externality and basically say that if an object is created, I have to be responsible for it to be able to return, and I have to build the right economics into it. So if, for example, I'm then reusable, I do that by adding a deposit. I do that by making the package able and strong enough and durable enough to be able to go around and be refilled or reused over and over. And if I choose to focus on a convenient disposable solution, then you need to insert those economics to be able to collect and recycle them. I mean, it's effectively what we charge a brand when we work with someone, is we say, look, whatever you make, it can get recycled.

You just got to pay for what it costs to collect and process it, minus what the outcomes are worth. And that is sort of the economics that must be in there. And then, if those economics are present, then laws could come out where the actual waste management companies must recycle and must process those materials. The reason that garbage companies don't recycle this stuff is not because there's any malicious issue. It's just because they'd lose money doing it.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Because of the way they did business, but now we can rethink how they do business, right? Yeah, and in order for us to fill all these gaps in collection and processing, a lot of new economic opportunity is going to emerge. Do you see TerraCycle as the orchestrator of that kind of a solutions oriented approach to all the materials that we waste?

Tom Szaky
That's what we try to do as an organization, right? So we only go and provide solutions where they don't exist. So we don't offer any form of recycling for things that are considered municipally recyclable, like an aluminum can or a pizza. There's no need.

We only focus on the areas where there's these, where they're not recyclable, again, because they cost more to collect and process, and the results are worth always going back to that sort of white elephant, and it begins with solving the economic flow. Now, there's two ways to solve economic flows. One is mandatory, which is where regulation comes in, and one is voluntary, which is where we go. But regulation is very important. And I mentioned that because you'd mentioned sort of the climate out there today. And one of the big challenges is that we live in today a period of time where we are very aggressively attacking regulation and also dismantling the police who enforce the regulation, right? So we're killing the laws and the people to enforce them, and this is important.

So you know, Loop, for example, in reuse, we ran pilots in Japan, the UK, US, Canada, France, no country was able to move into scale except France. And the key difference between all those other markets and France is that France has the regulatory environment to mandate and subsidize reuse while the others don't. And so this money flow component is critical.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Do you see potentially 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of new jobs emerging as we deal with the problem of how do we get all the material back to the right processor in sufficient volume to make it economically viable? There's a lot of value there. Like I said, 2.3 trillion just gets thrown away every year. What would that potentially look like?

Tom Szaky
I think it could be massive. And this is, I'll express it on reuse. Because my dream for waste like right now, the challenge in garbage as an industry is that it's it's get rid of this as cheaply as possible, and get it out of my sight, right? It is not in the main artery, if you will, of supply chain. It's sort of like get, you know, it's just get problems away from me.

What's exciting in the world of reuse is that waste management becomes the actual package supply system. It becomes integrated in as the main artery, and the amount of value that is generated is massive in jobs, in maintaining materials, it is significantly more more exciting, because it's now become an intrinsic part of the flow versus just an off take, you know, and if it's just an off take, it's always going to be expressed as as cheap as humanly possible. Please remove it, because it's not a part of a value chain.

Mitch Ratcliffe
As you've said, the way that we think about this is predicated on our historical approach to waste management. Yes. How would you suggest the nation or, now that consumers are seeing regulations stripped away, they're the ones who are going to have to ask for this. How would you suggest we rethink our approach to consumption to transform the efficiency of our system.

Tom Szaky
So I think it starts with a very important, very simple cornerstone, which we can then build on, which is, you know, we make decisions throughout our lives that affect the future. The most obvious would be like, what's our political vote, but let's remember, in the political vote, we're choosing honestly between A and B, right? We're not given a plethora of choices, and many of us can't vote if we're not a citizen, or if we're not of a certain age, or maybe, depending on if we've been incarcerated, maybe that has an effect on our ability. So it's a very refined privilege expressed very infrequently in a very binary example.

I believe the more powerful version of this, and this is the cornerstone on which to answer your question, is really thinking about how we buy as the most fiercely democratic choice we make, because all of us do it, no matter any of those prior contexts, even a five year old can go purchase right? And this is important, because what we buy more appears tomorrow, and what we don't buy less appears and it is so fiercely democratic in that sense, that is the first step to take is start to push in that direction, because then the systems will naturally build on top of that. That's how the voluntary systems get created, and voluntary movement is echoing what our desires are expressed by not what we say, but by what we buy, right. And then from there, I think that can create the cornerstone on which things can be built.

Mitch Ratcliffe
When I decide not to buy, I am sending, sending one message, but I have to depend on the fact that the marketer is paying attention to my local purchasing patterns. Should I also be sending a note to the company saying, “Look, if you would do this, I'll buy your stuff”?

Tom Szaky
For sure, I think the purchase is the big decision they look at, because they will look at that decision. And not buying is just as important to vote as buying. Both are critical, and I want to put a lot of weight in the not buying category, that's very, very important. But then any other way it's expressed is important. I would say the the next thing to do with once you've made your decision, even before you send the note, is share, share that decision with a friend. And because to not buy, decisions are incredibly powerful. And more three and then, yes, the more it's shared, the more it's advocated for.

Absolutely, that's what's going to get the voluntary movement, and it's what's also going to, I think, lubricate the way for lawmakers to regulate into that, into that method like France would not have both mandated that reuse needs to happen and subsidized it without that sort of citizen appetite being there, yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe
What would that waste free economy look like? How would you, if you could paint a picture for people to imagine 20 years from now, where we can go? What would you tell them?

