TRENTON, New Jersey - TerraCycle, a "waste solution development" company, was started 10 years ago by Tom Szaky, a dropout of Princeton University in New Jersey, with a single product, Worm Poop, a plant food made from just what you'd think.

Now, TerraCycle collects garbage from companies that make juice pouches, chips, candy and single-serve espresso tins, to name just a few of the waste streams it utilizes, and turns them into items like tote bags, portable speakers and notebooks that are sold at American retailers like Wal-Mart.

More specifically, TerraCycle collects the overruns of a company's packaging - reams and reams of it - and upcycles it into festive and useful objects ablaze with product names, a relatively cheap and feel-good brand extension.

It also collects waste - from used juice pouches to toothbrushes harvested by schools and charities - that it sells to recycling companies, which turn it into plastic pellets that can be made into driveway pavers, chairs or building materials.

This summer, TerraCycle's research and development department has been shredding diapers, looking for a way to recycle used ones. "There is no limit on gross here," said Tiffany Threadgould, who runs the company's design team, whose members seem to have high tolerance for disgusting things.

Ms. Threadgould, 37, is a product designer and writer. She has been TerraCycle's chief designer for the last three years, fashioning "upcycling" prototypes like pencil cases from Capri Sun juice pouches and clocks made from circuit boards, and leading workshops on how to weave pet-food bags into wallets and totes, for example, as she did last year for the 700 employees of a Hungarian pet-food company.

She is also something of a trash evangelist, preaching the crafty value of society's discards for nearly a decade, selling trash-into-craft kits - like a wine-bottle lamp kit - through her company, RePlayGround. And she is gently exhorting readers to make their own clocks out of paint-can lids in a new book, "ReMake It!"

"I want to change the way people think about garbage," she'll tell you earnestly and often.

TerraCycle, which collects a billion pieces of waste every few months, is mostly in the business of recycling or "garbage dealing," said Albe Zakes, the company's director of publicity.

But Ms. Threadgould's upcycled designs, which represent about 10 percent of the business, are its most visible products, attracting companies like Kraft, the maker of Capri Sun juice pouches, into partnerships with TerraCycle. (Since its founding, the company has lurched about a bit, fending off a lawsuit from the fertilzer maker Miracle-Gro, which saw Worm Poop's packaging as imitative of its own, and reorienting its business model, which originally focused on upcycling. This year, the company enjoyed a modest profit for the first time, Mr. Zakes said.)

Ms. Threadgould's design efforts are marketing tools that reiterate and amplify a single message: garbage can be fun.

"Waste Does Not Exist" reads the spray-painted manifesto on the vintage sofa in TerraCycle's lounge, which owes a lot, style-wise, to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," a zany American television children's show.

It's appealingly off-kilter. On the walls of TerraCycle's lounge: clocks made from the keys of a computer keyboard, scissors and a bike wheel; vintage mirrors painted red, blue and gold; and the company's logo, which looks like an infinity symbol, writ large in juice pouches. The floor is covered with artificial turf discarded from a nearby soccer field. Tables are made from used fire extinguishers and salvaged wood, and wine barrels topped with a door.

The main workroom, where most of TerraCycle's 65 young employees work, has walls covered in graffiti and a checkerboard of rug remnants. Vinyl records serve as desk partitions; desks are old doors. Conference tables made from more old doors, some embellished with doorbells, stretch out in "rooms" with walls made from clear plastic soda bottles. There are Nerf guns everywhere.

"We want to do more interior design projects," Ms. Threadgould said. "Offer our services to our partners so they can have their space 'TerraCycled.'"

She described a new project with a New Jersey-based restaurateur who has asked the team to invent a Philadelphia restaurant concept, from the branding to the decor.

Ms. Threadgould's studio, which she shares with Lori Anselm, 48, a textile designer, and Brad Sherman, 26, a designer with a master's degree in sustainability, looks like design studios the world over, except that its shelves are lined with boxes labeled variously: Cheerios boxes, Yak Paks, Pepsi bottle caps, Colgate containers, Burberry tie scraps and pregnancy tests.

Pregnancy tests? "Yeah, we get all sorts of things from our partners," Ms. Threadgould said. "Brad made a really cool clock out of those."

The New York Times

(China Daily 08/28/2011 page12)