Two years ago, Leticia Socal’s cognitive dissonance became too much. She needed to face what her career was doing to the planet.
Socal, who has a PhD in material science, had worked in the plastics industry for 15 years. She quit, started a sustainability blog, and began mentoring startups and students on how to reduce plastic waste. More than one part of her plan involved TerraCycle.
TerraCycle calls itself a “social enterprise Eliminating the Idea of Waste®.” But it might be best understood as the company that will recycle the packaging and products created by large corporations. Specifically, the stuff that you can’t put in your curbside bin. It recycles wrappers for everything from Swedish Fish to Entenmann’s Little Bites, plus a grab bag of other plastic products.