Letter from CEO Tom Szaky—2024 retrospective
2024 marked TerraCycle's twenty-second record year of driving innovation in recycling, recycled content, and reuse. With your help, we continue to do the important work to fulfill our mission of Eliminating the Idea of Waste®. As we turn our sights to 2025, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on what we've achieved together this past year.
Innovating reuse solutions
Loop saw major growth in France and Japan in 2024. Products from brands like Coca-Cola, Nutella, Evian, and many others can now be found in reusable packaging in 250+ stores across three retailers in France: Carrefour, Monoprix, and Systeme U, and 110+ stores across three retailers in Japan: Aeon, Askul, and StyleTable.
Unique recycling capabilities
Over the years, our team of in-house scientists has developed specialized methods to recycle hundreds of hard-to-recycle waste streams, from chewing gum to cigarette butts, all while achieving other R&D breakthroughs in reuse and recycled content. To further expand our R&D capabilities, in October of 2024, we opened our new, state-of-the-art R&D lab, the Dr. Ernel Simpson Research & Development Lab, at our corporate headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey.
Solutions for you
New recycling capabilities and partnerships in 2024 have led to exciting program launches. TerraCyclers can now recycle ASICS NIMBUS MIRAI™ shoes internationally, McCafé® Espresso Coffee Capsules in Canada, Ploom vape devices in the UK, bank cards in Australia, and dozens of other new waste streams across 20 countries.
Solutions for businesses
You may know about our free recycling programs and zero-waste solutions, but we also help businesses around the world recycle huge quantities of industrial waste. Our commercial recycling division recycles universal waste, pre-consumer waste, obsolete inventory, and anything else these businesses may want to recycle from their manufacturing or production facilities, distribution centers, laboratories, warehouses, and more.
Our acquisition of North Coast Services, a New Hampshire-based company specializing in the collection and recycling of universal waste, expanded our footprint for partnering with businesses to recycle waste like batteries, sharps, and fluorescent lightbulbs.
We've also launched industry-specific recycling solutions. Our solutions address a number of industries ranging from SalonCycle to ScienceCycle in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and we look forward to continued expansion during 2025.
TerraCycle at the Olympics
Our work was featured at the Olympics again this year. After creating podiums for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics from recycled trash, we worked with P&G to collect trash from rivers and natural areas in France and recycle it into podiums used to award medals during the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Athletes from the Australian and Japanese Olympic teams competed in ASICS NIMBUS MIRAI™ performance running shoes. In partnership with ASICS, our R&D scientists created a first-of-its-kind closed-loop recycling process that enables these shoes to be recycled back into themselves.
The TerraCycle Foundation
The TerraCycle Foundation continued its work removing waste from rivers and canals before it could reach the ocean, having now removed 2,864,814 lbs of plastic waste. In addition to this important work, we focused on the future of the planet by educating students about recycling and sustainability through our School Waste Bank Program.
What's next
Our impact goes beyond recycling—in 2024, we raised over $750,000 for schools and charities that are working to make the world a better place for all. In tandem with charitable monetary donations, we worked to drive change at the community level. A few examples include donating planter benches—made from recycled materials—to deserving community groups nominated by our TerraCyclers in the UK and, in partnership with Spin Master, bringing joy to hundreds of kids via a recycled playground we donated to the Boys & Girls Club of Long Beach in California.
As a mission-driven company, our work goes beyond the products and services we offer. We often work with governments and other changemakers with our mission of Eliminating the Idea of Waste® in mind. As experts on recycling, reuse, and recycled content our input has helped shape negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty and recommendations for the FTC's Green Guides. We also participated in the development of a new National Standard of Canada, which aims to establish a common definition of recycling to help industry and policymakers set targets, track progress, and assess the impact of initiatives like EPR across provinces.
In 2025 and beyond, we'll continue working to make recycling and reuse a seamless, convenient part of your life. Thank you for joining us on our journey to move the world from a linear economy to a circular one.
Tom Szaky
CEO and founder of TerraCycle and Loop
P.S. We're always listening and learning. If you have comments, questions, or ideas you'd like to share, send me an email.
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