Since closing its regular hazardous waste disposal site last year, Dashiel St. Damien has accumulated 20 pounds of batteries and a bag full of light bulbs.
St. Damien, 46, a designer who lives in Mount Washington, knows these items shouldn't go in her usual bins, but she's had a hard time finding a new, convenient place to leave them. Thus, the months passed and the bulbs continued to accumulate.
This week, for a small fee, your mess will finally be cleared up. St. Damien scheduled its first pickup with Ridwell, a subscription service that collects and disposes of hard-to-recycle trash. For $18 a month, a driver will come to his house every two weeks and pick up his batteries, light bulbs, plastic envelopes and even clothes.
He said the positive environmental impact, as well as his own sense of relief, is worth paying for the service on top of his regular trash pickup. “It's a very easy thing to do,” St. Damien said. “There are so many big problems that I feel helpless over, but this is just a small thing.”
Ridwell is part of a new class of companies, catering to environmentally conscious consumers, that position themselves as intermediaries that can help keep waste out of landfills and, as a positive side effect, make consumers feel better about the garbage they generate.
Ridwell is expanding its services in Los Angeles as the country emerges from its peak holiday waste season, where shipping boxes and their foam innards fill trash bins and unwanted holiday gifts clutter homes.
Ridwell specializes in collecting and safely disposing of hard-to-recycle items, including batteries, light bulbs and plastic film.
(Ridwell)
A Ridwell subscription starts at $14 a month for biweekly pickups, and the company promises that products will be “sustainably reused or recycled.” Complicated rubbish arrives at specialized plants for safe disposal, while items with the potential to be reused are donated to organizations in need. There are more expensive levels for those with more waste and materials that are difficult to recycle; the plan that recycles foam costs $24 a month.
“People are starting to ask more questions, like, 'Where do the materials to make my products come from?'” said Ryan Metzger, CEO of Ridwell.
Metzger came up with the idea for Ridwell in 2018 after he started a modest “recycling carpool” with neighbors in Seattle. Challenged with finding battery disposal options, Metzger took the initiative to collect batteries from neighbors and call to find a facility that could dispose of them safely. That first pickup quickly expanded to include trips to recycle light bulbs, electronics, plastic bags and Halloween candy. Word spread beyond the neighborhood.
“It's often up to consumers to drive change in a positive way,” Metzger said.
Ridwell now has more than 90,000 members and serves Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Portland and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. The company will expand to a dozen more Los Angeles neighborhoods this week, including West Hollywood, Studio City and Central LA.
The company seeks community partners for products that have the potential to be reused, such as toys, clothing and pet supplies. In Los Angeles, these partners include Wags & Walks, Out of the Closet, and Baby2Baby, among others. “Our model is to look for partners who have specific needs,” Metzger said.
Hard-to-decompose plastics (think Amazon envelopes, chip bags, and pet food bags) typically have to travel farther to reach special plants.
There is a growing awareness among consumers that not all plastics with the chasing arrows symbol are created equal. Many plastics placed in recycling bins throughout the city go to landfills. St. Damien said subscribing to a service like Ridwell can help curb the common practice of what she calls “wish recycling,” or throwing something into the recycling that might not actually be recyclable. (“I worry a lot about these things,” she said.)
Linda Sanoff, 69, who lives in Hancock Park, has noticed a fair amount of wish requests in her neighborhood. “The city doesn't accept Styrofoam and I know people put Styrofoam in their blue bins and it doesn't get recycled.”
January is a big month for trash. City of Los Angeles waste haulers collected 2.04 tons of cardboard in December 2022; In January 2023 that figure shot up to 16.42 tons, according to data from the city's sanitation department. In the weeks after Christmas, Ridwell sees an increase in his collection of batteries, Christmas lights and many types of plastics.
Environmentally conscious consumers know that the ideal way to deal with waste is to generate less to begin with, but most find it difficult to achieve a true net-zero lifestyle. Some subscribers said Ridwell is helping them close that gap.
“I think we owe it to our children's future to keep as much waste out of landfills as possible,” said Bonnie Zucker, 52, who lives in Pacific Palisades. “In some ways it's unfortunate that companies like Ridwell have to exist, because we have a lot of waste.”
Zucker prioritizes making green decisions in his daily life. In addition to her daily work as a psychologist, she volunteers with Resilient Palisades, a local environmental group. Most of her Ridwell vans so far consist of multi-layered plastic packaging, plastic wrap, and empty Pirate's Booty bags that her teenage son likes to snack on.
She has been impressed with the variety of items Ridwell will be rehousing. “They make old glasses and give them to, say, veterans organizations, or old pet supplies to donate to animal shelters,” she said.
Although California is a national leader in its efforts to reduce plastic waste, experts agree that there is still much to do. The state banned single-use plastic bags in 2014 and will go further with a broader phase-out of plastics starting next year. But in 2021, Californians still generated 76.7 million tons of trash, 46 million of which ended up in a landfill, according to CalRecycle estimates.
Similar waste disposal companies are springing up across the country in response to consumers' growing awareness and guilt about their own spending habits and the shortcomings of our current systems. Serving the greater Philadelphia area, Rabbit Recycling operates similarly to Ridwell and also offers one-time pickups.
TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company, uses an on-demand business model. The company sends its customers boxes that they can fill with certain types of waste for a fee. These boxes can be dropped off at a company drop-off point or sent back to TerraCycle for disposal.
Perhaps the best selling point of all is the convenience of door-to-door service. “I mean, the city, thank God, has a recycling program, but it doesn't require as many things as Ridwell,” Sanoff said. “And now I don't have to drive to UCLA to recycle batteries.”
