Turning waste into wealth

TerraCycle came to China in 2016 with a Colgate-sponsored program to recycle oral care waste such as used toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes. It has since collected 63,000 pieces of oral care waste from Chinese consumers.

A contest was launched recently among elementary schools in Shanghai for young children to recycle oral care waste and get votes on children's drawings under the theme of Green Future. The winning school will receive the prize of a 3-D printer.

"A green future will not happen without a clean and healthy environment - that's the educational message we want to send out," said Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle in an interview with Xinhua.

TerraCycle began in 2001 when Szaky, then a Princeton freshman, and his friend created an organic fertilizer made from waste-fed worm excrement. To date, more than 80 million people in 21 countries have helped to collect and recycle enough waste to raise over $21 million for charities around the world.

Last year, TerraCycle created the world's first recyclable shampoo bottles for Procter& Gamble's Head & Shoulders brand, with 25 percent of plastic waste collected from beaches, rivers and other waterways worldwide. The project won the United Nations' Momentum For Change Lighthouse Award in October 2017.

Szaky explained TerraCycle tries to eliminate the idea of waste and is doing that in three ways. First, to recycle everything, especially those hard-to-handle "non-recyclables" such as cigarette butts and candy wrappers. Second, to make products out of waste, such as the beach plastic bottles. And third, to close the recycling loop and make it smaller.

TerraCycle's coming to China "is the combination of client's demand and great opportunity", he told Xinhua.

"The waste issue caused by consumerism has actually been raising social awareness toward this problem - which means that people are willing to face the issue and take part in solving it," Szaky said.

"The government has been very supportive as well in terms of green and sustainable business," Szaky said, taking the example of China leading the world in wind and solar energy production.

"We were lucky that our client wanted to bring the recycling program to China at the right time," he said.

China has been promoting energy conservation and environmental protection industries as one of the seven emerging strategic pillars of the economy since 2012. In its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), a target was set to increase the added value of these industries to account for 3 percent of GDP by 2020.

Fiscal and tax support has been granted to technological researchers and businesses that provide solutions, products and services of pollution control, of which waste management is one of the key aspects.

Encouraged by preferential policies and the strong and urgent demand, the recycling business has witnessed an increasing number of players coming along. Some have stayed and thrived, while others failed and had to quit.

"Waste management is crucial for public well-being and environmental protection, yet many startups, though with noble and ingenious ideas, failed because it was difficult for small businesses to maintain a profit margin to keep on, especially in the early stage," said Mao Da with Beijing Normal University, a scholar in environmental history and founder of the China Zero Waste Alliance, a nongovernmental think tank.

At TerraCycle, a 1 percent profit margin had been maintained for more than a decade up to 2013. In 2017, the company's sales number reportedly surpassed $20 million.