This Earth Day, a Startup Promises to Recycle the Junk Your Curbside Service Won’t Take

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abrielle LeCompte has long been suspicious of her curbside recycling service.

“I felt that I was throwing everything into the recycling bin,” she said. “And I didn’t feel like it was doing anything. I really felt like it’s not making a difference, like they’re going to throw it all in the landfill.”

LeCompte was particularly perplexed by the never-ending supply of plastic material that rapidly accumulated in her small Alameda home — the food wrappers, produce bags, Amazon packaging and other omnipresent detritus of modern life that most curbside services don’t accept.

“My biggest goal was to make the least amount of trash possible,” she said.

About a year ago, LeCompte signed up for a new subscription-based pickup service called Ridwell that now collects most of her used plastic packaging, old clothing, and other common household items that can’t go in the blue bin. The Seattle-based, venture capital-backed startup acts as a middleman, partnering with a bevy of nonprofits and manufacturers who use recycled materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. 

“Before, I was making like one bag of trash every three or four weeks,” she said. “And now I’m making about one bag of trash every eight to nine weeks, maybe even less.”

LeCompte is among a small but growing army of eco-conscious, consumer-guilt-ridden Bay Area residents who, when it comes down to it, want to have their cake and recycle its packaging, too.

Ridwell now operates in a swath of cities across the region — from Novato to San José — the company’s growth marked by a proliferation of its signature square-foot white metal collection containers outside customers’ front doors.

A basic subscription, for $14 a month, includes pickups every two weeks of plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, old clothing and shoes, along with a revolving “featured category,” like art supplies, bottle caps and bread bag cinches.

For an additional $4, you can add in multilayer plastic material — the crinkly chip bags, candy wrappers and other stuff you can’t stick your fingers through. Additional tiers include even harder-to-recycle materials, like plastic foam and fluorescent light bulbs.

“We’re consumer-driven, right? [Companies] really influence us to buy, buy, buy,” LeCompte said. “But there’s no way to get rid of the stuff that we have. “So, for me, Ridwell is the easiest thing to do.”

Launched in 2018, Ridwell is the brainchild of Ryan Metzger. The Seattle resident became increasingly frustrated with the inconvenience of tracking down responsible disposal options for dead batteries and other common household items, like paint, that you’re not supposed to toss in the trash but can’t put in the blue bin. He started a small “recycling carpool,” taking his 6-year-old son along on rides to collect items from neighbors and deliver them to local disposal sites.

As more neighbors signed up, entrepreneurship took root.

Ridwell is among a small cadre of recently launched pickup companies around the country that have identified a burgeoning market among consumers who seek to generate less waste without necessarily changing their consumption habits — and who feel increasingly hindered by the limitations of their municipal recycling programs.

The new services come amid growing public awareness about how relatively few things — especially plastic — actually get recycled.

But it remains to be seen whether a company like Ridwell, which has yet to turn a profit, can ultimately become a viable business model in the competitive world of waste management while also continuing to fulfill its promise to divert an ever-expanding volume of crap out of landfills.

Junk matchmaker

Ridwell now has more than 110,000 members in the eight metropolitan areas it operates in — including Seattle, Atlanta, Austin, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver and Portland. The Bay Area has quickly become one of its fastest-growing markets. Since launching here in 2022 — starting first in the city of Alameda — nearly 15,000 households have signed up, and more than 1.5 million pounds of waste have so far been diverted from local landfills, the company said.

This service “is for busy people who want to feel better about where their stuff goes,” said Gerrine Pan, Ridwell’s vice president of partnerships, who calls herself a “serial entrepreneur-turned-climate enthusiast.”

Pan is a matchmaker of sorts. It’s her job to find homes for the multitude of disparate junk that arrives every day at Ridwell’s regional warehouse in San Leandro.

“Everything is trucked here. We’re probably on the brink of needing to find another facility or looking for more space,” Pan said, gesturing toward barrels of old batteries, a giant crate of plastic foam blocks, and a 15-foot-tall hill of bags, each packed with plastic film.

The warehouse is surprisingly quiet: no conveyor belts or other major machinery you’d find in a recycling facility — just a small crew of workers sifting through materials by hand.

“This is a place where we are consolidating so that we can make efficient loads out the door,” Pan said, noting that Ridwell doesn’t actually do any of the recycling itself.

“We identify and vet recyclers or reuse partners who are able to use those materials to the best of their ability,” she said.

Ridwell’s website lists the manufacturers it works with, all based in North America, including ones that make new decking material from the plastic film (polyethylene) or picture frames from the plastic foam.

Ridwell also partners with several local recyclers who extract metal and chemicals from the dead batteries, strip Christmas lights for their wiring and recycle the glass and mercury from the lightbulbs. It even collected political yard signs in December, shipping some to a plastics company in Canada that melted them down into post-consumer resin for new products, Pan said.

A tsunami of plastic

But finding — and retaining — those partners can be a difficult proposition, given the tsunami of plastic waste. Despite the familiar chasing arrows symbol printed on most containers, not all plastic is created equal, and only a tiny percentage actually gets recycled.

A recent U.S. Department of Energy study found that Americans generated an estimated 44 million tons of plastic waste in 2019 alone, of which just 5% was recycled — with most of the rest dumped in our ever-growing landfills.