Tom Szaky
You know, it would look like.... It would take a lot of the wisdom of our past, like we'd go look at the way the world was in the 1920s and before right where, where everything was made in significantly higher quality.

I mean, a great statistic is, in the 1920s we bought two apparel items a year and wore them for 20 years before disposal. 100 years later, we buy 66 apparel items a year, wear them on average three times before disposal. Now, a key reason the garments lasted much longer back then is they were higher quality. They was worth mending them and and repairing them and so on. So I think there's a lot of wisdom there that will make our lives better, but it's not about going backward. It's about going forward and then express that in a highly modern setting.

So this is, again, where I think this idea of, how do we make things timeless? How do we make things repairable? How do we make them reusable, so that they are able to, you know, to to express that, that that longer life, and then especially embed the economics into them, so that the economic engine is also flowing in that in that capacity. Imagine, for example, if everything we bought had a deposit on it that you could get back when you were done with it. Yeah?

Mitch Ratcliffe
A society of enduring value and enduring values. It's a very compelling image. Tom, thanks for the time today. But before you leave, can you tell us how listeners can follow TerraCycle progress and maybe order a zero waste box,

Tom Szaky
Absolutely well, thank you. It was a lovely conversation, and anyone who wants to learn more can go to terracycle.com there you can learn about everything from our recycling platforms. I first recommend check out the free ones, because there's lots of free choices, and if there's a certain waste stream that you'd like to recycle, but we don't have. Free solution. You can purchase one of our zero waste boxes or zero waste bags, and able to recycle just about anything. We also, if you're a business, do this in the in the business sense, with regulated waste, and you know, all sorts of things that may come through your enterprise. And if you want to learn about reuse, you can also, on our website, check out everything we do through Loop on our reuse platform.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Thanks so much for your time today.

Tom Szaky
Thanks for having me.

[Commercial Break]

Mitch Ratcliffe
Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, the specialty recycler that provides zero waste boxes as well as free mail in brand sponsored recycling services for hard to recycle materials. They also launched the Loop reusable packaging program available at many stores in the United States, France and Britain. You can learn more about TerraCycle and check out what you can recycle with the at Terracycle.com.

Whether the idea of waste was invented or the idea of convenience suddenly amplified waste in the 1950s it was that pivotal post war decade when trash began to metastasize with more and more packaging, as well as single use products heading to landfills every year. Historically, people make a mess.

Every archeological site has found waste piles, or what are called middens, alongside human settlements, but other social species pile up waste, as well as their dead in middens too. But we needn't bury ourselves in waste just because humans have always produced trash, as Tom explained, the economics of recycling have limited its success and at a time when we could not track and manage materials, such as during the explosion of trash during the consumer revolution of the 1950s we didn't have the logistical technology to address the many different materials in our garbage cans, but now we do from scannable codes to optical scanners that sort materials on high speed conveyor belts at materials recovery facilities.

We've got what we need. The answers are all here now. It's just a matter of putting them together in the right order. We've had organizations like the Universal Product Code provider GS, one on the show who's director of innovation, Vivian Tai explained, they can track individual items, not just all boxes of pasta, but individual, single boxes of pasta from manufacturing through recovery and recycling to close the circular loop,.

Tom is right: Recycling is urban mining, the process of digging through the trash collected by garbage companies, or worse, that's left uncollected in the environment. And as I pointed out, the United States spends about $2.3 trillion a year on raw materials that could be recovered and reused. That's a distributed problem and an economic opportunity addressable using technology and people. If we undertook that mission, we could create millions of jobs, and not the dirty jobs of collecting garbage, but a form of customer service that delivers and recovers everything to keep materials in circulation, we'd still need some raw materials, but far less, which would reduce humanity's environmental impact, and we could finally deliver on the circular economy promise, but it would look and feel like a concierge economy.

Terracycle’s pricing today, which is expensive, reflects the cost of recycling a material when collection and sorting services, along with localized processing capacity, is not widespread. Now's the time to take that step towards circularity, a process that needs to start with companies that make what we buy. They can decide to meld service with packaging and products the way that Loop has by allowing you to take that back to the store and have your ice cream packaging refilled again, by the way, not right there on in front of you, but it's cleaned and re put back on the shelf. And those companies could offset some of their costs by applying a deposit system that incentivizes others to pick up and return materials for reuse and recycling.

State bottle deposit programs are proven to increase recovery rates by as much as 100% compared to nearby states without deposit programs. If you don't want to return the material, the deposit would make it economically viable for someone to do it for you, again, think service, not burden, and you can see where jobs can be created. The ultimate economic unlock will come when we tie the value of the material recovered to reduced materials costs for those producers who otherwise have to pay out of pocket for their part of today's $2.3 trillion in raw materials for us, products and packaging.

I've been waiting to talk with Tom for a long time, and it was an enlightening discussion. I hope it gets you thinking.

And would you take a moment to share this episode or one of the more than 500 others that we produced on sustainability, in your ear with your friends, your family, your coworkers, writing review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us folks, you're the ampli. Fires that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, the people you meet on the street, that they can find sustainability in your ear on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I Heart Radio audible or other fine purveyors of podcast goodness. Thank you for your support.

I'm Mitch Ratcliffe, and this is sustainability in your ear. We'll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself. Take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours, maybe even put in place a circular economy. Have a Green Day.