SAN LEANDRO — A start-up recycling company has a message for its potential, environmentally conscious customers: Don’t send your problem garbage to the landfill; put it on your front porch.

The company is Ridwell, and if you drive the residential streets of the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, you’re likely to see the company’s signature white metal boxes on porches.

The boxes are for empty tortilla chip and plastic produce bags, used clothing, light bulbs and batteries. In some locations, polystyrene peanuts. All the things you’re not supposed to put in the blue recycle bin, but wish you could.

The Seattle-based waste service is geared toward people who worry their waste will end up in the landfill, or get exported to a developing country in Asia. They sort their waste into colorfully labeled canvas bags the company provides, and wait for a Ridwell pickup.

“Sorting is our special sauce,” said Gerrine Pan, the company’s vice president of partnerships. Part of the reason the company is successful at finding markets — or buyers — for its waste, she said, is that it’s sorted and pretty clean (unlike the food-contaminated jumble of waste that gets stuffed in many blue bins).

The company promises to distribute all that waste to specialty recyclers, manufacturers, even thrift shops.

But critics say the boutique waste hauler is not accomplishing anything environmentally useful and is selling the public a myth: that these plastics — multilayer plastic film, plastic bags, polystyrene — can be taken care of responsibly. The service would be benign, they say, if it stuck to the delivery of materials, such as light bulbs and batteries, that can be recycled.

Most local waste haulers don’t accept batteries and light bulbs because they can pose a hazard to workers and equipment.

The base Ridwell membership is $20 a month. For that, a driver will come by every two weeks and take the presorted bags to a warehouse where they’re emptied, the contents stacked and collected, until there’s enough to deliver to a facility that will take it.

Sorted recyclable items await transport at the Ridwell central warehouse.

Company lore is that founder Ryan Metzger and his son were frustrated that so many things weren’t accepted by their local hauler for recycling. The two sat down and researched where to take the stuff, then decided to scale up and serve their neighbors.

The company has since expanded to Vancouver, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Denver; Austin, Texas; Minneapolis and Atlanta. It now boasts more than 130,000 customers nationwide.

Most of the waste is delivered locally. But some of it travels hundreds, if not thousands of miles.

For instance, multilayer plastic bags — those that hold snack chips, candy and coffee beans — are the scourge of municipal garbage haulers because they cannot be recycled, and if put in the blue bins, can damage mechanical sorting machines. Ridwell, however, found Hydroblox, a company that melts the multilayer films into hard, plastic bricks that can be used for drainage projects in landscaping and road construction.

But this arrangement highlights some of the limitations of the nascent industry. Hydroblox owner Ed Greiser said he can take only so many chip bags. The company is growing, but it’s still pretty small, and he’s typically maxed out on the bags.

Ridwell workers sift through recyclables.

“This article is going to be a nightmare for me,” he told a Times reporter, because it’s likely to attract a parade of unsolicited garbage trucks looking to dump their bags. “I’m not the solution.”

In addition, Greiser’s two facilities are in Pennsylvania, more than 2,700 miles from most West Coast pickup points, a steep transportation cost for a plastic bag that could instead go 20 miles to a local landfill.

Ridwell also has recently expanded to serve customers outside its pickup cities. It sends special plastic bags to these far-flung subscribers so they can sort their waste and ship it back.

Again, critics say the company’s decision to operate a service that is dependent on plastic bags and requires extensive transport undermines their environmental bona fides. And they worry that a narrative suggesting all waste can be dealt with responsibly is false and misleading. That misconception, they say, contributes to the glut of plastic piling up in our rivers and oceans, and inside our bodies.

“There is typically a reason why a given product isn’t being recycled through curbside collection, and it usually isn’t for lack of effort by cities and counties,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “Most of the material being collected by boutique collection services like Ridwell are either very difficult to manage or lack strong recycling markets.”

Manufacturers of plastic packaging, not consumers, should pay for recycling products and packaging at the end of their life, he said. For regular people, “having to pay an extra fee to handle the unrecyclable plastic packaging that is thrust upon us every day is antithetical to every concept of producer responsibility.”

Earlier this month, the anti-plastic group Beyond Plastics published a disparaging report on boutique waste haulers, including Ridwell, accusing them of providing cover for plastic and packaging manufacturers who want people to believe their waste is being recycled.

