Household Recycling Made Easier — For a Price

(Bloomberg) -- Jill Fransen considers herself a serious recycler, the kind of person who knows the difference between various plastics, takes care to sort them, and drives five miles from her home in Portland, Oregon’s, North Tabor neighborhood to drop off refuse at a recycling center.

Over nearly a dozen years, Fransen’s routine was pretty well established. Then in late 2020, she heard about Ridwell, a subscription-based recycling service that had just been introduced in Portland. For about $12 per month, Ridwell would pick up items — stuff that many recycling programs won’t accept, like certain plastics and spent lightbulbs — right from one’s front porch, and take everything to its local plant to sort and redistribute for recycling or re-use.

“I was skeptical at first because of the monthly charge,” says Fransen. But seeing Styrofoam and #1 PET plastics — for polyethylene terephthalate, most known as the plastic used to make clamshell and other food containers — on Ridwell’s collection list persuaded Fransen to give it a try. “You have no idea how much #1 PET plastic you use,” she says. (According to the Michigan-based consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems, just 9% of the 1.5 billion pounds of PET-made items circulating in the U.S. are recycled.) “And driving out to East Portland got to be a pain in the neck.”

Fransen is among the nearly 300 early adopters of the service in Portland, where operations started in November 2020. Since then, the number of subscribers there has grown to 22,400. Ridwell launched and established itself first in Seattle before expanding to Portland, Bellingham, Washington, Denver, Minneapolis and Austin. The total subscribers collectively is about 60,000. The company is among a small group of environmental startups that are working to eliminate plastic packaging and create compostable plastics from mycelium, a mushroom root.

Ridwell’s growth has coincided with Americans’ redirecting much of their anxiety and restlessness over the pandemic into online shopping. That in turn has generated huge amounts of garbage. “So many people were getting stuff delivered from Amazon, Instacart, and takeout,” says Taylor Loewen, Ridwell’s Portland general manager. “People were stuck at home realizing: ‘There’s just so much packaging in my house!’”

The effort started well before the Covid pandemic. Generally, consumers don’t have many easy options for properly disposing of things like plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and clamshell containers. In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastic recyclables, leaving many U.S. cities without a place to send what they’d collected. Before then, processors in China had handled about half of the world’s recyclable waste. Greenpeace has estimated that more than 90% of the plastic ever produced has not been recycled. 

Those types of items had accumulated in Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger’s basement in his Seattle home. One weekend in the fall of 2017, he and his then 6-year-old son Owen started to clear the house of the refuse. “Every weekend, Owen and I would pick a category — Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs — and we would find a local partner,” he explained — someplace willing to take the haul. Before long, Metzger, then a marketing consultant for startups, was also hauling neighbors’ expired batteries and lightbulbs to various drop-off centers and recycling facilities around Seattle, along with his own trash. He’d post messages to the  neighborhood message board Buy Nothing, sharing tips about how to get rid of stuff — “I found a place that takes Styrofoam!”

The project, initially dubbed “Owen’s List,” caught on quickly. By October 2018, with 99 customers, it was officially named Ridwell. Within a year, the subscriber list had grown to 2,400 in the greater Seattle area.

For a monthly fee of $12 to $16, depending on the length of commitment, a square white Ridwell box is collected every two weeks. The box comes with reusable cloth bags, one for each item category — batteries, lightbulbs, threads, plastic, and a rotating “featured category” which ranges from old printer cartridges to holiday lights. Metzger estimates that, as of February, over 4.6 million pounds of waste from just Seattle, Portland, and Denver have been diverted from landfills.

Finding local partners, a key piece in the project from the beginning, has helped the expansion. Metzger worked to connect with businesses and other organizations that might re-use or recycle some of the collected items. Today, Loewen, the Portland general manager, and other employees with similar roles in Ridwell’s various locations spend a good chunk of time connecting with nonprofits and organizations like Free Geek, a Portland area technology nonprofit that facilitates the reuse of small electronics. The partners and categories vary from city to city.

Four years in, the venture also has become a fuller recycling business in its own right. At Ridwell’s 10,000 square foot warehouse in northeast Portland, employees sort plastic bags and blue Amazon wrappers (recyclable) from manila padded envelopes (not recyclable). A baler is used to compress plastic film into compact bundles. Industrial-sized bins spill over with second-hand clothes which ultimately will be donated to the city’s Pioneer Wiping Cloth, one of several organizations Ridwell works with.

Ridwell’s work has drawn investor interest. Metzger says the company has received three rounds of funding, though he won’t disclose the amounts. The business, he adds, is largely customer-supported.

Dylan de Thomas is vice president for external affairs at The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving recycling systems across the country. De Thomas, who is based in Portland, is a fan of Ridwell — with one caveat. “I think it’s a neat concept. For all the materials — minus one — it’s a convenience service,” he says, referring to PET thermoforms, which are not only not accepted by the city’s recycling program but aren’t taken by any of the free recycling centers in town, either.

An unanticipated development has been a clash with Portland trash haulers, particularly in Clackamas and Washington counties. There, the sanitation workers have protested that Ridwell is stepping on their toes, even though those municipalities don’t currently accept the items that Ridwell collects. (Portland doesn’t have a municipal sanitation department, so private companies are contracted to collect garbage.) Another big challenge has been logistics. “It’s a logistics business that is growing quickly,” Metzger says.

The Recycling Partnership’s de Thomas says ideally, what Ridwell collects and helps to redistribute or recycle should be part of any municipal service. “I prefer recycling programs that serve all of the residents equally and equitably,” he says.

Metzger is working to address the imbalance, he says, and is aware that the service Ridwell offers is not something everybody can afford. To that end, the company launched a pilot project over the December holiday season: for every gift card sold, Ridwell contributed $10 towards a six-month community-supported membership, of which there are now 100. “We hope to make it a more regular and larger part of Ridwell,” Metzger says.

Education also is part of Metzger’s game plan. The company sends out regular emails explaining what items are and are not included in each category. For example, a link might take you to the Clamshells page , which specifies that #1 PET plastic includes everything from plastic egg cartons and deli containers to plastic cookie trays. Not included in the category? Plastic bottles, blister packaging for batteries or electronics and colored plastics. Photos on each page make it easy to determine what is and isn’t included.

Last October, Metzger launched a transparency page. The company already had been sharing the names of their local partners, but on the transparency page, they also post each category’s contamination rates (how much collected material can’t be recycled or reused because it’s too dirty). On the website, you’ll learn that plastic film is the company’s most popular category in all six cities and goes to Trex in Nevada, where it’s transformed into composite decking.  Also that batteries, which go to EcoLights, have the highest recycling rate: 100%. 

“Transparency is something that consumers are very interested in,” Metzger says.  “It reinforces the behavior they’re making and shows the impact that we can all have by recycling and reusing properly.”

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