Episode 11 Transcript: Ridwell Helps Recycling Flow to the Right Place

Molly Wood: 

Hey, it's Molly Wood, and welcome back to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We’re diving deep into the climate crisis and coming up with solutions.

This week we’re talking … recycling.

This is a hot-button topic … I can’t tell you how often somebody says something along the lines of … “yeah but recycling isn’t even real … right?”

It’s complicated. I mean … yes … you saw the headlines about China … in 2018 … stopped importing plastic waste from the US and other places … Vietnam … Malaysia … and Thailand did the same soon after …

Now we ship plastic all over Southeast Asia and between 20 and 70 percent of it isn’t or can’t be recycled … and it pollutes like crazy … this is all according to the Columbia Climate School.

Most plastic waste is landfilled or incinerated … and even where we have recycling … a lot of Americans either don’t do it … or don’t do it right.

We don’t have infrastructure for recycling because we just dumped it on China for so long … and there aren’t any federal recycling programs … and yes … in case you’re wondering … the U-S generates more waste than any other country … full stop.

So.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t recycle. You still should. If you have curbside recycling use it and use it RIGHT …

BUT … new services and ideas are stepping in to fill the void … and create VALUE out of the waste that we’re generating …

And that leads us to our guest today …

Ryan Metzger:
I'm Ryan Metzger and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ridwell. And Ridwell is a service that makes it easy for you to waste less, and we do that by picking up reusable and hard-to-recycle items from your front porch.

Ridwell is a subscription recycling and re-use service that gives you a box for your front porch so you can recycle hard-to-handle products like batteries, light bulbs, different kinds of plastic, clothing or fabric or scraps, and a rotating category every time, like yarn or school supplies or old glasses. I’ve been using it for months … and I wish it didn’t have to exist … but I’m thrilled that it does.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, the backstory is it wasn't intended to be a business in the way many founding stories are, but rather just solve a consumer pain point. And it's one that I'm sure many of your listeners have, you may have had. How do you get rid of stuff that you think could be reused, you think it could be recycled, but it's not a part of your curbside program?

So I had a room in my house, my basement, where all the stuff went to go. And so there was the little bag for goodwill and there was the bag of styrofoam and the little box of batteries. And so what I did was every weekend, my son Owen and I would pick a category and we would do the research and oh, this hardware store takes these batteries and this place 30 minutes away takes styrofoam and recycles it. So we would take our stuff, that one category that we picked for that weekend, and then we would post to neighborhood groups. And it turns out we had room in our car. So why not offer that as a little service to the community? Let's fill our car with styrofoam with six other people.

Six became 10, became 12, became 20, and before long we were doing this all throughout Seattle and it became this really powerful community of people who really wanted to make a difference with stuff that they wanted to get rid of in responsible ways.

Molly Wood:
Amazing. And then at what point did you say, okay, I wanna do this not only as a business, which is tricky because it involves physical stuff in the world and transportation, and pretty sure we could take this business nationwide?

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, well, we're not quite nationwide, but we're working on it. But yeah, a couple things then, as we saw this traction, and at the time I should have said I was working in a venture capital firm. I was advising startups on growth and many of them consumer companies. And so it was really, you know, striking to see day job, how do I help all these companies grow who are venture-backed and things like that. And then on weekends, this thing was growing really organically and through the community telling each other. And that's a really important thing, has become even more so as consumer marketing has become more difficult in the years since then.

So having that really consumer reaction that did a lot of the marketing for us in terms of word of mouth and telling others was an important catalyst. The other one was the time we were in. And so this was back in 2018, there was a big policy change called China's National Sword that happened.

A lot of recycling was not going anywhere because China stopped taking things. And so I was talking to people in the industry as we saw this traction and it was, why are all these gaps and are the gaps gonna grow or are they gonna shrink? And the word I got was that the gaps were only gonna go up.

Fewer things worked in single-stream recycling. And so the opportunities were gonna grow for a business like ours that was in the business of finding gaps that consumers had and finding ways to solve those gaps.

Molly Wood:
So tell me more about the gaps. Is it a combination of the fact that people were putting things in recycling that weren't actually getting recycled because there was nowhere for them to go?

Ryan Metzger:
Some of each. Yeah, there's a term called wish cycling, which is, oh, I hope they'll do something with it. Let me put these plastic bags in recycled bins. So some of it is that, and so actually we believe we're making recycling streams better because we're pulling things out that shouldn't go there.

And then there's another set of categories that can never go there. A lot of those are things that are reused. You mentioned crayons that we've collected for local groups, kids groups and stuff like that, right? So that would never work in a traditional bin system. But because our system is finding all of these phenomenal partners and then giving members like you bags to pre-sort things, those things can stay intact.

