SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Most Angelenos use the curbside recycling system hoping that the paper, plastics and glass they put in their bins are destined for another life. But not every plastic is recyclable through municipal programs. Then there are things like batteries and light bulbs that require special trips to hazardous materials facilities.

What You Need To Know

  • Ridwell is a subscription service for households to recycle and reuse items that don't go in their curbside recycling bins

  • It launched Tuesday in Santa Monica and will eventually roll out to Los Angeles

  • The service uses a system of reusable canvas bags to collect specific items that are picked up every two weeks

  • In business since 2018, Ridwell has 75,000 customers in eight cities

“I’m pretty waste sensitive, but there’s just stuff that you end up with,” said Rebecca Olson, a Santa Monica resident who buys in bulk, composts food scraps and is now using a service called Ridwell to recycle and reuse more difficult items like plastic film and multi-layer plastic fast food bags.

“I have this fear with a lot of general sorting recycling. Is this just going to a dumpster in a different location somewhere? The answer is probably yes,” Olson said. “I feel like anything I can do to make it not go to the garbage island in the sea would be great, but I would really love it if things are getting reused and recycled.”

Launched Tuesday in Santa Monica, Ridwell is a subscription pickup service for items that typically are not recycled through a city’s blue bin system. Residents who pay $14 to $18 per month are provided with reusable canvas bags that are clearly marked with the items Ridwell will take off their hands, and a metal bin to store them. Ridwell then picks up the items every other week and sends them to partner companies for disassembly and reuse.

“We as consumers are surrounded by things that are really hard to get rid of,” Ryan Metzger told Spectrum News during a ride-along for Ridwell’s Santa Monica launch, dropping off bins and bags for the program’s 40 early adopters. In addition to thin film plastics and its other standard items, Ridwell has a rotating category every other week for oddball items such as eyeglasses and bike tires.

It was Metzger’s own experience trying to get rid of old batteries with his elementary-school-age son that inspired him to launch the company in Seattle in 2018. At the time, China had just banned the import of most recyclables from the United States, and consumers were ripe for a different way of handling waste, he said. Now, Ridwell has 75,000 customers in eight cities and has prevented more than 15 million pounds of trash from going to landfills.

“We get a lot of questions about how we can do this when traditional recycling can’t,” Metzger said. “We think that answering those questions is all about trust and transparency. A lot of the blue bins out there don’t tell you where things go.”

To handle the waste it collects, Ridwell partners with companies that turn them into other products. For thin-film plastics, Ridwell has partnered with the composite lumber company, Trex.

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While many of the partnerships vary based on the area where Ridwell operates, the company has partnered with Goodwill in various cities to recycled clothes and shoes, and lesser-known waste diversion companies that handle items like polystyrene, multilayered plastic food packaging, batteries and light bulbs.

The items Ridwell picks up from its subscribers are brought to a Ridwell warehouse where they are consolidated and sent to their partners. Thin film plastics are sent to the Trex facility in Nevada. Multi-layer plastics are processed by facilities in the LA area.

At launch in Santa Monica, Ridwell has five employees and two vans for pickup service, but Metzger thinks the service will be 10 times as large once it expands to the city of Los Angeles upon reaching a critical mass of interest. Ridwell already operates in seven other cities, including Seattle, Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Austin and Atlanta.

Metzger decided to expand Ridwell to LA after 7,500 people joined the company’s waiting list. Ridwell, he said, targets markets based on their level of sustainability, such as how many people drive electric vehicles and participate in municipal recycling.

“We really try to build that community before we start so that we can do stops efficiently and take miles off the road and really make a difference in a big, sustainable way,” Metzger said.