It’s no great secret that municipal recycling only gets us so far, particularly when it comes to plastics. Most facilities are only set up to handle the basics: the soda bottles, the detergent jugs, the peanut butter jars. For the rest, the prevailing advice from experts is a bitter pill for any eco-minded person to swallow: “When in doubt, throw it out.”
Unfortunately, this means our candy wrappers, bread bags, thin plastic mailers, and other assorted plastics have nowhere to go but the trash. It’s not that those items don’t have value, says Shelie Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. It’s that most recycling plants are designed for efficiency, which means they can only manage a few material streams. “Municipal systems are ill-equipped to be able to handle those, even though they can be very valuable to reclaim,” she says, noting that there can be markets for many things bound for the landfill. One man’s trash, as they say…
A group of services has sprung up to collect and repurpose what your local recycler can’t, acting as a kind of matchmaker for commonly-tossed plastics and the companies that can use them. Ridwell, Terracycle, and Hefty ReNew promise to process a range of hard-to-recycle products into raw materials that can then become things like lumber and shipping pallets. The premise is simple: Customers enroll for either a mail-in or pickup/dropoff service, fill up a vessel like a bag or bin, and watch their plastic problems disappear—usually for a fee.
On their face, these services seem to be a net positive—and not just because they keep materials out of the trash heap. “It’s less about diverting from landfill than it is reducing more virgin materials from being extracted and used,” Miller says. A 2024 lifecycle assessment of the Hefty ReNew program found that its potential outputs—which include lumber, pallets, and plastic pellets—come out ahead in terms of fossil-fuel use, which makes sense considering the vast majority of virgin plastics are derived from petroleum. And, with the glaring exception of turning plastic into fuel via a process called pyrolysis, making those products results in fewer planet-warming emissions than if they’d gone right to the landfill.
But are these offerings legit? That is, how confident can you be that your excess is getting put to good use when you sign up for them? It depends. “In my mind, it often comes down to some level of transparency,” Miller says. In the case of trash-handling, that means a couple things: What the company shares about how much material it successfully repurposes, and where the processed materials go to get a second life. We looked into three popular offerings and found they’re (pun incoming!) a mixed bag.
Ridwell
How it works: Ridwell offers two services, one mail-in and one pickup. If you live in one of the dozens of towns and neighborhoods it serves, you can sign up for bi-weekly pickups. You separate items by type into provided reusable bags and leave them in the bin Ridwell provides. If you don’t have enough to fill the bin in a given week, you can skip pickup. Depending on the plan you choose, they’ll take thin plastic, clamshells, light bulbs, textiles, Styrofoam, and more.
If pickups aren’t an option near you, you can opt for Ridwell Mail-in. This option is limited to hard-to-recycle plastics. The base plan covers plastic film (think shopping bags and mailers) and multi-layer plastic (think granola bar wrappers, potato chip bags, and pet food sacks), but you can add on options for pill bottles and bottlecaps. You fill up their prepaid mailers and drop them in the USPS to transit to the nearest Ridwell processing center.
What it costs: Ridwell pickup subscriptions start at $20/month, and the mail-in option is $30 to start with additional bags running $9 after that.
How transparent they are: Ridwell is totally upfront about who buys the materials it processes. Plastic film goes to a company in Virginia called Trex that turns it into wood-alternative decking; an outfit called Hydrobox buys processed multi-layer plastic to turn into drainage systems; and Merlin Plastics in Canada turns pill bottles into things like storage containers and packaging. According to Ridwell, 98% of plastic film and 97% of the food packaging collected via its mail-in program get recycled.
CEO Ryan Metzger told one5c via email that, while the company hasn’t conducted a third-party lifecycle assessment (womp womp), that’s a level of detail they look for when vetting who buys their materials. “Our partnerships’ team prioritizes transparency above all else—working exclusively with partners who can prove exactly what happens to the materials our members entrust to us,” he says. He also confirmed that none of their plastic-waste partners burn the materials as fuel. Ridwell works exclusively in North America (read: it’s not sending any trash overseas) and does what it can to minimize shipping emissions; it routes mailers to the nearest of its seven U.S. warehouses and buys carbon offsets to zero out shipping impacts—which, as we know, is a fraught enterprise, but it’s also better than nothing.
Hefty ReNew
How it works: Hefty’s ReNew program, previously known as EnergyBag, operates only in about a dozen metro areas in the U.S., including Cincinnati and Boise. In those places, it’s integrated into regular trash pickup. Residents stuff a signature orange bag with a range of typically unrecyclable items—from foam egg cartons and packing peanuts to chip bags and that empty mini tub of McDonald’s sweet ‘n’ sour sauce—and either haul it to the curb alongside their regular recycling or bring it to a drop-off location. The items then go to one of Hefty’s partners for sorting and processing.
