People across America buy billions of bags of chips, nuts, granola bars and frozen foods. Have you ever considered where the wrappings go? Ridwell in Longmont and Broomfield does.
Ridwell is a specialty recycling company that began when CEO and co-founder Ryan Metzger and his son began researching the best places to recycle items around their home. The duo picked up hard-to-recycle items from neighbors, family and friends and soon the demand outgrew what they could handle.
The company expanded into Broomfield in 2022 and again into Longmont in April 2023.
The service picks up some items such as plastic film, clothes, household batteries and lightbulbs and plastic clamshell containers regularly. It also includes a featured category that changes such as Halloween candy, bottle caps, corks and prescription pill bottles.
The company just announced that it has begun picking up multi-layer plastic from chip bags, granola bars and more as a regular part of its service.
“The only option for multi-layer plastic in the past has been to go to the landfill where it will sit for thousands of years, a resource being wasted. The many layers of different materials make this category one of the hardest materials to recycle at conventional recycling facilities because most processes are specialized to process one type of plastic at a time. Properly recycling multi-layer plastic requires specialty processes that are not very common,” said Rebecca Hayes, Ridwell’s general manager for Colorado.
Ridwell will pick the plastic up in its bins and take it to its warehouse in North Denver before shipping it to its domestic partners for recycling, she said.