Molly Wood:
Let's do the, this feels like a good place for the nuts and bolts, which is what the actual product is and how it works and how much you pay as a consumer.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, it's a subscription service around $15 a month. And so with that, we provide you this bin, which is a metal, you know, it says Ridwell on it, and it's designed to go on your porch, the side of your house, wherever is convenient for you. And then we give you these cloth reusable bags. And so it varies a little bit from place to place.

Some places have batteries, others don't. Some have light bulbs. All of them though have clothing and shoes. All of them have plastic film. We just introduced something called multi-layer plastic, which is snack wrappers, chip bags, those types of things. And so members are putting their material in each of those bags, and they're labeled. Remember I started this with my son, and so it's designed for the whole family to use, even if they can't necessarily read, and so there's icons on them and stuff like that.

So people are filling these bags. Then their pickup is every two weeks, and so they put the full bags in the bin. We have an app that gives them all the schedule and things like that. They request a pick up. And then we have drivers who go around and do routes and they will pick up your full bags and leave you empty ones behind.

And then you'll get a text message that says, thanks for helping the world, Molly. Your next category is crayons or back to school supplies or nonperishable food. We also have surprise and delight categories too. So every two weeks there's something new that we mix into that.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. The surprise and delight category, because it's already unbelievably valuable to just have somewhere to put the chip bags. I mean, that is, it's that thing that, you know, you can't quite recycle but you feel terrible about, or that weird little piece of plastic on the top of the cottage cheese.

Why? Why is that there? And I can it in this bag. But the surprise and delight categories, what's the genesis of that? And give us some more examples.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah. That goes back to really the founding story, you know, that I told you earlier, and so Owen and I, he's my oldest son, we would do these pickups and what was really special about that experience was neighbors started giving us ideas. This. And so I remember one vividly, some woman said, oh, you know, Owen, do you have and your dad, do you have anything for, you know, eyeglasses?

Like, my husband changed his prescription. He has these three pairs that are not used to him, but they might be useful for someone. And so we then looked and figured out that there was a partner for that. And so then we would share it back with the community. And so the community ended up really looking forward to, oh, what's next? What's gonna happen? And they didn't really know what it was cuz we didn't necessarily know what it was. It was something that was shared with us or something that was around our house that we were able to find a partner for. 

And so we've done that at a, at a much bigger scale today where when we go to a new market, we look for, who are the nonprofits generally, who are doing really good things in the community, who have a need for in-kind donations for things? Or what are the hard to recycle things? We added bread tags or plastic bottle caps, those types of things. So it's really that keep it fresh, keep it new, keep people inspired, that their actions make a difference. And so we introduced that by means of our, our featured category. That is every two weeks there's a new one.

Molly Wood:
I do not wanna out myself as the old lady that I am, but the week that you did yarn,

Ryan Metzger:
Oh, yarn was a popular one.

Molly Wood:
It made a really big difference at my house.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
And then talk to me about batteries and what are the core, the core categories do change a bit. Like, for example, I'm in Oakland where I can put my batteries on top of my recycle bin in a plastic bag, so don't have a battery bag. But it sounds like that's a very popular one for people who don't have that option.

Ryan Metzger:
Batteries is, yeah, batteries can cause many problems in traditional recycling. They can cause fires, and things like that. So in Portland and Seattle and, and even in Berkeley, not too far from you, batteries are part of the service in Oakland. They're not because it's provided by the city. But that certainly is a, is a popular one.

That was actually the first category Owen and I ever did. You know, back in our day, when it took us many, many calls to figure out a partner for it. So it's one that, that definitely has a lot of consumer interest, because it's one that is, is, has been often excluded from traditional systems.

Molly Wood:
And then what are, what are some of the other core categories, light bulbs, you mentioned

Ryan Metzger:
Light bulbs. Yep. And there that has light bulbs, has glass and plastic and metal that is separated and, and kept safe along that, clothing and shoes. Sometimes we call that threads. And so there, there's a hierarchy of reuse down to recycling depending on the condition of it. But, and then the, the hard to recycle plastics are, are the other others that are core

Molly Wood:
And who do you partner with for the threads?

Ryan Metzger:
Depends on the market.

Molly Wood:
The Goodwill Board?

Ryan Metzger:
Yes, Goodwill is, is a common partner of ours. They're, they have a federated model, so each Goodwill region kind of makes their own decisions and have their own needs and, and wants. But Goodwill is, is a popular one that we work with in several markets.

