Miracle-Gro vs. TerraCycle

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Oh, this story angers me to no end. I learned from the ladies at Garden Rant that Miracle-Gro is suing the maker of TerraCycle, an organic liquid fertilizer made from worm castings and packaged in re-used soda bottles. I first read about TerraCycle in the premier issue of Nature's Garden magazine (which, ironically, had a big splashy ad for Miracle-Gro books on the back cover). Nonetheless, I was excited to learn about TerraCycle: the company is run by a young guy who's trying to build a business by re-using as many materials as possible. Even the boxes used for shipping the product are ones that are reclaimed from other businesses.

Is TerraCycle perfect? Probably not. (The best thing one can do is make their own compost -- the real organic fertilizer.) But I at least give the TerraCycle guy credit for trying to build a viable business with a lower environmental impact.

So, Miracle-Gro claims that TerraCycle's green and yellow packaging looks too much like theirs. I guess they don't want the competition to threaten their own organic line of products - which have been advertised all over the place as of late. And while it would seem like Miracle-Gro's organic products are a good thing -- a step in the right direction -- I won't buy them. Why? Because doing so would mean that I'd be lining their pockets with more money to continue making their non-organic products, like their all-in-one plant food and weed preventer. How does that stuff work? I wonder what kind of chemicals it contains. (The Material Safety Data Sheet, which would list information about toxicity, is not currently available for that product on their Web site). Anyway, I won't ever buy Miracle-Gro products -- any of them -- so long as the company endorses Roundup, which is widely used on genetically-modified crops, has been linked to cancer, and kills frogs.

Here's to good ol' fashioned compost.