Another Inconvenient Truth
ANNIE STUART & EILEEN HAFLICH
October 7, 2026
What do you do with all the plastic that takes up residence in your home – things such as multilayer chip bags or flexible film plastics? Do you toss them in the trash or use the blue bin and hope for the best (also known as “wishcycling”)?
You really want to do the right thing. But what exactly is the right thing? It hasn’t always been easy to figure that out.
Enter Ridwell, a collection and specialty recycling company that now offers a convenient service for Sonoma County residents, boasting that it “has the answer to your plastic waste” and “you can feel great about where your stuff goes.” Charging a monthly fee, Ridwell picks up a wide range of items, including hard-to-recycle plastic, and “rehomes” it for you with the help of third-party partners. [1]
But is this “recycling for real,” as promised by Ridwell? Cardboard, glass, and metal can be recycled and reused countless times. But plastic collected by Ridwell is transformed just once (downcycled) into new products such as plastic benches, bricks, and decks. And then it ultimately ends up in a landfill or an incinerator – its final resting place.
This plastic gets a second life, so that’s got to be a good thing, right? After all, this lessens extraction of raw resources and keeps the plastic out of landfill (at least, temporarily).
Unfortunately, the second lives granted to plastic are not free of risk.
I (Annie) didn’t realize this when our composite plastic deck was seriously buckling and needed replacing many years ago. Reassured that I must be saving a tree, I replaced the old deck with, you guessed it, more composite decking. Then, I congratulated myself for this “brilliant” brainstorm: We had the contractor reuse some of the old plastic boards to build a small porch and stairs up to our barn. I was completely oblivious to the plastic sawdust our construction projects had created.
Here’s the downside of this type of downcycled plastic: Processing, cutting, and transporting it keeps it in our environment, releasing microplastics and leaching chemicals into our water, soil, and food. Decks, benches, and bricks are also exposed to wear and tear from the elements, causing them to break into tiny bits of plastic. [2]
Plastics contain thousands of chemicals, many known to be toxic to humans. Recycled and downcycled plastic contains a higher concentration of toxic chemicals than new “virgin” plastic. Meanwhile, all this plastic never goes away. It simply breaks down into microplastics, which are linked to a wide range of biological changes such as impaired immune systems, heart disease, cell damage, and inflammation. [3,4]
In addition, the plastics collected by specialty recyclers such as Ridwell must often travel hundreds or thousands of miles to be processed and many more miles to their final destination. Along the way, this produces greenhouse gas emissions.
And then there’s fire. Composite decking may not ignite as easily as untreated wood, but it can still melt under extreme radiant heat, such as during a wildfire. When plastic does burn, it is more toxic than natural materials, creating long-term environmental contamination that can persist for years following a disaster. [5]
What about Ridwell’s other recycling partnerships, such as for textiles? They are another big source of plastic.
In fact, if plastic producers have their way, 70 percent of fabrics will be made of plastic by 2036. This poses another hit to health since textiles are the single largest source of microplastics in the environment, and skin can absorb 60 percent of what you put on it, including the toxic chemicals in plastic. [6]
Ridwell partner Vespene Recycling, for example, does turn worn-out textiles and other plastic materials into products such as mattresses, stuffed toys, carpet padding, and insulation. But again, that keeps plastic in circulation, which is unnecessary since safer alternatives for products like these already exist. [7]
We are more enthusiastic about Ridwell’s reuse partnerships with regional nonprofits to redistribute usable goods to local communities.
If you are a Ridwell subscriber, ask yourself this: Are you buying more products in plastic packaging because of Ridwell’s promise of responsible recycling? We know you don’t want to contribute to the growth of the plastic industry. But we also know that both good intentions and incentives can drive behavior.
Take Germany, for example. While traveling there, I (Eileen) noticed that very few people were drinking from refillable metal bottles. Chalk this up mostly to a very high refund for plastic water bottles returned to deposit stations, as well as the absence of water refill stations. The unintended consequence of this generous redemption policy? It appears to have created a demand for more plastic water bottles.
Consider this: Over the next 10 to 15 years, the petrochemical industry plans to double production of plastic, 40 percent of which is single-use plastic. [8,9] They claim they are simply “meeting demand.” Helping to drive this trend is that plastic is very inexpensive to produce, so it can be economically challenging to find markets for recycled plastic – even for specialty recyclers such as Ridwell.
Here’s how we see it: If your bathtub is overflowing, first turn off the tap. Or as international climate leader Bill McKibben famously said, “If you’re in a hole, stop digging.”
The polluters must pay for the hole we find ourselves in. But if you would like to help stem the tide of plastic pollution, we can’t think of a better place to start than here: BeyondPlastics.org. And in honor of Zero Waste Month, make an extra effort to reduce your use of plastic:
Attend local zero waste events during North Bay Zero Waste Week (October 10–17).
Sign up for an October 14th webinar, Unwrapped: How to Get Plastic Off Our Food.
Try not to buy products that are packaged in plastic. If you’ve been a Ridwell subscriber, check your Ridwell bag to see if you are making progress using less plastic.
Use cotton shopping and produce bags whenever possible. If you do use plastic bags, consider reusing the ones you have at home instead of using new plastic bags every time.
Watch the Netflix film, “The Plastic Detox,” and share what you learn with family and friends.
Invite Eileen to give her presentation on plastic to your group.
Annie Stuart and Eileen Haflich are affiliate members of the national organization Beyond Plastics.
SOURCES
Beyond Plastics: “Recycle” By Mail Is Not the Solution You Think It Is and The Problem with Plastic by Judith Enck, pp 117–121.
Food Packaging Forum: Plastic recycling: Hazardous chemicals and strategies to tackle them.
Stanford Medicine: Microplastics and our health: What the science says.
Plastic Pollution Coalition: One Year Later: Los Angeles Wildfires Reinforce Why We Must Rebuild with Less Plastic.
Netflix: “The Plastic Detox.”
Geneva Environment Network: Plastic Production and Industry.
CIEL: Fueling Plastics: Untested Assumptions and Unanswered Questions in the Plastics Boom.
LA Times: This company tries to recycle the really difficult plastics.