Ok … time for a quick break … when we come back … we’ll talk about how Ridwell also takes the stuff we throw away … and helps companies turn it into new stuff … waste-to-value … is what this is called … and it’s a super promising trend that could get even BIGGER … over time.

ad break

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool … I’m talking with Ryan Metzger … the founder and C-E-O of Ridwell … in the second half of our conversation … we’re going to talk a little more about these re-use partners … and how this is the kind of business … that can help OTHER businesses … because a lot of the stuff we throw away … actually has a lot of value.

Molly Wood:
So thank you for that. Um, so talk to me about the partners. I think that with, you know, China Soar is an interesting place to have started because there is just fundamentally now a lack of trust in recycling.

And this business on your end is really about us believing that this is going somewhere and not getting dumped.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of partners, we have taken a stand that we're being very transparent about them and we, and we hope others follow. And so for all of our categories, whether it's the yarn, whether it's the books, whether it's the plastic film, whether it's the multilayer plastic, you can see where that goes.

And for many of them, you can see how much of the stuff that you provided to us actually got to them. So we show that for each market we can say, you know, 90 some percent in the Bay Area went to Trex or plastic film, for example. So we think it's really important to do that. We hope others follow and do that as well, because there is this lack of trust.

I think we are in a, in a, in a good fortune in that we have members like you who actually who do the sorting and really help us out with these bags. And so the quality of materials that we get is very, very high. And so there are many partners for things that there otherwise wouldn't be because of the model, because of who we serve.

And we're proud to share that with people who, who utilize the service. And even those who don't. Because we have nothing to hide. We really want to get the partners out and have people support Trex and things like that when they see who we're working with.

Molly Wood:
Um, you mentioned Trax. I wanna, and I'm hoping you'll give us some other examples of partners, but like Trax is a really interesting, they make deck

Ryan Metzger:
Comp. Yep. Composite decking. Yep. So it's a, they use a mix of kind of sawdust and recycled plastic film in that. And so it looks like a lumber, it looks like just lumber that you would make a deck with or you would make something, you know, they make benches and things like that. And so they're a US-based partner.

Depending on where you're located, that might, your plastic phone might go to Nevada, for example, in the Bay Area. They have another one in Virginia as well, too. So they're, they're a great partner of ours.

Molly Wood:
So that is a material that has been reusable. There was just sort of no way to get it to them.

Molly Wood:
Tell me about the benefit for Trex. Like, do they pay you for this? Because this is in fact a, this is a, a resource that they need.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, it's a material, so it plastic film just for your, your listeners, that's thin scrunch plastics, and so it's produce bags, it's Amazon mailers, it's bubble wrap, it's air pillows. It's those types of plastic things that is what they make their product out of. Sourcing that from traditional recycling would be very, very difficult.

Difficult because that stuff gets mixed in with your newspaper, your catalogs, your aluminum cans, your cardboard, and getting that thin stuff out would be difficult because it gets mixed up with paper and it gets jammed in the machines. And so they need to sort of source this thin plastic from another way.

They sometimes do grocery store, you know, sometimes there's a grocery store drop off for plastic film. Often Trex is on the end, end of that. They also work with post-industrial, so if you, if you're a manufacturer and you have pallet wrap or something like that. They do that as well. So they, they just have a recycling, um, feedstock that would be very, very hard to source in traditional ways when it's single stream and mixed together.

Molly Wood:
Right, so it is in fact valuable to them to get You're not like, Hey, I brought this and would, for example, that thin filled plastic, is that even recyclable in. I mean, I just always assumed I couldn't even put that in my recycling.

Ryan Metzger:
It depends jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Very, very infrequently. It is. I think if you were in Palo Alto, it might be, you know, there's a few, there. There're few and far between the places where those can go. And oftentimes they need to be bagged inside. And so someone is physically grabbing a bag of kind of bagged up plastic film and then taking it out of the sorting line and then getting it to a partner like Trex or someone else who does this type of thing.

Molly Wood:
And what's the difference between that plastic and the multilayer?

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, great question. Multilayer plastic is new and that's an exciting one that we heard loud and clear. People were very interested in that, so we had to work very long and hard to find partners for that one. Multilayer plastic is chip bags, snack wrappers. It's thicker and oftentimes has a silver lining in it.

And so those, and we have lots of documentation and things like that. Hopefully you're getting your questions answered if you have any. But the sound is different when you, when you crunch it. So it has more of a crunch to it where the other one is a softer noise because it's a different type of plastic.

And where that one goes, we have three partners that we work with. One of them makes this composite gravel substitute that is in planters and things like that. Another one makes these cement blocks that are made of really condensed, hard-to-recycle plastic. And then the third one makes a landscape drainage product.

