How TerraCycle is Eliminating the Idea of Waste®
At TerraCycle, we’re on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Together with the businesses, communities, and individuals we’ve partnered with for over 20 years across 20+ countries, we’re on a journey to move the world from a linear economy to a circular one.
What exactly do we do? We create first-of-their-kind solutions in recycling, recycled content, and reuse:
- Recycling: Our first recommendation is always that manufacturers design their products or packaging to be locally recyclable. If that is not possible, we partner with brands to create free recycling programs, scaling each program to whatever level the sponsor is interested in. Alternatively, businesses, organizations, or individuals may purchase the recycling solution for any given waste stream by reviewing our available paid recycling solutions.
- Recycled content: Another step in the journey towards a circular economy is to work with manufacturers to help make their products or packaging from waste. This generates demand for recycled content, which, along with recycling, creates a recycling-based circular economy.
- Reuse: We also help companies “tighten the circle” by moving from recycling to reuse. Through Loop, our global reuse platform, we allow brands to develop reusable packaging for their products which are made available to consumers at major retailers.
We’re focused on continued innovation as we work to fulfill our mission of Eliminating the Idea of Waste®.
The business of recycling
TerraCycle isn’t your typical recycler. We develop ways to collect and recycle trash that is not generally accepted by traditional municipal recycling services, including cigarette butts, toys, mascara wands, and much more.
What makes something municipally recyclable depends on whether your local recycling company can make a profit recycling it. If the cost of collecting and processing the waste is lower than the value of the resulting raw material, it will likely be locally recyclable. If the cost is higher, then it likely won’t be. The good news is that most trash can be technically recycled—practical recyclability all comes down to the underlying business model.
TerraCycle can recycle the hard-to-recycle because we work with brands, retailers, and other stakeholders who fund the recycling process. Our free recycling programs are sponsored by brands so you can recycle their products and packaging for free. It’s a way for them to take voluntary responsibility over this important externality of waste. We hope to see similar responsibility taken when it comes to other environmental externalities, like deforestation, climate change, biological diversity etc.
In addition to our free recycling programs, we also offer paid recycling solutions, which businesses, organizations, and consumers can purchase to #RecycleEverything. The cost of these solutions includes the collection box, transportation to you—and then back to our recycling facilities—plus the actual cost of sorting, cleaning, and recycling the contents minus the value of the recycled material.
We are always innovating to develop new ways to make recycling hard-to-recycle trash more economical, more convenient, and more accessible for everyone.We also directly address waterway waste through the TerraCycle Foundation, which has pulled over two million pounds of waste out of the rivers and canals in Thailand so far.
Developing and launching a recycling solution
Each waste stream requires a unique approach to recycling. This is our process for developing recycling solutions:
- First, our in-house Research & Development team determines the composition of a waste stream and what technical solutions we would deploy to sort it, clean it, and turn it into recycled raw materials.
- Next, our operational engineers design a process flow, mapping out the right equipment and techniques to deploy to create a practical recycling process.
- Once we’ve defined a process, our local operations team leverages our network of partners to find third-party facilities with the capabilities and equipment to bring our solutions to life. Watch this video to see our recycling process in action.
- After the trash is recycled, the raw material is sold to manufacturing companies who produce the end products, like outdoor furniture, flooring tiles, and more, to complete the recycling journey.
Auditing and verification
TerraCycle’s mission is Eliminating the Idea of Waste® and we guarantee we recycle all the accepted waste sent to us through our free and paid solutions.
We strictly control the movement of materials through each part of the recycling process so we can track and confirm where materials were sent and for what purpose. Bureau Veritas—a world leader in testing, inspection, and certification services—annually audits our collection and recycling supply chains, as do many of our partners.
TerraCycle has designed and implemented an advanced tracking system with a customized version of Evreka in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and our European markets. Evreka provides comprehensive solutions designed specifically for the waste management industry, enabling us to centralize and scale the tracking of all waste through each step of our global supply chain, from receipt, through multiple stages of sortation and processing.
Recycling is a step in the right direction
While recycling is an imperfect solution, it is a major improvement over disposing of our waste in landfills or through incineration or waste-to-energy. Recycling's main benefit is that it reduces the need to extract new virgin materials from the planet.
Our Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) department conducts comprehensive LCAs that prove our solutions benefit the planet. One LCA for rigid plastics found that across eight impact categories, including global warming potential and water use, TerraCycle recycling models reduce the environmental impact of a product's end-of-life by a collective average of 73% compared to local municipal landfilling and by an average of 67% compared to waste-to-energy.
But we must not stop at recycling. We must challenge ourselves to make products from recycled content and then completely redesign our products to be reusable. That way, the materials we spend considerable resources extracting from the world are honored and don’t go to waste. As reuse scales, the need for TerraCycle recycling programs will diminish, a transition we not only applaud, but are greatly investing our resources to achieve.
Many stakeholders need to work together to find meaningful and practical solutions to the waste crisis. TerraCycle participates in and chairs committees on the circular economy for the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; is a member of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty; and supports local, national, and global organizations on topics like developing extended producer responsibility. We are members of the UK Plastics Pact, an advisory Board Member of the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network, and much more.
Call to action
We’re committed to Eliminating the Idea of Waste, and we need your help.
We must ask our lawmakers to pass laws that promote circular business models and make disposable consumption more costly. We must ask brands and retailers to produce and amplify products are better for the planet. We must vote on a better future with what we buy and don't buy. Most importantly, we must all work together to buy less and reuse what we already have—and only then, to recycle.