TerraCycle--lots of products made with recycled material

[eridani]

Unfortuantely, not much in the US

http://www.alternet.org/environment/138590/life_among_the_eco-capitalists%3A_a_revolution_takes_hold_in_new_jersey_/?page=entire

TerraCycle upcycles all the time -- like when it needed to expand its factory, it grabbed a super-cheap, empty 250,000-square-foot facility in run-down Trenton. Yes, the gangs and the heroin and the "white flight" are real, but with a little bit of diplomacy, TerraCycle won over the locals.

Today, if you stroll through the factory, you find workers who chat amiably in small groups as they put labels on bottles and fill containers of fertilizer. Tanya Dave says she likes "the diversity" of the work -- it has her "always doing something different."

That said, the full truth about TerraCycle is that most of its manufacturing is outsourced. What TerraCycle has excelled at is not production, but design and sales inside a new green-business paradigm.

But here's what you don't get at all from their cool TV show: Yes, it is doing $7.2 million in sales, but not everything is made here, in this one cool factory. Another thing you can't help but notice on the factory floor is that the blue-collar workforce at TerraCycle is not made of employees with job security. The workers are temps from LaborReady.

Capitalism's effect on the Earth has been disasterous. The purer the capitalism, the worse the debacle: market fundamentalism and an unregulated finance sector wrecked the market economy. TerraCycle isn't interesting because it proves that the free market can fix the environmental crisis. TerraCycle is rather one of the most interesting ways that capitalism can destroy itself and then reinvent itself in the future.It is a harbinger of industries to come.

In the TerraCycle office, the furniture looks like what you'd find in the dumpster at Princeton at the end of the spring semester (it was.) The paychecks come in reused envelopes from the newspaper company that used to occupy the factory. The company even believes in upcycling the graffiti art that bourgeois America thinks is trash: Terra throws parties with local graffiti writers who have decorated the factory with eye-popping glossy fluorescent murals. Last year, the graffitists were brought in to do custom artwork on a line of flower pots made from recycled plastic.