The innocent question that changed Ryan Metzger’s life came the summer his son turned six. That’s when Owen asked about the ever-expanding bag of old batteries in the junk drawer.
“What’s going to happen to them, Dad?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do with them? We’re learning about recycling in school. Where do these get recycled?”
“Um,” Metzger said. “I don’t know.”
He knew where to get batteries, of course. And there were always instructions on correctly using them. But instructions on what to do when they died? Not so much. That’s why he fell into the habit of stuffing dead batteries into a drawer filled with all the other small, disused stuff that the family wasn’t sure what to do with.
“It’s heavy, Dad.” Owen waved the bag of batteries around.
It was pretty full, Metzger had to admit. Detritus from flashlights and old toys, smoke alarms and remote controls, with a crusty one that came out of an old toothbrush, these batteries were one of many types of problematic garbage. They had no obvious final resting place, much like garden chemicals, old phones, light bulbs, car parts, cooking grease … a ton of stuff, really, now that Metzger thought about it. You weren’t supposed to put any of that in the recycling bin. But you couldn’t put it with the landfill-bound trash, either, although that’s what many people ended up doing out of desperation or not caring or habit — or assuming (incorrectly) it would all somehow get properly sorted out by this impenetrable, mysterious entity called the waste management system.
“There’s got to be a place for old batteries,” Metzger assured his son. “Let’s find out.”
It took three phone calls to find a business near their Seattle home that would take their old batteries and ensure that they were actually recycled instead of just dumped somewhere.
Father and son decided to drive to this battery recycler so that Owen could make the delivery. On impulse, they asked a few neighbors if they had stashes of old batteries, too. Several did, so Ryan and Owen took those as well.
Owen was so delighted by this accomplishment that he and his father decided to make a regular project out of hauling one different type of problem trash every weekend to the right recycler, offering to do the same for neighbors in their Queen Anne section of Seattle. So they started gathering bent clothes hangers one weekend, burned-out light bulbs the next, and then plastic bags, wraps, pouches, bubble wrap, and Styrofoam, none of which plays well with community recycling programs. Demand kept expanding block by block as word got around about his little father-and-son project. Soon he had to create a subscriber email group to track it all, with a message going out each week on what sort of trash would be picked up next and when to leave it outside for pickup. They dubbed this “Owen’s List.”
Around this time, grateful subscribers to Owen’s List who had long felt guilty about their secret trashiness started offering the duo money. A few suggested they charge for the service. “I’d gladly give up a couple lattes a month in exchange for you taking care of this,” one neighbor said. “I bet a lot of people would.”
Could that be true? Could their father-and-son hobby become a business that would let him leave his tech job behind and do something to help save the world? Seattle residents took pride in living in one of America’s greenest cities, but would they really pay extra every month to change their trashy habits and help Owen’s List patch a gaping hole in the waste and recycling system?
Metzger renamed the service Ridwell, to better explain its mission at a glance, and then set out to find out.
To walk through the Ridwell warehouse in Seattle’s south-of-downtown district is to take a grand tour of the plastic industry’s unintended legacy: a disposable, single-use economy made of zombie trash that will not die.
The big room with the high ceiling and crammed aisles jars the senses with its piles, boxes, pallets, and bags of waste. It looks as if a landfill has been excavated, then its contents sorted, bundled, and neatly organized. That’s not far from reality, except this material has been rescued before its more typical destiny as landfill fodder, litter, or waterway pollution. And there is a lot of it: This “stock” changes day-to-day, the tide that never stops, with most of the warehouse contents turning over every two or three days.
Ryan Metzger, his hair close-cropped, wearing a Ridwell-branded, construction-worker-orange T-shirt, navigates the crowded, noisy warehouse floor like an experienced rock climber picking out a path to the summit. One minute he’s scanning the housewares aisle for fresh arrivals, next he’s surveying the packing of a battery barrel with flame retardant and sand as it’s readied for transport, and then he’s looking over a shipment of plastic film and bags being loaded by forklift into a trailer backed to the dock. Soon it will be headed out to a company that sees this otherwise unrecyclable trash as raw material for new products.
One area of the concrete floor is dominated by a mountain of giant translucent orange bags filled with Styrofoam blocks, chips, cups, clamshells, peanuts, and plates. Nearby are compressed bales of plastic film, wraps, bags, and tens of thousands of those distinctive blue-and-white Amazon mailing pouches. Other piles wait their turn in the baler. Another area contains those impossible-to-recycle composite pouches made of multiple layers of materials — for chips, dog food, frozen food, granola bars, candy bars, tuna, and even (sigh) organic foods — that you see all the time. These are often distinguished by their silvery lining inside an outwardly normal-looking plastic food bag. Most people believe these are recyclable. They are not. Near these composite plastics are boxes filled with bread tags — the ubiquitous small, flat, plastic slotted squares that seal the plastic bags for bread, too small for almost all community recycling centers, as they would slip through or clog the machinery.
Ridwell has come a long way since the father-and-son Owen’s List days. The question Metzger posed back in 2018 about its viability as a business — would enough people be willing to pay extra every month to have their zombie trash hauled off and turned into sustainable products? — has been answered emphatically: yes. With an annual growth rate of 50 percent and more than 100,000 subscribers as of 2024, Metzger is still occasionally stunned by Ridwell’s success.
