Tom Szaky
Hungarian businessman
Tom Szaky (born 14 January 1982) is the CEO and founder of TerraCycle, a private, US-based business headquartered in Trenton, New Jersey that turns non-recyclable pre-consumer and post-consumer waste into raw material to be used in new products.
Biography
Early life
Szaky's parents are medical doctors, and Szaky 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. Szaky notes that growing up in Canada and around the strong conservationist movement there is what sparked his interest in environmentalism. According to Szaky, he became fascinated with the concept of recycling after seeing the “astounding” things people threw in the trash, adding that the first television set he ever saw was being thrown in the garbage. This experience proved formative as he credits it with helping him understand that waste was a “modern idea.”
He started to attend college at Princeton University, originally intending to major in psychology and economics. He dropped out during his sophomore year to develop his green recycling business model, known as TerraCycle.
Career
Early on in his career, Tom started three small 'dot.com' companies.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Szaky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.