That's really cool. Areas that flood or up in here in Seattle that happens often. And so it's sort of like a French drain substitute or use case like that.

Molly Wood:
I love the idea that you could end up being a feedstock provider for a new company that would have had a hard time existing.

Ryan Metzger:
Yes.

Molly Wood:
For access to this material.

Ryan Metzger:
Absolutely. We, that's a big part of our vision. If there's entrepreneurs who want material and they want recycled material, not virgin one, we think the world is moving towards that anyway. And so if our member base can help support entrepreneurs who want to do stuff like that, we really hope they reach out to us.

We have a phenomenal partnership team who would love to speak to them if they have visions like that.

Molly Wood:
Waste to value, I believe, right. Is the name this kind of. Do you imagine that there's a universe where you might have to create a whole logistics system to enable this waste to value and bring these partners together? Like how much work? It sounds like now it's a bit manual in terms of

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, we do a lot on the logistics end of getting things from homes to us. And our members help as well. So you're doing the sorting and then we have a fleet of vehicles. We have routing software, we have warehouses, and so that stuff is brought. We have bailers and things like that at our warehouse.

That condense things and get big bales of plastic tore, for example, or to one of our multilayer plastic partners. On the backend. There is, at that point, you're in the trucking industry. And so there's plenty of people there who can get bailed plastic from us. Torex, for example.

We're kind of in a matchmaker of sorts consumer post-consumer material to a partner who could do something with it. So whatever role we need to play to accelerate that move to a circular economy, we'd be happy to explore it.

Molly Wood:
That's great. And then talk to me about kind of the bigger vision, because I know that someone is going to say, this is a thing that municipalities should provide, or it's a thing where you can kind of only have this impact if you can afford to do this monthly. How do you sort of think about that equity piece?

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, a couple different ways. We've worked with municipalities at times to, they've had grant money and provided subsidies for our service so anyone can do it, or they've done, you know, one-off pickup. So definitely we look for that. We've done programs where we, our members have contributed, and we have as well something called community supported memberships where people that have lower income but would like to do it, have an opportunity to do it at little to no cost, and we hope to do more of that.

You also mentioned adding stuff to the service. And we've had that happen too, where batteries for one, have been a part of a service on one day, and then they've changed it over a matter of months and added it. And then we've taken it off. There are many frontiers for which we can still go and add.

And sort of chase that and, you know, until our members are living completely waste free. That's really what we're trying to do. There'll be many things for us to do and we know our place and traditional recycling's place and we wanna work together to really have a system that can kind of leave a good planet for our generations to come.

Molly Wood:
And yeah. How do you think about that, the impact? Do you consider this to be a zero waste play? Do you think it's a, you know, are you measuring your carbon emissions avoided by things not going into the landfill?

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, it depends. We start with a household is sort of the unit and really say what do you have at your house and how can we divert as much as we can to reuse and recycling? So we do add all that up whenever we do a pickup from the very, very early days. Our driver marks down at Molly's house.

We got batteries and, and not batteries. We got light bulbs, we got plastic foam, multilayer plastic. So then we can give, in our app, there's an impact report that shows the amount of material you've collected. We can roll it up to Oakland, we can roll it up to the Bay Area. We can roll it up across the country.

So that's something we certainly look at in terms of impact that you can have.

Voice Over:
As to the question of monthly cost … on the one hand yes … this is for someone who can afford it … but Ryan also pointed out that if you’re using Ridwell … you’re putting less stuff in trash and recycling … and in a lot of towns … that means you can actually get a SMALLER BIN … and in some cases … save yourself … close to the actual cost of Ridwell. So that’s nice. Which made me wonder …

Molly Wood:
I feel like fundamentally that's my question is like why? Why is my city, I have curbside recycling.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah. Oftentimes the companies that run those, run both recycling and garbage have very, very lucrative landfill businesses to the tune. If you look at the top three biggest, over 8 billion in revenue a year from landfills. Right? And so if you've got your fleet of recycling trucks, that's nice, you know, we'll do that because some cities want it.

But really, what pays the bills in many times it's, it's this landfill business. And so if you have a very long-term tenure contract. Their goal is to get more of these 10-year contracts and really a lot of the value comes from the landfill portion of it. And so the incentives are not really aligned towards what does Molly and Oakland want to get rid of and how does she wanna reduce her footprint when it comes to waste, but rather, how do we keep the gravy train running?

Molly Wood:
Break that down for me a little bit. Who gets paid? So the landfill pays. The Waste Management

Ryan Metzger:
Well, you'll get a city contract. So I don't know who the particulars are in Oakland, but like in Seattle, for example, there's three companies that sort of share it. And there's a landfill owner, right? And so you get a get for 10 years, all of Seattle's waste is going to this landfill, and it's gonna be paid at this amount.