What it costs: Residents in the areas ReNew services can receive a free starter kit, but after that they need to buy their own orange bags. A 20-count runs about $12 at Walmart.
How transparent they are: ReNew is the only service we looked at that publicly posts third-party lifecycle assessments of its program, but they’ve got their ups and downs. The reports, which analyze the benefits of the process’s end products compared to them winding up in the landfill, publish every two years and have shown steady progress since the first one in 2020. The ReNew bags were originally called EnergyBags, which landed the program in a fair bit of hot water early on for misleading customers about the destiny of their castoffs. The collected waste didn’t become decking or roofing, but was rather converted into a synthetic version of crude oil via a process called pyrolysis.
The company has since rebranded the program as ReNew and moved towards outputs like lumber and shipping pallets, but pyrolysis is still part of their end-of-life mix, and, experts in waste-management note, pretty toxic business. Is that better than the landfill? According to Hefty’s third-party assessments, the answer is “no”—but it does appear that only the bags themselves meet this fate, as opposed to their contents.
We reached out to Hefty for a breakdown of what collected waste becomes and what partners handle its raw materials, as details on both are scarce on their website. As of this writing, we hadn’t heard back from them. The site notes that partners have included an outfit called Solutions Plastic Lumber and another called ByFusion, but there’s nothing concrete about what’s currently in play.
TerraCycle
How it works: TerraCycle has been on the scene since 2001, and you might have encountered its name when browsing specific products that participate in its free mail-in recycling program—things like Arm & Hammer toothpastes or Gillette razors. In those instances, companies partner with TerraCycle as an end-of-life solution for their hard-to-recycle products, and customers can request free shipping labels to send in their spent goods.
The company also has a catchall program that invites folks to fill up a Zero-Waste Box or Zero-Waste Pouch with a broad range of hard-to-recycle items. Pouches stick to a specific kind of waste—for example plastic food packaging or coffee pods—while boxes can be either product-specific or come as a catchall for everything from e-waste and LED string lights to clothes and bubble wrap.
After sorting and processing, TerraCycle either sells the material to third-party manufacturers. In the case of plastic packaging, it can become shipping pallets, pipes, and patio and playground equipment. TerraCycle also uses some of it in its own product line that includes things like compost bins and frisbees.
What it costs: If you’re dealing with a one-off product that TerraCycle handles, the service is free. The all-in-one box runs $241, and single-item boxes start in the $100 range, with one for plastic packaging running $105. A mail-in pouch for plastic packaging is $47, and other item-specific offerings start at $32.
How transparent they are: The company says they conduct regular audits of their operations and partners with Bureau Veritas, a supply-chain specialist, and that 98.3% of “compliant” waste they take in gets recycled. A spokesperson told one5c via email that TerraCycle doesn’t disclose its manufacturing partners, as those relationships are a proprietary piece of its operations.
They have conducted life-cycle assessments for a range of the materials they handle—including flexible films, oral care, and rigid plastics—and shared with us an internal analysis for beauty and personal care products. That report found that their process cuts environmental impacts by 74% compared to sending waste to the landfill and 67% compared to burning it for energy.
TerraCycle’s probably makes the biggest promises of the services we looked at, so it makes sense that their opacity and track record might give some people pause. A 2022 Bloomberg story found that a facility Bureau Veritas had rubber-stamped left food packaging sitting in a warehouse. And the company was subject to a greenwashing lawsuit in 2021 that claimed its brand-specific recycling programs baited-and-switched customers into its paid offerings; as part of the settlement, TerraCycle agreed to more accurately label participating products.
So, what’s the bottom line?
Brass tacks: While some of these services do appear to deliver on their promises, they’re currently addressing only a small fraction of our plastic waste. Ridwell, for example, says it’s kept around 23 million pounds of material out of the landfill, but the U.S. generates around 160 billion pounds of plastic waste every year.
But there could be a silver lining: Even if an individual’s participation is a drop in the proverbial bucket in terms of impact, it can help send a signal that there’s a market for these types of services and the systems that support them. “Having a small group of individuals committed to the vision is a necessary step toward broad market adoption,” Miller explains, also noting that many waste-recovery operations usually scarcely break even or run on very thin margins. “Early adopters can’t guarantee widespread success, but without them, failure is almost certain.”
Whether or not that makes giving hard-to-recycle materials a fresh life is worth your money comes down to personal choice. They’re also far from the only way an individual can push back against plastic pollution. While some of these services might be helpful, it’s important to remember that there are better ways to address the flow of plastic waste. One is to avoid as much of it as you reasonably can—particularly single-use items—and the other is to advocate for regulations that address the flow of new packaging and make the companies driving our plastic problems responsible for cleaning up their own mess.