Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Szaky's office could pass for a landfill. Szaky, 24, the co-founder and CEO of plant-food manufacturer TerraCycle, sits in a chair that was at one time another firm's trash, next to a computer on a desk that were both once trash, and, with near palpable enthusiasm, draws supply-and-demand graphs on scraps of paper to show why he's so fond of building his business out of trash. "What is garbage?" he asks, marker in hand. "It's any commodity with a negative value, right? It's something you're willing...
...TerraCycle is willing to take it, he might as well add. Negative costs drive the company's bottom line. Only the label on the bottle of TerraCycle's flagship product is new. The product is a ready-to-use organic plant-food spray, made from the excrement of worms fed on compost and packaged in repurposed soda bottles...
...baser terms, the man is selling worm s___ wrapped in used plastic. The company has earned accolades for its minimal environmental impact (and is happy to trash talk competitors on their records). And the plant food is a hit with retailers. TerraCycle rolled out its products en masse in the U.S. earlier this year. They're carried in more than 7,000 stores across the country. The privately owned company took in $1 million in the first quarter of 2006, and sales are growing 300% to 600% each year...
...more than 50 species of fish, shrimp and coral previously unknown to science that researchers from the environmental NGO Conservation International (CI) reported discovering off the Bird's Head peninsula of Indonesia's Papua province. Last year, a CI team uncovered dozens of new bird and plant species in Papua's Foja Mountains. This time, the group's study of the region's equally rich waters left its marine biologists "almost giddy," says expedition leader Mark Erdmann. "It's common enough to get a new species, but to discover them non-stop was completely unexpected and fun, like stepping back...
...Even more disturbing are recent studies showing that the bacteria may not be content to just live on the surface of produce, and may actually set up shop inside plant tissues, making them impossible to eliminate with a simple dousing in a chlorine bath, the current way that most fresh produce is cleaned. Eric Triplett, chair of microbiology and cell science at University of Florida, has published two studies documenting the ability of bacteria like salmonella to travel into a plant through its root system. "We just inoculate the roots and up they go, they fully colonize all over...