Ridwell fills the Recology gap

For years I have doggedly sorted my recycling with focused determination (with a world in such disarray, this is one thing I can control, right?) My scads of rubber bands, paper clips, and miscellaneous art items I periodically drive down to Scrap; bubble wrap and air pillows to Tony at the Postal Chase on Fillmore Street; plastic bags to Safeway — you get the idea. Although Recology has stepped up their game a bit, there are still some unrecyclable materials that unfortunately end up in the black bin.

Enter Ridwell, a company with a half dozen locations across the country that has recently landed in the Bay Area. Ridwell picks up multilayer plastic (chip bags and the like); plastic films; clothes, shoes, and textiles; lightbulbs, and more every two weeks. They provide marked cloth bags/boxes and pick up directly from your front door and deliver to recyclers like Scrap that reuse the items or others that recycle the materials to produce new items, like ByFusion, which turns multilayer plastic into construction-grade building blocks. 

What’s more, they are transparent about what goes where, which is listed on their website along with percentages of diverted materials and contamination, and they audit and track the items to ensure they reach their partner destinations. 

For additional information and pricing, visit ridwell.com.