MW: Let's switch more from the manufacturing side to the consumer side. I am really intrigued by the whole nature of products made just from reused waste, not from recycled and remanufactured and disguised waste. But you are literally taking a soda bottle and turning it into a container for another product.

TS: Yes.

MW: Is that something that is hard for consumers to adjust to? Is it a shock when they see something that's so obviously just something they threw away yesterday, and now, they're going to Target to buy it again?

TS: I think that the customers really dig when they see the TerraCycle bottle, and it's all used soda bottles together. I think that is really an appealing aspect to the customer. What's interesting is, many times, people don't realize it 'til after they buy it. And that is even more exciting when someone bought a product and then realizes all of the super green eco-friendly aspects of it and bought it just because of price and performance.

MW: Are there ways to encourage consumers to re-recycle this again or to bring it back? Is there a collection program?

TS: Sure. Every one of our products has a return program on it where we will take it back and reuse it. And many times, we give credit, not full credit, but some credit back for giving us the material that we can use again, so that's absolutely there, and it's something that we look forward to on each of the products.

MW: And so I guess I should back up. Explain a little bit about how you go from an empty soda bottle to a cleaning product. What else do you have to do to that bottle? What other things do you have to add? I know there's the wrappers, and then there's the spray nozzle.

TS: Yes. So we take the used soda bottle. We wash it out. We remove the label. We fill it up with our cleaner and -- or fertilizer, and then we put on a heat-shrink label made from PET to make the whole thing recyclable, and then the cap is actually a leftover, or off-spec or reject cap that we find. And that finishes it. That's all you need.

MW: And so the wrapper is the only new piece of this puzzle.

TS: That's right, yes. Yeah, that's really all that is new. And we looked at things like biodegradable plastic and different plastics. But one of the challenges with biodegradable plastic is that you have to put it into a compost pile to make it biodegradable. It's one of my big problems, actually, with that whole industry of biodegradable products. And very few people have compost piles to place them into. And things, quite frankly, don't biodegrade in a landfill, even if it's biodegradable. You could find a banana that's 100 years old in a landfill because there's no oxygen passing, so there's no biodegradation.

So we looked at that, and we said, "Well, look, what we want to do is make it easy for the customer, and so if the entire piece is recyclable, that's the most realistic thing people will do." And so that's why we went to using PET film to wrap our bottles.

MW: I'm curious also about the big picture of TerraCycle versus the way things are currently done. Have you found that companies, once they see what is possible with waste, they start incorporating that into their own operations, they start looking at their own waste streams for creative ways to reuse?

TS: Yes. Typically, they engage us to do the reusing. What we haven't seen is people trying to copy our model. So what companies are really excited to do is work with us, so that we can create reusable choices from their raw material. That's been the most typical approach.

MW: Even if they're not copying your model, do you find that maybe they're looking at their own inputs and outputs in a different light, that they're seeing some potential for what would otherwise be waste and coming to you with ideas?

TS: Yes. We definitely -- now, that we've been really pioneering this way to upcycle waste, we're finding a lot of people coming to us and saying -- it ranges from people saying, "Hey, we have this waste stream. Can you guys do something with it?" to "Hey, this is a cool solution to a waste stream. Would you guys want to be a part of that?" And so we're definitely finding a lot of that occurring, and the more ideas that come to us the better. We'd love to grow and use those ideas to do more.

MW: One of the questions I like to ask is, what does success look like? And when I was thinking about how that applies to TerraCycle, it's -- what happens when the waste runs out, which I don't think is really --

TS: Well, that's what -- the waste will never run out because you're always ... there's always something. When you're done with a product, you have what's leftover, and that then needs to keep being reused. So what really it looks like -- what success looks like is that there is no waste because everything is being reused to build something else. That is what success for us looks like.

And what's interesting is that there'll always be a function for TerraCycle, or companies like us, because we'll keep that reuse element growing and going.

MW: Tell me a little bit about the eco-capitalism idea behind TerraCycle.

TS: Yes, so what TerraCycle really revolves around is simply showing that if you do the most environmentally friendly thing, you do the most socially responsible thing, you actually help your profit and that your products end up becoming cheaper.

It's this big twist because typically when you take a product, you make it 5 percent more eco-friendly or 10 percent eco-friendly, your cost goes up. But if you go completely the other direction, and you make it out of garbage, and you're located in the inner city, and you do all this stuff, your cost actually gets driven way down.

So the idea is that you can -- instead of doing things the normal way, you can, if you rethink the business paradigm, you can actually make money and more money and get cheaper products to customers by doing things the absolute best way possible.

And that's the simple way to summarize eco-capitalism. It's obviously a lot -- it could be a lot more complicated, and you can dig into more of the details, but it's all around using waste and the paradigm of waste, the fact that waste is simply an idea, an object, or something that we're willing to pay to get rid of. And the fact that we're willing to pay to get rid of it, opens up a very cool set of possibilities.

MW: Great. Well, Tom, thanks very much for taking the time to talk.

TS: Thanks for having me.