Small Hauler Contributes Big to Boost Recycling Rate

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Within a roughly 45-minute radius of Downtown, TrashCab provides doorstep recycling and garbage services for apartment buildings, townhomes and businesses.

“We’re glorified garbage men,” said founder and president Teddy Douglass.

A new survey of central Ohio residents found that nearly half of those living in multifamily units don’t have access to recycling at home, and a third don’t recycle at all.

When Douglass was finishing up college and living in an apartment complex in Grandview Heights, he had two options: drag his recycling to a dumpster 300 yards from his building or toss it in his car and drop it off at a public bin.

He thought at the time that it didn’t make sense that there wasn’t a version of curbside recycling for apartment-dwellers.

“I would pay someone to do that,” Douglass said. “I figured I couldn’t be the only one.”

So in late 2011, he and a co-worker, Brennan Kelley, took it upon themselves and started a recycling business out of a Ford F-150 pickup truck.

Today, TrashCab has grown to a dozen employees and four compacting trucks. The company services between 6,000 and 8,000 units and about 60 small businesses per week.

Most of the nearly 1 million pounds of recyclables processed daily at Rumpke’s regional facility are collected through curbside and community recycling programs. But some of the material comes from third-party haulers such as TrashCab, Rumpke spokesman Jonathon Kissell said.

With its smaller vehicles and willingness to send employees into buildings to collect recycling and trash from break rooms and communal bins, TrashCab fills a gap, Kelley said.

Pricing for recycling and trash pickup can range from $35 for monthly bin collection to $10,000 for full-building services.

On a recent Friday run, TrashCab crews swept through LeVeque Tower’s residential recycling in about 30 minutes before heading to New Albany to empty out the curbside bins at an apartment community. They stopped at about 10 sites that day.

“I feel good at the end of my day,” TrashCab driver Mark Uphouse said, “especially considering how much trash I’ve accumulated in my lifetime.”

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantage.com