Need to get rid of your junk and your consumer guilt? There's a subscription for that

Since her usual hazardous waste disposal site closed last year, Dashiel St. Damien has accumulated 20 pounds of batteries and a bag full of lightbulbs.

St. Damien, 46, a designer who lives in Mount Washington, knows these items shouldn’t go into her usual curbside bins, but has struggled to find a new, convenient place to drop them off. So the months ticked by, and the bulbs kept piling up.

This week, for a small fee, her mess will finally be cleared. St. Damien has scheduled her first pickup with Ridwell, a subscription service that picks up and disposes of hard-to-recycle trash. For $18 a month, a driver will come to her home biweekly and collect her batteries, lightbulbs, plastic mailers and even clothes.

Paying for the service on top of her usual trash collection, she said, is worth it for the positive environmental impact — plus her own feelings of relief. “It's such an easy thing to do,” St. Damien said. “There are so many big problems that I feel so helpless about, but this is just one small thing.”

Ridwell is part of a new class of businesses, catering to environmentally conscious consumers, that position themselves as middlemen that can help keep waste out of landfills, and — as a positive side effect — make consumers feel better about the junk they generate.

Read more: Mountains of holiday food and packing waste are clogging landfills. Is there a better way?

Ridwell is expanding its services across Los Angeles as the country is emerging from its peak holiday waste season, during which shipping boxes and their foam innards are filling trash bins and unwanted holiday gifts clutter homes.

A Ridwell subscription starts at $14 a month for biweekly pickups, and the company promises that goods get "sustainably reused or recycled." Tricky trash finds its way to specialized plants for safe disposal, while items with the potential to be reused are donated to organizations that need them. There are more expensive tiers for those with more waste and complicated materials to recycle; the plan that recycles foam costs $24 a month.

"People are starting to ask more questions, like, 'Where did the stuff come from to produce my stuff?'” said Ryan Metzger, Ridwell’s chief executive.

Metzger had the idea for Ridwell in 2018 after he initiated a modest "recycling carpool" with neighbors in Seattle. Faced with the challenge of finding disposal options for batteries, Metzger took the initiative to gather batteries from neighbors and call around to find a facility that could safely get rid of them. That first pickup quickly expanded to include trips to recycle lightbulbs, electronics, plastic bags and Halloween candy. Word spread beyond the neighborhood.