This company will now pick up your glass recycling in Tacoma and Olympia for $10/month

Seattle-based recycling company Ridwell will expand glass pick-up services in South Puget Sound, including in Tacoma, University Place, Gig Harbor, Pierce County and Olympia. Sign-ups for biweekly services open Thursday, the company CEO told The News Tribune on Tuesday.

The move seeks to fill a gap in glass recycling services in Tacoma and Olympia and will cost $10 a month.

In September, Tacoma announced that although residents could drop off glass at designated sites, all of it would be sent to the landfill because the city's glass-recycling vendor isn't accepting it due to "unexpected changes in the international glass market." More than three years ago, Tacoma ended curbside-glass recycling in favor of satellite drop-off sites, as previously reported by The News Tribune.

About four years ago Olympia also ended curbside glass recycling to pivot to satellite drop-off sites, Olympia director of Waste Resources Gary Franks told The News Tribune on Tuesday. Glass collected there is ground into aggregate, which is sold to Tumwater-based Concrete Recyclers to become materials used to make roads, in addition to foundations and trench filler, Franks said.

City curbside glass pickup likely won't return to Olympia, Franks said, due to many of the reasons it stopped in the first place. Ultimately it became too expensive for the city to contract the transportation and processing of glass, he said. Contamination of the recycling stream and fuel emissions also played a factor in those decisions, Franks said.

In the future, any outlet to divert more glass from entering landfills, "absolutely" would be important, Franks said.

'The environment needs help' Ryan Metzger, CEO of Ridwell and one of its founders, said the company started out of a strong desire to reuse or recycle items to keep them out of landfills.

A busy father to two young kids at the time, Metzger saw the limitations of curbside recycling in Seattle. So he started a project with his then 6-year-old son to compile a list of where they could take items like Styrofoam, batteries, Christmas lights and eyeglasses to be recycled.

"We created a little carpool out of it, where when we would find something, we would take our stuff, and then neighbors' as well. And that really became quite popular quickly," he said. "So it was really the inspiration to say, 'Hey, let's do this on a much bigger scale, more than a father and son can do.' So we started Ridwell as an answer to some of the challenges people were feeling within their waste systems."

Fast forward six years, and Ridwell now picks up the recycling of more than 100,000 people across seven states. Ridwell began offering services in parts of Tacoma in March 2021 and Olympia in February 2022, according to the company. Since then, Ridwell has diverted more than 1.1 million pounds of waste from landfills in the South Puget Sound, it said.

Ridwell picks up stretchy plastics like shipping bags, plastic bags and Ziploc bags, in addition to multi-layered plastics like food storage bags, frozen-food bags and other plastic packaging, including clam-shell fruit containers. It picks up batteries and light bulbs, in addition to clothes, shoes and textiles. For an additional price it can also pick up electronics (including cords and chargers), corks, latex paint, Styrofoam, prescription pill bottles, bottle caps and bread tags. The company is also recycling campaign yard signs for free to any household in any Ridwell service area.

Customers can choose a recycle plan on their website (the most popular is $18 a month) and fill a square red-and-white box 14 inches wide by 14 inches high by 14 inches deep with recyclables. Every two weeks an employee with the company will pick up reusable bags of recycling off your porch and replace them with new ones.

From there the recycling is taken to a Ridwell warehouse where it is screened for contaminants and then delivered to one of the company's partners, said Tiffany Nice, a PR lead with Ridwell. Glass will be sent to either Strategic Materials in Seattle or Glass to Glass in Portland, where it will be separated by color and processed into crushed glass cullet. The cullet is then sent to facilities with giant furnaces to make new glass bottles and jars, she said.

Ridwell has more information on its website about where each type of recycled material it collects is sent, how much is ultimately diverted from landfills and what percentage is deemed contaminated and cannot be recycled. According to the company, 90% or more of collected materials are diverted from landfills compared to about 75% of materials in a typical recycling bin.

This week Ridwell ended a six-week pilot program in the South Sound to test the viability of a glass-recycling program. In that time the company collected about 3,500 pounds of glass from 96 participants, Nice said in an email to The News Tribune.

