The headquarters for the ReCollective, a waste management company based in Durham, is crammed inside a small loading dock. Piles of variable plastic, cardboard, and glass line the walls. Orange pill bottles and chunks of styrofoam are sorted into large bags, while other materials wait to be categorized. Textiles are churning in the washing machine.
Bryce Brooks, who cofounded the ReCollective in 2022 alongside Kevin Younge, has been laboring over the mound of junk for hours but maintains her enthusiasm for the job. She takes a beat to admire the day’s work.
“It still smells like honey in here sometimes,” Brooks says. The lingering odor is thanks to the previous tenants, The Brothers Vilgalys, creators of the Krupnikas honey liqueur.
The ReCollective offers door-to-door service to residents who want to more thoroughly sort and discard the waste they generate at home. Brooks previously worked as a consultant helping businesses understand how to reduce waste throughout their own operations. She saw an opportunity to help bring those best practices to residential neighborhoods. The ReCollective now has more than 400 members across the Triangle.
“When we think about end solutions, in terms of the reuse of perfectly good pill bottles or boxes and stuff like that, that becomes the upstream solution for the beginning of someone else’s journey,” Brooks says. ”Because if they’re not buying virgin plastic to use for this box or this thing, then we’ve prevented the waste from happening in the first place for them.”
Every time you throw something away, it is hauled away to the local solid waste facility to be processed and sorted. But tons of items lying around the house—materials used for shipping packages, plastic bags used to carry groceries, and old batteries—are not biodegradable, which means they are destined to sit in landfills for hundreds or thousands of years.
The environmental impact of landfill waste is most acutely felt by residents of Sampson County, one and a half hours southeast of Durham, where the bulk of Durham’s trash is shipped and stored. Twenty-five million tons of garbage are rotting in the Sampson County landfill, according to a 2023 report from NC Newsline. Due to the decomposition process, the facility emits the second-most methane gas of any landfill in the country, causing environmental harm and poor health outcomes for the community.
With the threats spurred on by climate change feeling more present by the day, Brooks, Younge, and a handful of other entrepreneurs in Durham, including the founders of Don’t Waste Durham, have taken up the challenge of supplementing the city’s waste reduction efforts by making “reduce and reuse” a seamless part of everyday life for residents.
Even the most earnest tree huggers can find it difficult to properly dispose of all the different waste they create on a daily basis. Without clear directions from manufacturers or the city, most residents default to tossing items into the trash can or the recycling bin, unaware of how it will be processed downstream. Brooks says she sticks to a few fundamentals when in doubt.
“I’m pretty confident when I stick to bottles, cans, tubs, jugs, and jars. That’s the mantra I have in my head,” Brooks says.
The City of Durham provides a “recycling guidelines” search tool on its website to inform residents on the best method for disposing of items they may be unsure about. Many of those items, the ones that are often not suitable for the city’s regular trash and recycling pickup, are the types of products that the ReCollective hauls away.
Folks who sign up for the ReCollective get a collection of bags that separate waste into four categories: plastic film, textiles, styrofoam, and batteries and bulbs. Those materials are picked up monthly from each customer and brought back to the ReCollective facility, where they are sorted and redistributed to other recycling depots or nonprofit organizations that repurpose the products. Items that fall outside the regular collection categories are sometimes included in the company’s monthly “ReCo picks,” a onetime pickup for a different specialty item that could be as small as wine corks or as big as a car seat.
Brooks says that while she enjoys helping to combat waste and bring this necessary service to residents, her hope is that private industry and the public sector can work to prevent waste at the source.
“If we designed waste out of the problem,” Brooks says, “if we lived in a world where these things were returned to their manufacturer, or all of our local things were made in reusable containers and just simply washed and reused, recycling wouldn’t have to be the savior or the Hail Mary that people think of it as.”
Waste is managed in three ways: mitigation, diversion, and prevention. Mitigation includes actions like picking up litter or having your trash hauled away to a landfill, efforts to mitigate the waste that gets into the environment. Recycling and composting are examples of diversion services and help keep some materials in circulation by breaking them down and repurposing them. Many of the services the ReCollective offers are about diversion.
But for Crystal Dreisbach, founder of Don’t Waste Durham, the ultimate goal is prevention: building a network of products and services that keep wasteful materials from being created in the first place.
In 2017, Don’t Waste Durham started the Green-To-Go program. It partnered with other local businesses to provide reusable containers for customers to use when ordering takeout. After a customer finishes their meal, they can return the container to any business participating in the Green-To-Go program. The containers are then washed at a licensed facility and returned to the businesses.
To launch the program, Don’t Waste Durham needed special permitting to create the washing facility. Dreisbach found allies at the Durham County health department, who worked with Dreisbach to come up with a proposal. Through their partnership, the health department and Don’t Waste Durham took their collaboration to the next level, advocating for the recognition of reusables as an industry, and convincing the NC board of health to change the food code to allow reusables, unlocking new potential for the development of a “circular economy” in Durham.
“A huge lesson I learned is that policy and innovation must go together,” Dreisbach says. “A policy cannot be changed unless people have their minds open to a different way, and then that innovation cannot be scaled until the policy passes, so they really need each other.”
