Not all places in the United States have collection points for corks, but one group launched a ‘recycling carpool’ to help people dispose items that are usually not accepted at recycling points. — Photos: dpa
The bread tag is a seemingly innocuous facet of everyday life. The tiny, usually plastic, closure keeps bread fresh until a loaf is done, when it’s unceremoniously tossed into the trash.
Sure, those little clasps could be reused for other closure needs, but more often than not, these small conveniences are thrown out.
Even if they make it into the recycling bin, the billions produced every year are going to end up in a landfill, a casualty municipal recycling facilities just can’t handle due to their size.
But bread tags can be recycled. The polypropylene just has to be separately delivered to a special recycler in mass quantities, and then the colourful tags can be melted down and transformed into a colourful bowl, plastic food utensils or a coaster.
One company is striving to rescue this group of hard-to-recycle items – that also includes corks, mailers and loose plastic bottle caps, among others – before they hit the landfill.
Ridwell finds places to safely dispose of lightbulbs, Styrofoam, clothing and even Halloween candy that were a challenge for individuals to discard responsibly.
In California, Ridwell is going door to door, gathering those items for a fee and picking up where city recyclers leave off.
For founder Ryan Metzger, the journey started with trying to get rid of old batteries safely.
The Seattle resident knew he couldn’t dispose of them in his regular trash, so he researched where he could take them in his area. He toted along his six-year-old son Owen, and since he was making the trip, he asked friends in his neighbourhood if he could take any for them, too.
The “recycling carpool” was such a success that they decided to keep it going, finding places to safely dispose of lightbulbs, Styrofoam, clothing and even Halloween candy, tackling a new category most weekends.
Soon, word had spread, and the duo couldn’t handle all the drop-offs themselves. Metzger, who had experience in startups and venture capital, knew his next business venture had been born.
He assembled three additional founders, and the group quit their jobs and started working out of his Seattle garage, formally launching Ridwell as a way to reduce waste by collecting hard-to-recycle items right from people’s doorsteps.
Ridwell rescues hard-to-recycle items like corks and loose plastic bottle caps before they hit the landfill, one household at the time.
“It was something I couldn’t say no to,” Metzger said. “It was pulling us in. ... The dream with startups is there’s so much interest that (the product) spreads by word of mouth, and that’s what we were seeing in big ways.”
The small company started by finding partners to plug the holes in Seattle’s recycling programme. These businesses could take items like plastic film and multilayer plastic and turn them into decking, drainage solutions or even cornhole sets.
Then Ridwell found organisations to recycle Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs and clothing. Customers signed up for the service and were given a bin to keep outside, with canvas bags labelled with each type of item tucked inside.Redirecting waste
Every other week, a Ridwell driver would stop by and exchange the full bags for empty totes, and customers could feel good about conveniently redirecting at least a small part of their waste stream.
Metzger said when the company was in its early stages, he felt like recycling was in the news a lot for not doing what it purported to do. Items weren’t actually getting repurposed or even going to the appropriate places that recyclers promised they would. There was a lot of distrust.
He acknowledges that municipal recycling programmes are often doing their best, but it’s simply a system that’s too big to have a lot of innovation and technology.
“It’s just a sector that is fairly static,” Metzger said. “And I think what we have really tapped into is that a growing number of consumers are not satisfied with that.”
Having an app and good customer service is part of that solution – the company has a whole team dedicated to answering questions about which materials qualify for which Ridwell categories, and scheduling a pickup is just a few clicks away.
Even the drivers are trained to help out; since many also work in the Ridwell warehouse, a customer could stop and chat with them during a pickup to ask any questions.
In practice, it’s as simple as it sounds. On a recent hot and sunny September afternoon, Niall Murphy, the operations manager for Ridwell sifts briefly through canvas totes of multilayer plastic, dumping it all into a larger box that will eventually get condensed before pickup or delivery by the recycling partner.
While standing in front of a mountain of Styrofoam, he points out some flexible pieces that typically wouldn’t qualify for the partner programme, before chastising the ultimate offender for the planet: a Styrofoam takeout container. It’s one of the few things Ridwell can’t do anything with.
Later, Ben Mattern, the West Coast director of Jelinek, a cork production and distribution company, will arrive to load a massive cardboard box of wine bottle corks into his pickup. His company turns those discarded corks into flooring, wall tiles and bulletin boards.
Each category of waste is neatly organised in giant boxes around the warehouse, overflowing with electronics, prescription bottles and rigid plastic rings.
The right thing
After our quick tour, Murphy hops into a white van wrapped in the company’s Creamsicle Ridwell logo. Today he’s doing a few pickups nearby. The first house he pulls up to is a one-storey brown stucco house with a tidy, drought-tolerant lawn on a residential street.
Up a short set of brick stairs, just to the left of the home’s entrance, sits a white Ridwell box with its orange logo, full of totes tucked inside and one sitting on top.
He grabs the bags, replaces them with empty ones and sorts them in the van to separate receptacles, the whole cycle taking less than a minute.
A few blocks away, at a white shingled home, Murphy notices a piece of plastic packaging sticking out of the plastic film bag that doesn’t qualify – it’s the rigid kind that holds cookies – and he jots down a quick note to send that customer a message. It’s not to criticise them, he emphasises, merely just to let them know for next time. “Most customers want to do the right thing,” he said.
And it seems, they really do. Every customer in this neighbourhood of typical one-storey California ranch homes has their bags set up neatly for their drivers, making the route quick and easy for Murphy.
The company’s transparency resonates with Californians, Metzger said, with the recycling partner and percentage of a product successfully recycled displayed for every category on the Ridwell website.
Residents are also tired with the state of recycling. In California, 69 million tonnes of waste were generated in 2022, with 53% of the waste going to landfills and 41% going to recycling, according to CalRecycle.
But in a country where the cost of living keeps rapidly rising, convincing residents to pay at least US$14 (RM59.90) a month to recycle trash is a tough proposition, especially when they’re already paying for similar services.
Metzger hopes Ridwell’s dedication to the mission – it just became a certified B corporation, meaning it was meeting certain standards of accountability and social impact – can help rise above those obstacles.
Ideally, no one would need a supplemental service. There’s the obvious question: Is the end goal to not exist at all? “Yeah, that’d be great, but I think that’s probably unrealistic. Instead, we want to continue to evolve,” Metzger said.
Making an impact
Although the market is small, recycling through Ridwell has an impact.
For Danielle Rothchild, a college student who runs Danielle Cares for Chairs, an Indianapolis nonprofit organisation she started when she was 17 that now partners with Ridwell, she discovered a few years ago that she could collect bread tags from her local community and sell them to recyclers, saving up each time to buy a wheelchair for a person in need of one.
She’s collected over three million plastic bread tags, saving plastic from ending up in a landfill while getting mobility products to those who need them.
Ridwell’s most recent contribution to Rothchild’s organisation, an estimated 1.6 million bread tags, likely translates to at least six mobility products – and 1,271lbs (576kg) of bread tags saved from the landfill.
“My organisation is a very, very small organisation, and when companies like Ridwell partner with me, it helps to spread my message that we can recycle or repurpose anything, including something as small as a bread tag,” Rothchild said.
“If I can recycle an item as small as a bread tag and create value, just think what other items we could come up with.” – SFGate, San Francisco/dpa