Molly Wood:
Seattle pays the landfill. Like just like if I

Ryan Metzger:
Consumers do, I mean, residents do as of their bill, but like it's gu, there's guaranteed profit margins and things.

Molly Wood:
So this may be too.

Ryan Metzger:
I take my dump, no, this is really important to know because that is fundamentally the question. Like, it seems like cities could be doing this. It seems like it would benefit communities to do it, and that the knowledge that there's a business rationale not to do it, I think is really important.

Molly Wood:
So to simplify dramatically, like if I go to the dump, I have to pay some money to drop it off. And so what you're saying is, on the one hand you have these landfills, and on the other side you have cities who have said, we will pay you this certain amount to bring you this trash.

Ryan Metzger:
Well, I would take even a step back from there. The companies that are traditionally in charge of recycling also are in charge of picking up your garbage and making money off of land, filling that garbage.

Molly Wood:
Got it.

Ryan Metzger:
So if you look at that stakeholder, finding a use case for bread tags for someone in the Bay Area versus keeping the landfill and sort of the status quo intact.

Where are they gonna run to first? And so I think there's just this incentive system, which is profit-driven, which most things are, but it's not as environmentally focused as our members want to be. And so that's where we're finding the people that say, no, I wanna keep things from landfills.

How can I do that? Versus this sort of larger ecosystem that's been developed over many, many years.

Molly Wood:
Right, and that has a bunch of moving parts that have been in place for all of those years, and that it's a path of least resistance and maximum profit. In a lot of ways.

Right? Who knew. Ryan says they’re also testing EVs in Seattle for pickup and delivery … which is a big question a lot of people also have … and then …

Molly Wood:
Tell me, tell us, tell people who are now wondering, how can I get this, what cities you're available in.

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, we are in seven markets and within that many cities within that, so we started in the Seattle metro area. That was our first, we added Portland, Oregon, which includes Vancouver, Washington, around that area as well. Denver was our third. We go up to Boulder and places even further than that.

Minneapolis, twin Cities was our fourth. Austin was our fifth. The Bay Area was our sixth, and so we began in the East Bay where you are, we added the peninsula. And then San Francisco is gonna be live as of this taping, or when this taping airs. So that's an exciting new addition for us.

And then Atlanta is just getting going as well. So that's our furthest east in our first in the eastern time zone. That was our seventh market, and then Los Angeles is coming soon. So that should be happening this summer as well.

Molly Wood:
If somebody was listening to this and they could be like, how can I help in addition to, how can I sign up?

Ryan Metzger:
Yeah, I think partnerships are a really interesting part of it. If there's someone we mentioned the entrepreneur who wants feedstock to do things, I think there's a lot of brands who are wanting to create things from what would be garbage. So there's shoe brands, there's clothing brands that, you know, we did a pilot with a group that made these upcycled tote bags where our members provided jackets and shells.

And then we made these really cool, one-of-a-kind tote bags that had a Ridwell logo on it in the partner they're called ReFleece, outta Massachusetts. So I think if there are entrepreneurs out there who are upcycling things, think of us as a feedstock and then think of our members as people who really want to support those activities.

Because we, when we did these tote bags, they sold out in 25 minutes and people wanted them more and more and more of them. So we're bringing that back in q4. But those types of things we're really excited about because it really lets people put their money where their values are and we want to provide outlets for that.

Molly Wood:
I love that. I'm just imagining an artist collective,

Ryan Metzger:
Absolutely. Yep. We've done some of that and we want more. So if there are artists out there, you know, reach out to Ryan at Ridwell and we'll see what we can do.

Molly Wood:
That's fascinating. Okay. Now tell me like what's the wildest add-on category that you've done that you might never do again?

Ryan Metzger:
Oh man. We did cannabis containers on four 20 in Portland. That was an interesting one.

Molly Wood:
That's a stinky drive. I pity those drivers.

Ryan Metzger:
We did, we did campaign yard signs post-election. That was a popular one. Lots of, we've done leftover Halloween candy is a really fun one too, that we've done over and over again in sort of the November period.

There's so many of them. We like to really get into the seasonal seasonality of things, holiday lights, post holiday season and things like that. So there's definitely some fun ones out there.

Molly Wood:
So good. Ryan Metzger Ridwell.com is where you can sign up and you just better hope it's in your city cuz it's like my new favorite thing.

Ryan Metzger:
Thank you, Molly.

Molly Wood:
Thank you so much.

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