At a city council work session last September, the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and Don’t Waste Durham presented a proposal to limit the use of plastic bags at local retailers through a small 10¢ fee at checkout. Nancy Lauer, a staff scientist at the Duke clinic, said that the manufacturing of plastics such as the bags found at grocery stores or containers at fast-food restaurants takes a heavy toll on the health of marginalized communities, and that their convenience is not cheap.
“The plastics that we are suggesting solutions for, these are ones that cannot be recycled,” Lauer said. “If we were to zoom out and look at this full life cycle, it’s really hard to justify their convenience based on the cost that those plastics bear to the low-income and communities of color at the beginning of their life during production and the extraction of oil and gas; during the plastics manufacturing; and at the end of their life, when we dispose of them in the Sampson County landfill.”
Community members raised concerns during the research process about the equitability of the bag tax. Brooks says a 10¢ fee should not be easily dismissed for residents who are already struggling to make ends meet.
“People are like, ‘What’s the big deal, it’s only 10¢ for a bag.’ Well, you’ve never been so poor that if you overdrafted by 10¢ for that single bag, you got charged $35,” says Brooks.
In response, Don’t Waste Durham created the Boomerang Bag program in partnership with Sew Crafty to help alleviate some of those equity concerns. They created a system of reusable bags with recycled textiles from groups like the ReCollective that customers could access for free at checkout to entice them away from choosing plastic. Michelle Nowlin, co-director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, also recommended that the city exempt SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid recipients from paying the bag fee as part of the proposal to the city council.
Unfortunately for advocates, the NC General Assembly preempted the initiative in its own budget proposal just days before the clinic’s presentation, restricting municipalities across North Carolina from implementing rules like the plastic bag tax. Don’t Waste Durham still piloted the reusable bag program with two stores in Durham: Save-A-Lot (which has since closed) and Kings Red and White. But the interference from the NCGA restricted how progressive the city could be with its waste management solutions.
“Not only are we disappointed and frustrated with this action, but we’re also very frustrated and disappointed for the city, because you still bear the responsibility for managing waste,” Nowlin said. “That is a statutory mandate and part of your duties to protect the public health and welfare of the community members. The General Assembly is now poised to make you do that with both hands tied behind your back and prevent you from taking actions to reduce waste and protect the interests of the community.”
Even with this setback, the City of Durham is making strides to bring reuse to its own operations. Last year, city staff began a feasibility study through a partnership with the nonprofit FUSE Executive Fellowship Program to build a state-of-the-art recycling facility called the Reuse Hub Project. The facility would allow the department to tackle the use of disposables across Durham.
Katie Hunt is the program coordinator for the FUSE fellowship. She holds a doctorate in environmental communication and political economy from the University of Utah and has worked for decades as an advocate for environmental justice and equitable sustainability.
Last fall, Hunt published an analysis based on feedback from the community and data from the city about how to approach building a circular economy with equity as the core value. She says that, unlike other communities who have introduced the concept of a circular economy, equity has been a top priority for Durham.
“Very few of them center equity in terms of the orchestration of those activities and the participation of frontline communities in developing the projects and then benefiting from the outcomes of those activities,” Hunt says. “And it is truly a marker of distinction for the City of Durham that they have centered that commitment in the strategic planning around the circular economy initiative from the beginning.”
The Reuse Hub would provide the City of Durham with a suite of tools to increase its capacity for managing waste products. Operation of the facilities and development of new sustainable products that would be used throughout the community are potential jobs for Durham residents, Hunt says. Job training and certification programs would be available through partnerships with local organizations like Durham Technical Community College and Step Up Durham, as well as the city’s office of economic and workforce development.
“This is going to require systems change, and that systems change requires multiple entities working in tandem … in that coordinated way,” Hunt says.
Activists are often despondent about the effect of individual shifts in behavior when it comes to climate change. The root cause of the issue is with major corporations, like plastic manufacturers, whose business practices contribute the bulk of emissions in the United States. But folks like Brooks and Dreisbach are confident that changes at the local level will have an upstream impact on the ways corporations conduct their business, and that it’s important to teach residents about the agency they have in effecting change in their own communities.
Dreisbach notes that Durham Public Schools uses more than 50,000 disposable items, such as lunch trays and plastic utensils, each day. She says that the amount of waste the school system creates sends the wrong message to students who are actively learning about sustainability during class.
“That’s insane,” Dreisbach says. “And it’s ridiculous for teachers and Durham Public Schools who are telling Don’t Waste Durham that it’s not just the endocrine disruptors that are [messing] up our children in the schools. It’s the moral harm we are doing to them. Because they’re in class learning to care for the earth. And then they go to lunch. It’s like messing up the development of their sense of what integrity is and trust in systems and adults. They’re forever screwed. Is that what we want for our kids?”
Correction: Crystal Dreisbach was the sole founder of Don’t Waste Durham. Don’t Waste Durham partnered with Sew Crafty (not the ReCollective) on the Boomerang Bag program, using donated textiles from groups like the ReCollective. The story has been corrected.
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