Reuse or Recycle the trash you can’t put in your curbside bin.

Recycling is not easy.  It takes time, money, and more knowledge than I certainly had before learning about Ridwell.  Recycling is expensive, and many towns and municipalities are not able achieve optimum recycling practices due to the cost and lack of facilities.  Comingling of recycled items (one bin fits all) is easier on households, and less expensive for towns, but makes it more difficult to clean, prepare and reuse or recycle the items.  That means that for many Americans, home recycling efforts go to waste, and much of what they recycle ends up in landfills anyway.

A Landfill

I learned about Ridwell from ASE reader Susan W. and was impressed by what I read.  The founder, to clean out his basement and teach his children about caring for their environment, came up with a project where each week he would choose an item from his basement to reuse or recycle to keep it out of the landfills.  The items, like batteries, lightbulbs, used prescription bottles, and Styrofoam, would not be eligible for traditional curbside pickups. They would search for solutions as far away as necessary and send the items off to be reused or recycled. In Portland, for example, the curbside program doesn’t accept plastic clamshell packaging, and there’s nowhere else to take it. Ridwell found a partner in Texas that would take the boxes.  On the flip side, if a municipality changes their requirements and begins accepting house paint or batteries, Ridwell will stop taking those items.  Ridwell’s mission is to fill the gaps between local recycling and what customers want to keep out of their trash cans.  This will reduce the volume of trash that goes to landfills.

Ridwell’s founders began to pick up their neighbors’ items and soon they had 4,000 Seattle households participating, and Ridwell was launched.  It passed the 100,000-subscriber level long ago and is growing rapidly.  They now have over 250 people working to keep millions of pounds of out of landfills.

Ridwell is a popular subscription-based recycling service with two options for receiving subscribers’ items – bi-weekly curbside pickups in select U.S. cities, which costs approximately $14–$20/month or mail-in bags which start at $30 for the starter kit, and then $9.00 a bag after that.

Do you know about multi-layered plastic?  All the items in the above photos are housed in multi-layered plastic which are not allowed by local recycling systems. These bags and wrappers are made from multiple layers of different materials.  Ridwell partners with innovative specialty recyclers to turn them into new products like leach-free storm water drainage material.

Plastic film

Another item not allowed in usual recycling is plastic film.  Plastic film includes zip top baggies, bubble wrap, dry cleaning bags, FedEx and Amazon plastic packaging, the cling wrap that your roast chicken is wrapped in, and much more.  Ridwell sends it all to be shredded, washed, and melted into pellets.  It then is used to make other products like new packaging, composite decking material, and trash can liners.

How much really gets recycled with Ridwell.

Ridwell is not alone in their quest to recycle or reuse hard-to recycle items. Trashie is a similar recycling intermediary.  They bring efficiency and convenience into your recycling efforts with well-researched solutions – for a fee, well-earned if you ask me.  There is also TerraCycle, which is smaller and just added mail-in bags to its services, Retold which focuses on fabric recycling, and Pact which specializes in beauty product wrapping and packaging, just to name a few.

We applaud innovative ideas like Ridwell’s and other companies like it, that see a need and try to fill it.  Recycling is complex and many of us have guiltily put items in our trash that should not be there and could be repurposed into something useful for lack of an alternative.  For the cause, and the convenience, I hope these companies are successful, and are able to slow the flow of trash to the landfills.

The post Ridwell Recycling appeared first on Sharp Eye.