Green Tip: Looking at Everything as a Resource

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Beverley Auerbach, writer, editor, co-owner of A Marketing Perspective and a Resilient Palisades member.

In an ideal world, every item in our possession would be acquired thoughtfully. We would consider its durability, its functionality, its health benefits, the pleasure it engenders and its afterlife.

At the other end of the scale is single-use plastic, the poster child for our throw-away culture. Often acquired as a byproduct, this waste clutters our homes, fouls our natural world, and usually ends up in the dump or the ocean, much to our detriment.

Resilient Palisades’ number one goal is to reduce the proliferation of single-use plastic. Eliminating it entirely will have to wait for scientists and inventors to produce a viable, environmentally healthy, bio-degradable, non-plastic alternative for that handy little bread bag closure, water bottle, chip bag and shipping envelope. But we can help by changing the way we look at waste.

If it took resources to make an item, if we paid for it even indirectly, if it was even minimally useful, we can send it on a better path by making it useful again. In other words, we need to look at everything as a resource.

Enter Ridwell, a social purpose corporation with a mission to mitigate the environmental impact of usually unrecyclable items—items not accepted by the city in blue bins.

Presently working on their B Corp certification, Ridwell seeks out industrial and nonprofit partners who can take what would ordinarily end up in landfill and transform it into a resource that leads to new products.

Ridwell was founded in Seattle in 2017 by a father and his young son who tried to properly dispose of dead batteries, only to discover how difficult it was. Founder and CEO Ryan Metzger gradually found outlets for many difficult-to-recycle items, developing the infrastructure and systems to expand what Ridwell could take and where they could get it: presently Atlanta, Austin, the Bay Area, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Portland and Seattle.

To date, Ridwell subscribers in these cities have diverted over 20 million pounds of waste from landfills. Seattle remains the largest market, with some neighborhoods boasting 30% participation. The biggest area in Los Angeles so far … Pacific Palisades!

When Resilient Palisades first mentioned Ridwell, I knew I was in. As a resident of Cool Block Embury, an environmentally cooperative community in the 1100 block, I was already passionate about reducing waste of all kinds. Together with four other Embury households (with one more in process), we were among the first to sign up for a Ridwell subscription.

Ridwell picks up their tidy white metal bin (about a 13” cube) every two weeks, right from the porch—no carrying it out to the curb. Inside are clean cloth bags to segregate several waste categories: multilayer plastics, plastic film, light bulbs, batteries, threads (usable or unusable fabric, clothes, even shoes) and a scheduled bonus category that can be anything—corks, cords and cables, holiday decorations, broken jewelry, office supplies, empty prescription bottles—all a boon to responsible decluttering.

I am now on the Ridwell Community Advisory Board. Recently I toured Ridwell’s Van Nuys warehouse—impressive despite being a heap of sorted trash. This is trash that is going somewhere, and it’s not to the dump.

For example, there are vast stacks of plastic film—bags full of the cling wrap found on store-bought meat and produce, the stretch plastic over tubs of berries, the wedge of plastic that tops banana bunches (and the blue plastic band that binds it together), LA Times bags, plastic shipping envelopes, Ziplock bags, etc.

This is ubiquitous plastic that cannot go in the blue bin because it would clog up the machinery or be too small for the city’s plastic sorters. Ridwell sells it to TREX, the company whose almost-indestructible fencing and decking materials are made from 95% recycled plastic film.

Another corner is piled almost to the ceiling with multilayer plastic, which is baled and sent out to a variety of partners, including HydroBlox, a Pennsylvania company that produces landscaping drainage material.

There is a tiered cost for a Ridwell subscription, but the most popular plan, at $18 per month, includes every named category except Styrofoam and fluorescent light bulb tubes (for these items there is an additional charge). New categories are added periodically as recycling partners are brought on board.

Pickup for the Palisades is every other Friday. You will receive a Ridwell white metal box; clean category bags are replaced with every pickup. You will also be told how to sort, clean and dry your plastic before submitting—an easy (and forgiving) process once you’ve done it a few times.

The type of waste Ridwell collects has little economic value in and of itself. Nonprofit partners pay nothing for the donations they receive, and commercial enterprises pay something but not enough to cover Ridwell’s operating costs.

Ridwell has applied for and received limited social action grants, and they stretch their dollars by cross-utilizing employees in the field and in the warehouse, but in the end, their success depends on growing their subscribers and their paying recipients—thus diverting more waste.

We all put our money toward causes we find to be deserving. The energy and enthusiasm I have found in this startup’s employees, from Founder Ryan Metzger, Community Builder Erin Metzger, and Los Angeles Market Leader Niall Murphy, to the efficient and helpful drivers who come by my home every other week, has more than confirmed to me the value that Ridwell brings to the community.

For more information, visit ridwell.com. If you would like to join, Ridwell offers incentives. Use this link: get.ridwell.com/rp-trial.