Author explains how recycling can be consumer friendly

— -- The seed of the idea for Tom Szaky's company, TerraCycle, was planted on a road trip to Montreal during his freshman year at Princeton. In high school in Canada, he and a friend grew a marijuana plant they dubbed "Marley."

The plant hadn't fared well on a diet of water and chemicals, but on that road trip, Szaky discovered it was flourishing, thanks to worm-poop fertilizer.

Szaky began to develop his business idea at Princeton, where he was part of a team that entered a business-plan competition. The idea: Take people's garbage (a service for which a fee could be charged), feed it to tons of worms, get worm poop, then sell it to the masses.

In Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle is Redefining Green Business (Portfolio, $15, 208 pages) Szaky tells the story of his journey from Hungarian immigrant to college dropout (he left in his sophomore year to build the business) to CEO of a company that might be making a dent in our planet's waste problem.

Some waste-centric facts:

•Americans pay $1 trillion every year to dispose of waste that could be fed to worms.

•A major U.S. retailer tosses 35 million gift cards every year — the equivalent of 42 truckloads.

Although Szaky and his team didn't win Princeton's competition, they won others, including the Carrot Capital competition. For that one, they were eligible for a $1 million prize that TerraCycle turned down because the team disagreed with Carrot's plans for the company.

As with other gonzo entrepreneurs, Szaky views failures as setbacks rather than derailments.

For example, in 2004, the TerraCycle team was on the conventional path to brand-building: Start with small retailers and trade shows, and build a foundation that leads to a major contract with a megaretailer.

Results were less than impressive, so Szaky and his colleagues called big-box stores several times daily. After 35 days and hundreds of calls, they scored a meeting with HomeDepot.com, which placed TerraCycle's first large order.