Even in California — which in 2014 became the first state to ban single-use plastic grocery bags and this year is beginning a broader phaseout of single-use plastics — about 5.4 million tons of plastic waste was dumped in landfills in 2021, according to the most recent statewide disposal data. That means Californians toss about 290 Olympic swimming pools worth of plastic every day.

“The ‘wishcycling’ is substantial,” said Pan, referring to the common habit of indiscriminately tossing various types of plastic into the blue bin, most of which gets filtered out and winds up in the garbage. And that’s because it’s generally far more expensive for manufacturers to recycle most kinds of plastic than it is for them to just make more of it.

Ridwell actually pays most of its partners to take the plastic off its hands.

“The supply-demand balance of this is just off. You couldn’t get paid for that,” she said. “We are fighting for our share of capacity with all these partners.”

Equally challenging is the constant search for reuse partners, Pan added, pointing to a section of the warehouse packed with overflowing boxes of clothing and a random array of household items, including an entire crate of cosmetics and a pallet of three-month-old Halloween candy.

“If it looks overwhelming, that’s because it is,” she said.

Ridwell partners with local nonprofits, including food pantries and thrift stores, that accept items when they can. But that exchange isn’t always steady or predictable, and stuff — like the stale Halloween candy — often ends up piling up here for months, taking up scarce, very costly space.

“They have been sitting here since November,” Pan said, pointing to a crate of baking tins. “And they will continue to sit here until we have another collection of home kitchen items and we have more partners who might raise their hand.”

A trash disruptor

While Ridwell sees itself as filling a major waste management gap, it has also — in true startup fashion — run afoul of more traditional trash collection services. Soon after launching in Portland in 2021, for instance, some businesses complained to the city, arguing Ridwell was skirting the many regulations and accountability measures that long-established haulers were required to follow to retain their city contracts. And several smaller neighboring cities even ordered the company to halt operations.

For its part, Ridwell insisted it’s designed to complement the curbside service, not overlap with it.

“Our relationship with waste management companies can vary,” Pan said, noting that some recognize the service as a net benefit. “But in some areas, there is sometimes conflict and concern where people don’t quite understand what we’re trying to do. In reality, we are trying to take a lot of things out of the system that they do not want in the system.”

Some industry insiders also question the viability of Ridwell’s business model. The company is still very much dependent on its VC funding and has yet to turn a profit — although Pan insisted they are “right on the cusp.”

“I don’t think there’s a competition issue,” said Martin Bourque, executive director of The Ecology Center, a Berkeley nonprofit that launched the nation’s first curbside recycling program more than 50 years ago and continues to collect for the city. “There is sort of this disruptive venture capitalist, tech component to it that feels a little like the new Uber or something.”

Startups like Uber and Lyft, he noted, offered artificially low rates when they first launched because their goal was to get into the market and disrupt the highly regulated taxi industry. But eventually, ride rates shot up as the companies became subject to more regulations and pressure to make profits.

“Ridwell is sort of at the very early phase of that,” Bourque said, arguing that its current subscription rates seem unrealistically low, given the shakiness of the recycling market.

“As they start to be required by cities to have a franchise agreement and pay for use of roads and access to customers, will that model pencil out?” he said. “I think it’s an interesting experiment, but let’s see how it unfolds. Because when push comes to shove, investors want a return on their investment, and that can lead to bad decisions for the environmental community.”

Bourque pointed to TerraCycle, a similar service, as a cautionary tale. The New Jersey-based company, which operates a nationwide custom mail-in recycling program, was sued in 2021 by a California environmental group, which accused it of making recyclability claims that were “deceptive to a reasonable consumer.” The company has since settled and agreed to provide additional documentation to support its claims.

“Their markets were unstable, and they ended up stockpiling a whole bunch of stuff and telling people it was getting recycled when really they were just warehousing it,” Bourque said. “Where’s it going to go eventually? Either some low-grade market or the landfill, or maybe it’s getting exported someplace. So nobody really knows where it’s going.”

Despite his skepticism, Bourque said it’s gratifying to see so many people interested in further reducing their waste footprint — even if they’re not necessarily willing to change their consumption habits.

“It is encouraging that all of the work that we’ve done over the last 50 years to educate the public has created a community that is very committed to these values and willing to spend their hard-earned money to do the right thing,” he said.

‘Zero-waste lifestyle’

Back in Alameda, Juan Lopez drove one of the company’s white vans through a residential neighborhood, pulling over every few blocks to pick up junk that customers had left in their boxes. A former Amazon driver, Lopez was hired at Ridwell right after it launched in the Bay Area and has since become the regional operations supervisor, helping to manage about 20 employees.

“Right now, we’re averaging about 300 new members a week, which is almost like two routes a week getting added,” he said. “So, another two people we have to hire.”

Lopez pulled up to a small bungalow on a quiet residential street and emptied the bin as a subscriber named Lianne Jones watched from the doorway.

“I already was trying to live a zero-waste lifestyle, so this was just one extra tool for me to continue doing that,” said Jones, who signed up more than two years ago and now encourages her neighbors to drop off their stuff with her before her biweekly collection day. “It definitely has made me think more about, when I’m in the store, my decisions about what I’m purchasing.”

Asked if she’s achieved her zero-waste goal, Jones paused to consider.

“I mean, you can’t live a zero-waste lifestyle. That’s kind of a misnomer,” she said. “But I’m doing everything that I can.”

Correction: The original version of this story mistakenly stated that the lawsuit against Terra
Cycle was “last year.” In fact, it was in 2021.