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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/how-specialty-recyclers-are-reducing-waste/>
"We ask a lot of food packaging. It needs to look good and keep perishable food
safe, intact and unblemished as it travels from the producer to grocery stores
and then on to people’s homes, with minimal weight.
Some food packaging is made of multiple layers of different materials fused
together. While this increases durability, it also makes it difficult to
recycle.
“We’ve done a great job as a society of creating packaging that is efficient
and appealing,” said Gerrine Pan, vice president of partnerships at Ridwell, a
Seattle-based startup that helps consumers send less waste to landfills. “But
our rate of packaging innovation has far outpaced our rate of being able to
handle that material in the traditional waste management system.”
Launched in 2018, Ridwell is part of a small but growing group of specialty
recyclers helping to educate consumers about reducing waste while collecting
materials that traditional municipal recycling services won’t. Some offer
memberships or subscriptions to residents for a monthly fee with bi-weekly
pickups from their curbs or doorsteps, and a few also provide services to
businesses.
Their reach ranges from regional to multi-state. Rabbit Recycling, for example,
operates in the Philadelphia Metropolitan area, while the ReCollective offers
services in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which includes Durham, Raleigh,
Chapel Hill, and Cary. Recyclops serves residents and businesses in more than
30 states and most major metro areas.
Ridwell now has 100,000 members in eight metro areas in seven states. Every two
weeks, the company picks up multi-layer plastic food packaging, plastic
clamshell containers, batteries, lightbulbs, and other hard-to-recycle
materials from the doorsteps of members who pay $14 and up per month.
It was launched by a Seattle father and son who needed to recycle old
batteries, but their garbage company wouldn’t accept them. After calling around
to find a location that would take the old batteries, they offered to take
along their neighbors’ dead batteries too as part of a “recycling carpool.” It
turned into an ongoing weekend project with different materials collected and
recycled every week, including electronics and Styrofoam.
Their list of participating neighbors, which became known as “Owen’s List,”
eventually topped 2,000, underscoring great demand and confusion about the
patchwork of local recycling rules in the US, which lacks a modern national
standard. In a nation where recycling rules may vary county by county, not to
mention state by state, just 32.1 percent of waste is recycled or composted."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
