Business
This company tries to recycle the really difficult plastics
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.
Bagged recyclables sit in boxes at the Ridwell warehouse in San Leandro.
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.”
Sony Pictures will invest $100 million and take a minority stake in virtual reality venue operator Cosm, as the studio continues to build a business in communal experiences.
As part of the investment, Sony Pictures Chief Executive Ravi Ahuja will also join Cosm’s board of directors, the studio said Wednesday. The size of Sony’s minority stake was not disclosed.
The El Segundo-based Cosm currently operates three venues — one at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, and the others in Dallas and Atlanta. The company plans to open additional venues in Detroit and Cleveland.
Cosm bills itself as a “shared reality venue,” and its facilities center around a massive, wraparound screen that is intended to envelop viewers with additional digital effects. The company has largely focused on sports, though it has also shown Cirque du Soleil shows and done several collaborations with Warner Bros., including recent screenings of 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in honor of the film’s 25th anniversary.
“Cosm sits at the intersection of several trends shaping the future of entertainment,” Ahuja said in a statement. “We’ve followed Cosm since before launch and have been impressed with the quality of the experience and the enthusiasm it’s generating with audiences.”
The investment is Sony’s latest venture into experiential entertainment. In 2024, the Culver City-based studio acquired dine-in theater chain Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday unanimously advanced an ordinance to halt new oil and gas drilling and phase out all existing production over the next 20 years. L.A. is home to more than 2,000 active oil wells.
The measure revives a similar ban passed in 2022, which was struck down by a judge following legal challenges from the oil and gas industry.
It must pass a second vote before final adoption later this summer, and would make L.A. the largest city in the United States to phase out existing oil wells.
“Today, Los Angeles is making a decision that aligns with our need to turn the page on urban oil drilling,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said during Tuesday’s council meeting. “The absence of an enforceable oil ordinance has had real consequences for our communities.”
The ban in 2022 was seen as a historic move for a region built on the petroleum industry.
But in 2024, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge invalidated the law, ruling that the state, not the city, has jurisdiction over petroleum production. The legal challenge was brought by oil companies including Warren Resources, which operates a large oil field in Wilmington. Much of the field is beneath the city of Long Beach, but it also extends under Los Angeles.
Shortly after that, state legislators advanced Assembly Bill 3233, which reaffirmed city and county authority to regulate oil and gas activity. It was largely seen as the missing piece that made the original ordinance vulnerable.
“It’s now unequivocal that cities have the authority to regulate, limit and prohibit oil and gas operations within our jurisdiction,” Yaroslavsky said.
The new ordinance, written by the Department of City Planning, prohibits new oil and gas extraction, including drilling, redrilling or deepening existing oil wells for the purposes of production. It also designates all existing and active idle wells as “nonconforming uses,” meaning they may only operate during the phaseout period and are no longer compliant with current zoning.
Warren Resources, which led the lawsuit against the previous ban, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company previously argued that the 2022 ban was rushed and would lead to more oil imports to the area, causing increased emissions from tankers and trucks and other environmental consequences.
Many wells in the city operate near schools, homes and parks. Most are concentrated in low-income areas and communities of color, such as Wilmington and the harbor district, West L.A. and South L.A., where residents have long reported respiratory issues, headaches, throat irritation and other health problems. Studies have found oil wells can emit carcinogens and are linked to adverse health effects.
“This ordinance is such an important step toward giving every frontline community in Los Angeles access to clean air,” Silvia Esparza, a South L.A. resident and member of environmental justice group Stand-L.A., said in a news conference ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Ashley Hernandez, a Wilmington resident and organizer with the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, said bloody noses and noxious fumes were a regular part of life in the neighborhood growing up.
She noted that in addition to oil drilling, L.A. residents continue to face other environmental hazards, such as the recent oil pipeline rupture that sent crude into the L.A. River or the ongoing cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights that is spewing toxic smoke.
“I’m here to remind L.A. city and these toxic neighbors that Wilmington residents are more important than any ‘black gold’ under their homes,” Hernandez said. “We need our city to protect our families now and to stop the oil industry’s reign of power in our city. A passage of the oil phaseout ordinance today gives the city a chance to correct this wrong.”
Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.
Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX halted their three-day slide that had erased roughly $600 billion off its market value.
SpaceX shares closed at $156.11 with a nearly 1% gain on Tuesday, a slight recovery from a 16% fall on Monday.
That loss dropped the stock below $160.95, where it ended the day June 12 after a 19% surge during its record initial public offering. The IPO gave it a market cap of $2.2 trillion, making SpaceX one of the world’s most valuable public companies.
It also turned Musk into the world’s first trillionaire, a status he retains despite the sell-off.
The downturn probably reflects investor unease over the company’s spending plans and potential debt load, analysts say.
SpaceX raised a total of $86 billion after underwriters exercised their right to sell additional shares, on top of the $75 billion initially raised. It was the largest IPO in history.
A little more than half a billion shares were distributed to institutional and retail investors at a price of $135, with the stock opening at $150 as some holders immediately flipped shares for a profit.
Shares rose as high as $176.52 during the IPO before settling at the $160.95 price. In the weeks since, shares reached a high of $225.64, meaning that some investors lost money or are underwater with paper losses.
Since the IPO, SpaceX has dropped some big bucks.
It announced last week that it was acquiring AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in a deal expected to close in the third quarter. The San Francisco company, founded in 2022, enables engineers to instruct software in English to run coding tasks autonomously.
It also sold $25 billion in bonds on Tuesday , unusual for a company that just went public, much less for one that just raised a record sum.
The IPO surpassed the 2019 offering by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant, which raised $29.4 billion, the prior record holder.
S&P Global issued a report last week that assigned SpaceX a “BBB” credit rating, the lowest possible rating to qualify as an investment grade credit risk. It noted the company will have “elevated capital expenditure” through 2029.
SpaceX rivals OpenAi and Anthropic filed this month for initial public offerings that, while not expected to be as large as Musk’s company, will be large in their own right.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who has been bullish on SpaceX stock, said the market is digesting “massive debt and equity raises from Big Tech players” in the coming years.
“This is part of an industry wave of debt offerings on Wall Street, like Alphabet and SpaceX among others,” he wrote in an email.
With the stock already giving up gains since the IPO, it will be further tested when tranches of locked-up shares held by current and former employees are released.
At least 20% of the shares will be released after second-quarter results are disclosed sometime in the coming months, with all the lockups expiring in December.
SpaceX, based in Texas, is the leading launch services company in the world, with its Falcon 9 rocket accounting last year for the vast majority of satellites sent into space.
It is also the leading satellite-based broadband provider with its Starlink service. But the extraordinary interest in the IPO was driven by Musk’s plans to make the company an AI leader — including plans to launch orbiting satellite data centers powered by the sun that crunch AI data.
He merged his xAI artificial intelligence company into SpaceX this year, with the combined entity recently announcing it was leasing computer power to rivals Anthropic and Google at two terrestrial data centers it has constructed.
Musk moved the company’s headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas in 2024, but it retains large operations in the South Bay city and blasts off regularly from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Investment research firm Morningstar placed a $780-billion valuation on SpaceX, focusing on its core rocket and Starlink broadband satellite businesses. It suggested investors wait a few months for the stock to settle before buying in.
“I think the day-to-day stock price movements are usually based on market sentiment,” said report co-author Nicolas Owens, an equity analyst at Morningstar. “So I was not surprised when it went way up right after the IPO — and I’m not surprised it [came down]. Not much has really changed in the fundamentals.”
Mike Alves, founder of Pasadena’s Vida Vision Fund, has a stake in SpaceX that accounts for 46% of his AI and robotics fund.
He said he was not perturbed by the stock drop, noting that Facebook fell under $18 a share just months after its May 2012 IPO closed at $38 a share. It has since risen more than 1,000% above its offering price.
“The volatility doesn’t really matter because you’re going to multiply your best investment many times, so I’m not so worried about it,” he said, adding that investors seeking shares could now “scoop them up at a good deal.”
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