One of those participants was Nancy Paschall, a Proctor resident who has been using Ridwell recycling services since 2021. During a visit Tuesday, Paschall showed off her white metal box and handful of cloth bags she's used to collect recycling that isn't usually picked up curbside, like flimsy plastic bags, candy wrappers, netting used to bag oranges, Amazon packaging and bubble wrap.

"I've been an avid recycler for, I don't know, a long time," Paschall said. "I try to do what I can. I don't mind taking trips to the dump, to the recycling center there and dropping stuff off, but they don't take everything, either."

When she heard about Ridwell, Paschall said, she was excited about the concept and has recommended the company to others. Now that Tacoma isn't accepting glass recycling for the time being, Paschall said it's a great option for people that still want to recycle their glass in town without the hassle.

"The environment needs help. So this is my little part of doing what I can to help out," she said. "[Ridwell] works with companies that really create stuff that we all use. So if those companies can have a lower cost source for them and, you know, not creating more stuff from landfills, I think it's a win-win for everybody."

"We used to hate elephants a lot," Kenyan farmer Charity Mwangome says, pausing from her work under the shade of a baobab tree.The bees humming in the background are part of the reason why her hatred has dimmed.The diminutive 58-year-old said rapacious elephants would often destroy months of work in her farmland that sits between two parts of Kenya's world-renowned Tsavo National Park.Beloved by tourists - who contribute around 10 percent of Kenya's GDP - the animals are loathed by most local farmers, who form the backbone of the nation's economy.Elephant conservation has been a roaring success: numbers in Tsavo rose from around 6,000 in the mid-1990s to almost 15,000 elephants in 2021, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).But the human population also expanded, encroaching on grazing and migration routes for the herds.Resulting clashes are becoming the number one cause of elephant deaths, says KWS.Refused compensation when she lost her crops, Mwangome admits she was mad with the conservationists. But a long-running project by charity Save the Elephants offered her an unlikely solution - deterring some of nature's biggest animals with some of its smallest: African honeybees.Cheery yellow beehive fences now protect several local plots, including Mwangome's. A nine-year study published last month found that elephants avoided farms with the ferocious bees 86 percent of the time."The beehive fences came to our rescue," said Mwangome.- Hacking nature -The deep humming of 70,000 bees is enough to make many flee, including a six-tonne elephant, but Loise Kawira calmly removes a tray in her apiary to demonstrate the intricate combs of wax and honey.Kawira, who joined Save the Elephants in 2021 as their consultant beekeeper, trains and monitors farmers in the delicate art.The project supports 49 farmers, whose plots are surrounded by 15 connected hives. Each is strung on greased wire a few metres off the ground, which protects them from badgers and insects, but also means they shake when disturbed by a hungry elephant. "Once the elephants hear the sound of the bees and the smell, they run away," Kawira told AFP."It hacks the interaction between elephants and bees," added Ewan Brennan, local project coordinator. It has been effective, but recent droughts, exacerbated by climate change, have raised challenges."(In) the total heat, the dryness, bees have absconded," said Kawira.It is also expensive - about 150,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,100) to install hives - well beyond the means of subsistence farmers, though the project organisers say it is still cheaper than electric fences.- 'I was going to die' -Just moments after AFP arrived at Mwanajuma Kibula's farm, which abuts one of the Tsavo parks, her beehive fence had seen off an elephant.The five-tonne animal, its skin caked in red mud, rumbled into the area and then did an abrupt about-face. "I know my crops are protected," Kibula said with palpable relief.Kibula, 48, also harvests honey twice a year from her hives, making 450 shillings per jar - enough to pay school fees for her children.She is fortunate to have protection from the biggest land mammals on Earth."An elephant ripped off my roof, I had to hide under the bed because I knew I was going to die," said a less-fortunate neighbour, Hendrita Mwalada, 67.For those who can't afford bees, Save the Elephants offers other solutions, such as metal-sheet fences that clatter when shaken by approaching elephants, and diesel- or chilli-soaked rags that deter them. It is not always enough. "I have tried planting but every time the crops are ready, the elephants come and destroy the crops," Mwalada told AFP."That has been the story of my life, a life full of too much struggling."ra-rbu/er/kjm