A Ridwell employee inserts a bag of recyclables into a bailer at the San Leandro warehouse.

Ridwell offered a visitor a tour of its Bay Area warehouse in San Leandro. The spacious facility behind a Home Depot and Walmart was crowded with steel drums filled with alternating layers of batteries and fire-retardant pellets, boxes of light bulbs and piles of used clothes, all destined for recyclers, upcyclers and thrift stores.

While the public may think of recycling as a largely physical process, it’s actually a market: a function of how well a material can be profitably turned into something else.

Boxes of clothing await transport.

Metzger, Ridwell’s chief executive, said some of the material his company collects can be sold. Some of it is given away, “and some we pay to have responsibly processed.” The more technically challenging the plastic, the more likely Ridwell will have to pay to deal with it, he said.

He said the company vets all the places it sends its waste, giving preference to those that use items a second time over those that melt them down or shred them to make them into something else. It also gives preference to partners that are local.

He said his company is “careful not to present plastic recycling as a cure-all,” and it turns away some materials, for example vinyl shower curtains, “because we don’t have a downstream partner we can stand behind.”

And while Metzger agrees with many of Beyond Plastic’s concerns, he has observed that “when customers actively sort and see which items require special handling, it often increases their awareness of where plastic waste is coming from in their own lives … [leading] them to change purchasing habits and avoid certain packaging altogether.”

Outside a hall where Southern California Edison was celebrating Black History Month on Friday, a group of Altadena residents stood on the sidewalk, waving signs and talking of the homes and family members they lost in last year’s Eaton fire.

“They’re in there celebrating Black history and they’ve destroyed a Black town,” said Nicole Vasquez of My Tribe Rise, which helped organize the protest.

The Jan. 7, 2025 fire destroyed thousands of homes, including the majority of homes in west Altadena, a historically Black community. All but one of the 19 people who died were in west Altadena.

“If Edison’s tower did not ignite the fire, Altadena would still be there,” said Trevor Howard Kelley, who lost his 83-year-old mother, Erliene, in the fire.

Kelley, his daughter and two granddaughters had been living with his mother before her home was destroyed, he said.

The Black Altadena residents are part of a larger coalition that is asking Edison to advance each family who lost their home $200,000 in emergency housing assistance. They say that more than a year after the blaze many wildfire survivors are running out of the funds they had received from insurers.

The group protesting Friday also called for transparency from Edison. The company has said it believes it is likely its equipment caused the fire but has continued to deny it did anything wrong.

“We just want the truth,” said Felicia Ford, who lost her house in the fire. “What’s wrong with saying, ‘We got this wrong.’”

Scott Johnson, an Edison spokesperson, said Friday that the company continued to believe its voluntary compensation program was the best way to help victims of the fire. Edison has promised to quickly review each victim’s claim and pay it swiftly if approved.

Families who lost their homes can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars under the program, while those with damaged homes receive lesser amounts.

But many survivors say they don’t believe the offered amounts fully compensate their losses. And to receive the money, victims must agree not to sue — which many are not willing to do.

“We recognize the incredible struggles the community has faced,” Johnson said. “The intent of the program is to reach final settlements to allow the community to rebuild and move on.”

The investigation into the cause of the fire has not yet been released. Edison has said a leading theory is that its century-old transmission line in Eaton Canyon, which had not carried electricity for 50 years, somehow became reenergized and sparked the fire.

Company executives said they did not remove the old line because they believed it would be used in the future.

In December, state regulators ordered Edison to identify fire risks on its 355 miles of out-of service transmission lines located in areas of high fire risk and tell regulators how executives planned to use the lines in the future.

This week, Edison disclosed that the Los Angeles County district attorney was investigating whether Edison should be criminally prosecuted for its actions in the fire.

West Altadena became one of L.A.’s first middle-class Black neighborhoods in the 1960s, partly because discriminatory redlining practices for years kept Black homebuyers from settling east of Lake Avenue.

Heavenly Hughes, co-founder of My Tribe Rise, told the crowd she had lived in Altadena for 50 years.

“I was raised in a thriving working-class community and they have destroyed that community,” Hughes said, referring to Edison.

Added Ford, “The people making these decisions aren’t suffering at all. They’re still getting their paychecks, bonuses and stock options.”

SEOUL — Governments and companies around the world scrambled Saturday to determine the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down most of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs and his response with a new round of import taxes.

