![]() ![]() He sent emails to neighbors and canvassed the streets of his Grant Park neighborhood in Northeast Portland. He was instrumental in bringing Ridwell to Portland. Musser, 49, is an environmental advocate, former financial adviser, and serial obsessive. No one believes in Ridwell’s potential more than William Musser IV, a stay-at-home dad who has become Ridwell’s unpaid ambassador in Portland. But what they’re really fighting now is someone who could handle a lot more services.” “Right now, it’s like taking a sledgehammer to swat at a gnat,” says Jerry Powell, who ran a recycling publication for 38 years and also advised recycling companies. Little wonder the haulers are raising a stink. But that’s unlikely to end the conflict.Ī review of public records, plus interviews with trash haulers, Ridwell representatives and customers, and recycling experts, paints a portrait of a battle for trash-one that evokes the fractious beginnings of other disruptive tech companies, like Airbnb and Uber, that fundamentally changed the industries they entered. In the coming months, government regulators that oversee Portland’s recycling system will decide whether Ridwell can continue storing its haul at a Northeast Portland warehouse. “The fact that the city allowed it to happen was, I don’t want to say, a slap in the face-but we abide by all these rules, and they’re there for a reason.” “It just didn’t sit right with us,” says Dave Cargni, who operates Portland Disposal & Recycling, one of the city’s nine franchised residential haulers. Haulers in the suburban towns and counties ringing Portland have done the same. Since then, residential haulers have lobbied city bureaucrats, elected officials and staffers through emails and letters. Portland trash haulers complained to the city shortly after Ridwell launched, arguing the company was skirting regulations that garbage companies must follow to keep their city contracts. In 11 months, the company says, it has signed up 18,600 households in 50 ZIP codes in the Portland area. For another $9, Ridwell will pick up plastic foam.īeth Fischer left an Elmer's diner after nine years to drive for Ridwell. For a dollar extra, you can offload the clamshell containers that hold takeout meals. In return, Ridwell supplies customers with a 2-foot-square metal box that includes a bag for light bulbs, another for batteries, and others for threads and plastic film. Ridwell is a Seattle-based, venture capital-backed startup that late last year started asking Portlanders to pay $12 to $16 a month. Fischer’s employer sees a business in this junk.
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