In goal to reduce garbage to ‘nothing,’ Everett recyclers try Ridwell

EVERETT — Since signing up for Ridwell’s recycling services, Everett resident Kelli Bradley barely has a full bag of garbage to put on the curb for waste pickup days.

“Between composting and Ridwell,” she said, “our garbage is nothing.”

She subscribed to the service in 2020 after “wishcycling” for years — hoping that the curbside recycling load “goes off and does what you are wanting it to do.”

Ridwell, starting at $14 a month for a basic plan, gives subscribers a 2-foot tall metal box with reusable bags inside. Each bag is for a different item: batteries, plastic film, multi-layer plastic (think chip bags), threads (clothes and shoes), household light bulbs and a “featured category” for a product the customer gets to choose.

Subscribers can recycle corks, electronics, bottle caps, bread tags (those small pieces of plastic holding your bagged loaves together), among other rotating items for the featured category.

Every two weeks, a Ridwell driver empties the bin and takes items to the company’s headquarters. In Washington, Ridwell staff at the Seattle headquarters prepare the pre-sorted items for business partners to pick them up.

Customers have to pay for Ridwell’s services in addition to curbside waste collection. But it’s worth it, Bradley said, to have more recycling options.

Ridwell staff communicate with waste collection companies to ensure there isn’t any overlap.

“We would do tours of recycling facilities and see what comes in and the things that fall through the cracks,” said Ryan Metzger, the co-founder and CEO of Ridwell, in an interview this month. “And that’s sort of what we tried to pick up.”

For example, Rubatino Refuse Removal doesn’t accept clear plastic clamshells — the subject of my first “Trash Talk” column — so Everett residents can add them to their Ridwell subscription.

Bradley finds herself buying berries more often now.

“Our consumption has gone up because we know we can recycle it,” she said.

Before launching Ridwell in 2018, Metzger and his son Owen had their own community recycling project in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. Metzger called local businesses to see if they took batteries and other hard-to-recycle items. He and Owen then organized local pickups to help neighbors divert waste, too.

“It quickly expanded beyond Queen Anne,” Metzger said.

Ridwell staff now offer services to over 44,000 residents throughout Western Washington — as far north as Bellingham and south to Olympia.

The company has also expanded to California, Colorado and Oregon, as well as several other states.

Forty Ridwell drivers based in the Seattle area make about 2,500 daily stops to empty subscribers’ bins.

The company said it plans to convert most of its cargo van fleet to electric by 2028.

‘Build trust throughout the whole system’

I tried Ridwell myself — having heard about the service months ago from several Daily Herald readers.

A Ridwell staff member delivered the box to my doorstep almost three weeks before my scheduled pickup.

For my featured category, I chose prescription pill bottles.

I checked the website for guidance on how to prepare everything I planned to put in the bin before my April 30 pickup. I was particularly curious about the labels on pill bottles and plastic mailing envelopes. I quickly found a page that outlined exactly which bottles Ridwell accepts.

Did I have empty pill bottles with a label? Without a label? Different colors? All of them are acceptable, I learned, as long as they are transparent and have the #5 recycling symbol on the container.

The bin quickly filled to the brim with granola bar wrappers, a hefty bundle of plastic bags and sheets of bubble wrap. My roommate also happened to have a stack of clothes she had planned to deliver to a thrift store and some alkaline batteries she had set aside for weeks, in hopes she could recycle them somewhere.

Ridwell staff gave me extra bags for Styrofoam that I could place outside my bin for an extra fee, too.

The Ridwell website has a page dedicated to transparency, so customers can see where their items are sent in the Seattle area:

• Trex turns plastic film into decking materials;

• HydroBlox recycles multi-layer plastic to make drainage materials;

• Goodwill and Rag Mine Clothing take threads;

• Ecolights accepts lightbulbs and batteries; and

• Styro Recycle and DTG recycle Styrofoam.

Ridwell also posts its contamination rates online for each category, showing the percentage of material successfully diverted from landfills. For instance, Ridwell’s Seattle headquarters recycles about 95% of the plastic film it receives, according to the service’s website.

“I would love for other parts of the industry to do that as well,” said Metzger, about recycling transparency. “I think that would build trust throughout the whole system.”

Ridwell offers three different subscription plans:

• Plastic film, threads, batteries and light bulbs for $14 a month;

• Add multi-layer plastic for a total of $18 a month; or

• Add Styrofoam and any bags of items that don’t fit in the bin for $24 a month.

Ta’Leah Van Sistine: 425-339-3460; taleah.vansistine@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @TaLeahRoseV.