I have mentioned Terracycle before on this blog where I recognized their truly innovative business model for making high quality organic lawn and garden products out of “waste” organic worm poop and discarded soda bottles. From it’s inception in 2001, the company has done an amazing job with it’s brand, and has expanded it’s product line beyond fertilizers to cleaning products and others including the Firelog made from a very problematic bio-diesel byproduct, glycerin. Now they have partnered up with one of the worlds largest food and beverage companies in their first effort to up cycle Kraft products packaging into a new category of eco-friendly consumer products.
What a traditional capitalistic enterprise would consider a limitation, Terracycle has turned into an advantage. There aren’t many marketing or development teams that would embrace the challenge of creating products completely out of garbage. Terracycle is thriving by doing exactly that, turning waste into an asset, their business model is based on trash, no pun intended. Their whole product development process is based on using waste as the raw material in every aspect including the packaging. Terracycle’s model is one of the most inspiring working examples of eco-capitalism, by taking material that is generally considered an industrial and environmental liability and turning it into an asset.
Annie Leonards and her team have done an amazing job with a fun and effective way of creating awareness in several related issues. Her 20 min. video, “The story of Stuff” could be one of the most important videos in the youtube library. They have been uploaded in sections but I encourage everyone to watch the whole video from their home site in order to gain a holistic understanding of the issues that the sustainability movement needs to tackle in order to turn our mother ship around.
It is really amazing to see how the information in these videos is completely new and fresh to those outside the bright green community and if you read through some of the comments below the videos, you can see a sort of snapshot of all the different points of view or “states of consciousness”.
If you ask me, The Story of Stuff should be in every school library and it should be viewed by all young children. Yes, there is a bit of an environmentalist bias communicated in the video and some of the information shown is outright shocking to hear but most of it is very accurate and telling of humanities current reality.
Please take a few minutes to watch the video for it will definitely help you gain clarity in the related issues and also provide you with some great one liners to combat the still skeptical.
P.S. images are from the video but slightly mashed as always.
