What it takes to recycle hard-to-recycle plastics
At Ridwell we’re obsessed with making it easier for our members to waste less. When our members let us know about a material they have trouble dealing with, we do our best to help ensure it stays out of a landfill. Case in point: hard-to-recycle plastics like prescription pill bottles. Since our early days our members have been asking us to pick them up. They’re something everyone ends up accumulating but few of us know what to do with. So they became a Ridwell featured category by popular demand.
No judgement, just gratitude for helping us recycle them, and yes you win the prize!
We’re committed to keeping materials like these out of the landfill, even when it involves going the extra distance. This distance is sometimes longer than even we expect it to be. Something we’ve learned in our work is that recycling something is much more complicated than just dropping it off at the right place. This is because recycling isn’t just a sustainable way to handle materials; it’s also a marketplace with its own complex supply chains. While it doesn’t make headlines as often (unless something dramatic happens), the recycling industry has the same roller coaster peaks and valleys as other types of supply chains and marketplaces. Prices rise and fall, trends come and go, and buyers change their mind just like any other industry.
We found this out firsthand recently. A recycler we’d been working with to handle your old prescription pill bottles and turn them into new plastic had a change of heart and let us know they would no longer accept polypropylene, a common material that prescription pill bottles and other hard-to-recycle plastics are made of. This was because they no longer had a market for recycled polypropylene. So our unphasable, hard-working partnerships team had to scramble to find a new home for the prescription pill bottles we’d already told our members we’d pick up. We knew immediately this would take extra time and extra work. Part of the game with hard-to-recycle plastics is that they’re hard-to-recycle precisely because so few organizations want to deal with them in the first place. So finding a backup is inherently difficult. However, we kept looking, and thanks to our persistence we found a new recycler to work with so this featured category can continue as planned.
The end result of all this hard work was absolutely worth it thanks to members like you. As part of our most recent prescription pill bottle featured category pickup, our Pacific Northwest community kept over 15,000 pounds of prescription pill bottles and plastic caps out of landfills! These hard-to-recycle plastics will head to our specialty recycling partner who will turn them into plastic pellets that can have a second life as new products and materials. A huge thanks to everyone who participated. You made this tremendous impact possible.
Matt from our partnerships team celebrating how many prescription pill bottles & caps we’d collected.
In our world today, unfortunately the easiest and cheapest way to get rid of something is often to send it to a landfill. With the default options being more waste, it means that doing the right thing often requires extra time, care, and money. It can be an uphill battle, like we rediscovered with the prescription pill bottles, but it’s one we happily fight every week. Your support is the reason we can fight so hard to reduce waste. Every Ridwell subscription is a literal investment in and a vote of confidence for this scrappy, agile, and determined approach to tackling waste. With every pickup you schedule and friend or neighbor you refer, you’re doing your part to make sure that more materials like prescription pill bottles stay out of landfills. Thanks, keep it up, and we’ll do the same!