The company now has more than 200 employees and a fleet of colorful vans (the latest is an EV) that make pickups every two weeks. The trash they gather has been sorted by customers into Ridwell cloth bags labeled for each of the six most common categories of waste that community recyclers can’t handle: “plastic film,” “multilayer plastic,” “plastic clamshell containers,” “batteries,” “light bulbs,” and “threads” (for clothes, shoes, and other textiles). For each pickup, a different “featured item” — an unrecyclable type of trash that doesn’t accumulate quickly enough for twice-monthly pickups—is also specified by email. It might be corks one time, small electronics the next, then nonperishable food, holiday lights, cords and chargers, pill bottles, bread tags, plastic bottle caps, or unused diapers (left over when a baby graduates to larger sizes or big-kid underwear). Each customer also gets a white metal porch bin emblazoned with Ridwell’s distinctive orange script to fill for pickup days — as well as to serve as highly visible neighborhood advertising.
After a year of expansion within the Seattle city limits, Ridwell’s service area stretched 90 miles north to Bellingham, Washington, through Everett and Snohomish County north of Seattle, and 60 miles south to the state capital, Olympia. Ridwell’s next logical outpost was just across the state line, Portland, Oregon — followed by metropolitan areas in seven states, including Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Santa Monica, the San Francisco Bay Area, and most recently Los Angeles.
Ridwell’s leading collection item is plastic film, a category that includes wraps, bags, bubble wrap, cereal box liners, shipping air pillows, and grocery bags — all of which get sent to a Virginia-based company, Trex, a billion-dollar company that turns plastic film into low-maintenance decking, furniture, and other outdoor structures normally made out of wood. Though its “boards” look like wood, they are made out of 95 percent recycled plastic film.
Another popular item for Ridwell pickup are those ubiquitous pouches that combine different plastic polymers and sometimes aluminum into an unrecyclable amalgam, which are often tossed into recycling bins by mistake. In recycling industry lingo, such merging of materials is considered “contamination,” which renders the material useless. That’s the reason “paper” coffee cups, which have a polyethylene coating on the inside to keep the coffee from bleeding through the paper, are rarely recycled. And we Americans use about 54 billion disposable “paper” cups a year, which is an astonishing 160 disposable cups for every man, woman, and child, all of it unrecycled because of the contamination problem.
partners to be responsibly recycled. (Courtesy Ridwell)
But Ridwell found multiple solutions for those pesky contaminated composite pouches. Some go to a company based in western Pennsylvania called Hydroblox Technologies. Inventor and CEO Ed Grieser figured out how to turn normally unrecyclable plastic waste into sustainable, inexpensive drainage systems used for backyards, athletic fields, construction sites, and even flood-prone segments of the Appalachian Trail. His patented process produces planks that look like a cross between a child’s work of macaroni art and the surface of the alien spaceship known as a Borg Cube from the fictional Star Trek universe. In place of traditional pipes and drains, these planks transport storm water by capillary action when buried in shallow trenches. Grieser says this is cheaper, easier to install, more sustainable, and longer lasting than traditional drainage technology, even as it locks away disposable plastics that would otherwise end up in landfills or the environment.
The other company that takes unrecyclable plastics of this sort, ByFusion, in Los Angeles, uses steam and pressure to mold plastic into construction blocks that fit together like giant Legos and have a wild, multicolored surface — reminiscent of a trashy Jackson Pollock knockoff. These rectangular cubes are designed to take the place of the venerable concrete block — with 83 percent lower carbon emissions. Concrete manufacturing, the world’s number one product, generates massive amounts of heat-trapping pollutants, about 8 percent of all human-made carbon emissions. So ByFusion is attacking another big problem in addition to plastic pollution. It sells a machine that spits out these blocks right at construction sites.
Ridwell’s solution for another problem plastic, Styrofoam, is sending it to one of several companies around the country that use machines called densifiers, which compress the toxic, crumbly foam plastic into a dense, hard, durable plastic. It’s used for picture frames, home-decor molding, and an array of other products, including material that can be used as an additive to lower the carbon footprint of cement.
Unwanted clothing — 85 percent of which ends up in the landfill in the United States — is transferred by Ridwell to a variety of reuse and recycling destinations, from nonprofits such as Goodwill and other thrift outlets, to charities that supply clothing to children in need, to cloth recyclers that turn old duds into reusable cloth wipes.
In all, Ridwell and its customers have kept 23 million pounds of their discards from being landfilled so far. Ridwell’s tracking shows that 97 percent of the discarded material it collects is reused or recycled.
As a rescue operation for the zombie trash of our disposable age, Ridwell and its community of waste-cutters are both inspiration and paradox. With its origin story of a father-son recycling project that spread neighborhood by neighborhood, it would be hard to imagine a better demonstration of the powerful impact that individual and community choices can have. By organizing as a social impact company, Ridwell has been able to attract customers and investors who value enterprises where the return on investment isn’t just financial but also the fulfillment of the core mission. And in this case, that mission is not only to reduce waste, plastic pollution, and carbon emissions but to set an example of how smart waste management can also support the reuse economy and effective, transparent recycling.
That’s the positive part — the Ridwell community really is making a difference on the zero-waste front. But (and there’s a big but) Ridwell and the few other companies doing similar work in a handful of communities are also a constant reminder that the recycling system everywhere else is total garbage. Even though there are proven technologies for making useful products out of plastic film waste, most of the country isn’t bothering, due to the perverse economics of the disposable economy, in which manufacturers of wasteful products bear no financial responsibility for cleaning up the mess they create. In the end, less than 2 percent of the 9 billion pounds of bags and wraps that Americans throw out each year gets recycled.
Ryan Metzger likes to say he can’t wait for someone to crack the code on that problem, even though ending the scourge of plastic waste would put a big dent in Ridwell’s business. “Nothing would make me happier,” he says.
Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose 14 previous books include Garbology, Mississippi Mud, and the PEN Award-winning No Matter How Loud I Shout.
From Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World by Edward Humes, Published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, A division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Edward Humes.
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