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.
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Everywhere we turn today, we are bombarded by amazing statistics. The information is out there and anyone can drop a scary statistic like the US consumes 200 billion plastic bottle each year” in order to make a point. All we really get form these statistic it that it’s a lot and even if we write it out 200,000,000,000 we see a lot of zeros but we still don’t really understand the dimensions and sheer scale of this number. As a society, we have grown accustomed to scary statistics to a point that they no longer have the desired impact that they once did. Artist Chris Jordan’s latest prints are a great tool to help us gain a more real understanding of these insane numbers. Chris helps us visualize what these statistics really look like and in term gives renewed impact, relevance and meaning to the numbers.
This stuff is huge business, according to a recent article in Treehugger bottled water using this type of container like the Dasani brand from Coca Cola has a markup of up 10,000% from the cost of production making it one of the most profitable commodities around. I can’t believe that I just referred to water as a commodity. Some of these bottles of water are transported from across the globe and require up to 7 bottles of clean water in the production of each bottle container.
Although they are designed to last for a very long time, almost all of these plastic containers have an extremely short life of use especially by the consumer. How long does it take to drink a 20 oz bottle of soda or water? After that primary use, these containers are denominated recyclable garbage worth about 5 cents a unit in most states.
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