The latest twist in the U.S. tariff roller-coaster ride, launched when Trump returned to office 13 months ago and upended dozens of trading relationships with the world’s biggest economy, roiled trade officials from Mexico to South Korea to South America and beyond.

South Korea’s Trade Ministry called for an emergency meeting Saturday to understand the new landscape. Some specific exports to the U.S., like automobiles and steel, aren’t affected by the U.S. high court decision. Those that are affected will probably now be covered by a new tariff imposed by an executive order Trump signed Friday. Trump announced Saturday morning that he would raise that 10% tariff to 15%.

In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the checks and balances in the United States, praising the “rule of law” during a visit to a Paris agricultural fair: “It’s a good thing to have powers and counter-powers in democracies. We should welcome that.”

But he cautioned against any triumphalism.

Officials were going over the language of bilateral or multilateral deals struck with the U.S. in recent months, even as they braced for new swings and Trump’s swift announcement of new tariffs.

“I note that President Trump, a few hours ago, said he had reworked some measures to introduce new tariffs, more limited ones, but applying to everyone,” Macron said. “So we’ll look closely at the exact consequences, what can be done, and we will adapt.”

Mexico braces, adapts

Mexico’s secretary of the economy, Marcelo Ebrard, urged “prudence” Friday in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. “We have to see where this is going,” Ebrard told reporters. “We have to see what measures [Washington] is going to take to figure out how it is going to affect our country. “

Amid widespread concern about tariffs in Mexico — the United States’ major commercial partner, with almost $1 trillion in annual two-way trade — Ebrard cautioned: “I tell you to put yourselves in zen mode. As tranquil as possible.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, when asked about the tariffs, said, “We’ll review the resolution carefully and then gladly give our opinion.”

Ebrard said he plans to travel to the United States next week to clarify matters.

Last year, Ebrard noted, Mexico managed to stave off Trump’s threats to impose a 25% across-the-board levy on all Mexican imports.

However, Mexico has been pushing back against Trump administration tariffs on imports of vehicles, steel and aluminum, among other products.

Among other impacts, the Supreme Court voided so-called fentanyl tariffs on Mexico, China and Canada. The Trump administration said it imposed those levies to force the three nations to crack down on trafficking of the deadly synthetic opioid.

About 85% of Mexican exports to the United States are exempt from tariffs because of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The accord extended a mostly free-trade regimen among the three nations, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The three-way pact is scheduled for joint review starting July 1. That date marks six years since the agreement was signed during the first Trump presidential term.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, along the Texas border, Sergio Bermúdez, head of an industrial parks company, discussed Trump’s plan for a new tariff. Trump, he said, “says a lot of things, and many of them aren’t true. All of the businesses I know are analyzing, trying to figure out how it’s going to affect them.”

The impact could be felt especially in Juarez: Much of its economy depends on factories producing goods to export to consumers in the U.S., the result of decades of free trade between the U.S. and Mexico.

The policy swoons in the United States over the last year have made many global business leaders cautious, as they struggle to forecast and see investment take a hit.

CEO Alan Russell of Tecma, which helps American businesses set up operations in Mexico, has seen his job grow increasingly complicated over the last year — his company’s workload has surged as much as fourfold as it grapples with new import requirements. He worries the last U.S. moves will only make things more difficult.

“We wake up every day with new challenges. That word ‘uncertainty’ has been the greatest enemy,” said Russell, who is American. “The difficult part has been not being clear what the rules are today or what they’re going to be tomorrow.”

A ‘good decision’

Swissmem, a top technology industry association in Switzerland, hailed the Supreme Court ruling as “good decision,” writing on X that its exports to the U.S. fell 18% in the fourth quarter alone — a period when Switzerland was facing much higher U.S. tariffs than most neighboring countries in Europe.

“The high tariffs have severely damaged the tech industry,” Swissmem President Martin Hirzel said on X, while acknowledging the dust is far from settled. “However, today’s ruling doesn’t win anything yet.”

Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell in Mexico City contributed to this report, as did Associated Press writers Tong-Hyung Kim in Seoul and Megan Janetsky in Mexico City. AP writers María Verza and Fabiola Sánchez in Mexico City, Samuel Petrequin in London and Jamey Keaten in Lyon, France, also contributed.