Tom Szaky
Tom Szaky is the CEO and founder of TerraCycle, a company that makes consumer products from waste.
Szaky's parents are medical doctors, and Szaky himself is an only child. At age four, Szaky left his home in Hungary after the Chernobyl disaster. In 1987, Szaky immigrated to Canada, where he grew up in Toronto. Szaky attended high school at Upper Canada College. He attended college at Princeton University, majoring in psychology and economics. He dropped out during his sophomore year to focus on TerraCycle.
Early on in his career, Tom started three small 'dot.com' companies. These were Werehome.com, piority.com, and studentmarks.com. In 2006, Tom was named the "#1 CEO under thirty" by Inc. magazine in its July 2006 issue for his work in TerraCycle.
“In looking at waste as an entirely modern, man-made idea, I stopped viewing garbage as garbage and instead slowly started to see it as a commodity.”
“The idea of finding value in what people are willing to pay to get rid of it one of the fundamental backbones of ecocapitalism, as I think of it now.”