Seattle-based recycling start-up Ridwell has expanded to include the city of Santa Monica following its successful roll out in seven other metro areas, many of which are up and down the West Coast.
Since its inception in 2017, Ridwell has grown to 80,000 members across seven cities in seven states, including Seattle, Portland, San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis and Atlanta.
By subscribing to their plan, Ridwell provides a pick up service for all manner of waste items that are not included in the Blue Bin list of recyclables (metal and aluminum cans and foil, some glass bottles and plastic containers, paper and cardboard). Other items that most of us believe are recyclable are still put into these bins, but tragically they ultimately end up in landfills.
Ridwell prides itself on being to offer a scheme where they provide small and medium-sized collection bins and bags to collect items like multi-layer plastic, batteries, lightbulbs, electronics and Styrofoam. The company said it hopes that the recycling service will gain traction in a similar manner to the way compostable organics have in recent years.
“Our members receive a Ridwell bin and clearly marked bags for collecting their used items and then these bins and overflow bags are picked up every two weeks and replacement bags are left behind,” says Ryan Metzger, CEO, co-founder at Ridwell. “We focus on items not generally accepted curbside plus there’s also a featured category that rotates every two weeks. It might be eyeglasses one week and bike tires a few weeks later.”
Credit: Ridwell
Metzger said the items in each category are consolidated together in a warehouse and safely stored before being transported to the relevant partner company for recycling. “And you can see where they’re going and who the partner is, that’s a really important part of it. You can see in the app and on the website and that’s the process. It’s from bags to bin, to warehouse to facility,” Metzger says.
Ridwell subscribers have the choice from three packages: the Classic, the Plastic Plus and the Unlimited plan, starting from $14 per month and going up to $24 per month respectively. Moreover, each plan comes with a number of add ons, charged per bag, for a collection of one-off items that aren’t included on the selected subscription plan.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans recycle less than 10% of the plastics that they’ve used. However, this isn’t purely down to laziness, many plastics simply cannot be effectively recycled. Even the more suitable plastics are only recycled at a rate of 20-30%, while the rest typically goes to incinerators or landfills, where the carbon-rich material can take up to 1,000 years to decompose.
Multi-layer plastics pick up is available in both the Plastic Plus and the Unlimited plans, but Styrofoam, because it’s among the environment’s worst enemies and is so mindboggingly difficult and therefore expensive to recycle, is only available on the Unlimited plan. However, a one-off Styrofoam collection is available on both the Classic and Plastic Plus plans. The key here is to combine resources in your community.
According to the company, the concept has collectively kept 14 million pounds of trash out of landfills and Ridwell itself has grown to more than 200 employees, including drivers, warehouse workers and tech developers who work on things like the website and smartphone app.
To service the Santa Monica area, a company called CleanEarth is accepting the lightbulbs, a company called Trex takes the plastic film and finally, Foam Zone takes on the challenge of turning Styrofoam into something useful.