Image of a pile of plastic "trash" including snack wrappers, a bread bag, and bottle caps with the words "none of this stuff is trash!"

It’s time to stop throwing away plastic “trash” like chip bags, pet treat bags, and frozen veggie bags. These things can’t be recycled curbside, but we have a solution.

Plus, we just added a particularly tricky item to the list of things you no longer need to throw away: coffee bags. We can pick them up from your doorstep and route them to a partner who will turn them into something useful.

Coffee bags present a recycling challenge: They’re made of multiple materials, often a mixture of plastic and aluminum.

Combined materials are notoriously difficult to recycle. Recycling machinery is designed to handle individual materials with their own particular processes because of factors like melting point—and the layers in things like chip bags can’t be separated. Coffee bags are even more difficult than other layered packaging because they tend to combine more materials and be thicker.

Rather than trying to force this type of plastic into a system where it doesn’t fit, we found and vetted a partner who developed a process to make something new out of multi-layered plastic without separating the layers.

Let’s back up and take a look at the broader story of plastic waste and why breakthroughs like recycling coffee bags for the first time give us hope.

The plastic story so far

Mass production of plastic started in the 1950s, as a post-war economic solution to replace more expensive materials—like paper, glass, and metal—to make single-use items such as packaging.

Plastic is designed to last for thousands of years. That's what makes it useful—and what makes it a waste problem.

It’s incredibly difficult to dispose of. Some types of plastic take thousands or even tens of thousands of years to degrade in a landfill. And that degradation results in microplastic particles that pollute our ocean, air, and ecosystems.

When it was first popularized, plastic wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is today.

From the the 1950s through the 1970s, a relatively small amount was being created and plastic waste was manageable.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, plastic production tripled. So did plastic waste.
In the early 2000s, more plastic waste was generated in a single decade than over the four decades prior.

The economics of mass-produced plastics have led to our current single-use culture.

Today, worldwide, one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute and up to five trillion plastic bags are used every year.

All told, of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that have ever been produced, 6.3 billion have become plastic waste. Only 9% of that has been recycled and 79% is still sitting in landfills or in the natural environment. The rest was incinerated.

If the trend continues, there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic in landfills by 2050—an amount 35,000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building.

Why isn’t more plastic recycled?

Were you surprised that only 9% of plastic is recycled? That’s the global statistic and it holds true in the US. Today, the US produces about 36 million tons of plastic waste per year. About 3 million tons (8%) are recycled, 27 million tons (75%) are landfilled, and 6 million tons (17%) are incinerated with energy harnessed for reuse.

What’s keeping the recycling number low?

A report from The Recycling Partnership examining the current state of residential recycling identified five gaps:

Not enough packaging is recyclable
Too few households have access to recycling
Too few households that have access actually recycle
Recycling facilities don’t process enough of what they receive into saleable materials
The cost of processing recyclables is often outweighed by the demand from existing end markets

When you look at plastic recycling in particular, there are additional problems.

Plastics are diverse—there is no one single “plastic”—and only a few types are recycled in existing programs.

For example, less than 1% of soft plastic film (like bubble wrap and grocery bags) and crinkly multi-layer plastic (like chip bags and granola bar wrappers) is recycled in the US.

Plastic film can get tangled in recycling machinery like hair around a vacuum cleaner, causing facilities to shut down while someone cuts the plastic free manually—then they send it to the landfill.

Multi-layer plastic uses layers of different materials, but recycling machinery is designed to handle one specific material—and the layers don’t separate.

There’s also no single standard list of what is and isn’t recyclable, so confusion about what goes in curbside recycling containers is rampant. Plus, public mistrust about what happens to recyclables is soaring after worrying news stories have come out in recent years, most recently about failing plastic bag recycling systems in retail drop-off locations.

The struggle, as they say, is real. But hope is not lost!

How Ridwell does things differently

Photo of two people at the HydroBlox facility — Ridwell VP of Partnerships Gerrine Pan with Ed Grieser, CEO of HydroBlox

We here at Ridwell are on a mission to build a future without waste.

Ridwell is only part of the solution. The waste problem is far too broad for any one entity to solve. Meaningful impact will require less production and consumption of single-use plastic items, improved waste management processes, innovation around material alternatives, increased awareness and education, and advocacy for policy changes.

At Ridwell, being part of the solution means doing things differently. A traditional approach to waste management may involve working with third parties who buy and sell waste like it’s a commodity, making it difficult to understand what happens once the waste is collected. Our approach is to find and vet individual partners to repurpose or reuse each of the hundreds of materials we collect, and to work directly with them. As a result, we’re able to share with our members exactly what happens to everything we collect.

We have two main ways of tackling plastic waste:

We help people send less to landfills at a household level, with a simple and cost effective solution
We educate and change consumer behavior—one member, household, neighborhood, and community at a time

We know small changes from enough people can make a groundswell of impact over time.

Three specific elements of our system are essential to how we take a different approach to recycling and reusing materials so they stay out of landfills.

We ask Ridwell members to sort materials. The Ridwell system is simple, intentionally. We collect items from a doorstep bin—easy! Our members fill bags with one type of plastic (or another material, like lightbulbs, depending on the bag) and put them in the bin. Sorting into the bags becomes second nature pretty quickly, just like sorting your curbside garbage and recycling.

This sorting is the biggest reason we have a very low contamination rate. More than 90% of the plastic film and multi-layer plastic we collect is actually recycled or reused, compared to 40% at recycling facilities, where materials are usually collected from one big, mixed container.

We work with nontraditional partners. The end market for recyclables is, as we touched on above, crucial to making recycling happen. We have a team dedicated to searching for and vetting partners who can use plastics that aren’t typically recyclable curbside—plastic film, multi-layer plastic, loose bottle caps, pill bottles, bread tags, and more. The well-sorted materials our members provide has encouraged partners to work with our community.

Our nation-wide partner for crinkly multi-layer plastic is HydroBlox, who recently made the coffee bag breakthrough. They manufacture drainage material used in commercial and residential projects to channel water where it should go. And they’ve developed a way to make this material out of 100% post-consumer multi-layer plastic. Read more about how we work with HydroBlox >

Similarly, our soft plastic film partner, Trex, creates long-lasting planks for decking using things like plastic bags and bubble wrap. Their standard plank is made of 95% recycled content and uses about 2,250 plastic bags. Read more about how we work with Trex >

So far, we work with 200+ local and national partners to recycle or reuse the materials we pick up—all things that aren’t easily recycled or reused from home. We work alongside city recycling programs, not in competition with them.

We keep it transparent. You deserve to know where your stuff goes, and we’ll always tell you exactly where we send it, who receives it, and what they do with it. This transparency fuels our members’ trust and enthusiasm for keeping more materials out of landfills with us. When you know that the right thing will happen with materials you want to dispose of responsibly, it can motivate you to continue to do your part.

Looking forward

We’ve seen that enough people making small changes to how they get rid of waste can make a big impact. Our community has kept 2.5 million pounds of soft plastic film and crinkly multi-layer plastic out of landfills, and 8 million pounds of plastic overall.

As we mentioned above, less than 1% of plastic film and multi-layer plastic are recycled in the US. The household average comes out to 0.8 pounds per year. Compare that to Ridwell households—our members save 30 pounds per year. That’s 375 times more!

Advances like being able to recycle coffee bags give us reason to believe that a future without waste is possible. They give us hope. The bigger our community grows, the more we can do together!