So you want to go the extra mile to get rid of your unwanted stuff and give it its best shot at avoiding the landfill. Should you pay Ridwell or Trashie, or any other company, to do that?
The most obvious free alternative is to do an old-fashioned drop-off, such as at your local e-waste center, charity center, or collection point. Some municipalities allow you to schedule special pickups for hazardous items, such as light bulbs, batteries, and electronics, which are dangerous to throw in the trash.
For packaging that isn’t type 1, 2, or 5 plastic, free drop-off options are more limited. Municipal recycling programs rarely accept common packaging plastic, including plastic film, multilayer plastic, and unlabeled plastic (to-go food-container lids, for example).
There are some options, like drop-off partnerships with organizations such as Pact. But for many kinds of unaccepted packaging, the advice goes, you should just throw it away — otherwise, you’re passing on the sorting to the facility and possibly dooming an otherwise recyclable batch to the landfill, too. In contrast, Ridwell’s and TerraCycle’s proposition is that actually, you can, and maybe even should, recycle more than you think.
The sustainability arguments for pickup and mail-in services often boil down to efficiency, consolidating transportation instead of relying on individuals taking multiple car trips. “One thing I surely wouldn’t do is drive all over the place in order to recycle,” said Lifset. “That’s just going to be counterproductive.”
Another efficiency point is that these paid services meet you where your habits already exist. In the case of Trashie, if you’re in the habit of shopping for clothes online, ordering a bag, filling it, and dropping it in the mail like you would an online return probably doesn’t seem like much of a mountain to climb.
And Ridwell’s pickup service mirrors what you already do with your other household waste on a daily basis. Research supports the intuitive idea that convenience can increase participation, said Jessika Richter, an associate senior lecturer in industrial environmental economics at Lund University, in an email.
There’s a third efficiency point in favor of a service like Ridwell’s. Because it relies on customers to presort items, overall, the percentage of what Ridwell collects that it must throw away is more likely to be low, and its system costs can stay down. Ridwell’s CEO, Ryan Metzger, told me that an average of 97% of materials the company collects are successfully recycled or reused.
Ridwell touts its transparency and shares its recycling partners on its website, listing them by material and region. I reached out to a few of them, including Solutions Plastic. According to Patrick Leahy, CEO of Solutions Plastic parent company Firststar Recycling, 100% of multi-layer plastic from Ridwell is recycled into lumber or pellets that are resold for use in pallets, turf mats, and chemical recycling. What’s more, “materials from Ridwell are low in contaminates, especially compared to single-stream, curbside, or store take back collection methods,” Leahy said in an email.
Trashie, on the other hand, takes sorting into its own hands at designated spaces in facilities in Texas. Historically, low-value but technically reusable or recyclable clothing has gone into a mixed bundle, leading to more textile waste. What sets Trashie apart, according to CEO Kristy Caylor, is the detailed, market-focused nature of Trashie’s sorting.
“Currently, approximately 70% of the textiles we receive are reusable in their original condition, while 20-25% are suitable for recycling,” a Trashie spokesperson shared. About 45% of reusable items stay in North America, and all recycling happens in the United States. “On average, 5% of collections are truly waste and are landfilled in the US.”
As to what happens to the recyclables, a spokesperson referred to “a large global network specializing in various recycling methods, including wiper and rag production, mechanical recycling, and emerging technologies like chemical and advanced sorting,” as well as “actively piloting innovations to expand what’s possible in textile recovery.”
I was unable to confirm with any recycling partners what actually happens to items that Trashie processes. Transparency in recycling for challenging streams is, well, challenging. Case in point: A few years ago, reporting by Bloomberg on TerraCycle, perhaps the most recognizable name in intermediary recycling services, underscored how opaque and unwieldy some recycling streams remain.
But how much of the stuff you try to recycle will actually be recycled may not be the point — or at least, not the only one. “I don’t think that that means you shouldn’t go through with these practices,” said MIT’s Jeremy Gregory, speaking generally. “Sometimes you run into a chicken-or-egg situation, where you need enough volume of a recovered stream in order to create the demand for it to be used in those higher-value applications.”
In other words, “sending that stuff out can be helping to send a signal,” said Gregory. That’s an economic signal, but it’s also a technical one; manufacturers need to know whether they can reliably swap virgin materials for recycled materials without compromising performance.
As an individual, “the benefit that you provide to the environment for recycling a modest amount of trash is small,” said Yale’s Reid Lifset. “But the benefit, if you get the whole system to work, is much larger.”
“The point here is to develop viable systems,” he continued. “And so the point here is not ‘How much damage have I avoided by recycling some amount of packaging?’ It’s ‘Is this company or this project likely to result in something that is financially viable and environmentally adequate?’”
On that note, with any paid service, customers should be on the lookout for unsubstantiated claims, which Gregory raised as a red flag for greenwashing, as well as grand promises. For all the reasons stated, he said that he would prefer to see companies acknowledge that all of this is a work in progress.
