By Reid Fryhover, Co-Founder

Currently at SUDS

This page documents where we are in building North Central Washington's first regional plastics recovery system. I update it as milestones happen. Building industrial infrastructure doesn't produce daily headlines, but every step here represents real progress: equipment acquired, partnerships signed, plastic pulled out of the ground.

2024: The Garage Phase

SUDS started the way a lot of things start: with a problem nobody was solving, a garage, and a refusal to accept that the answer was "nothing."

In 2024, I started digging into what was actually happening with plastic waste across North Central Washington. The short answer: nothing. There is no plastics processing infrastructure in this region. Every pound of it, agricultural film, packing material, consumer plastics, goes straight into the landfill. Millions of pounds a year, buried.

So I started experimenting. I learned quickly that there are far more types of plastic than the seven numbers stamped on a container, that industrial shredding equipment is expensive, and that different plastics behave very differently under heat and pressure. I bought a used shredder, retrofitted it in my shop, and started testing what was possible at the lowest possible cost.

One early discovery stuck: certain plastic blends can be incorporated into concrete without meaningfully reducing compressive strength. A small win, but it proved the thing that mattered. This material has value. Someone just has to do something with it.

2025: Proof That It Works

With a proof of concept in hand, I started knocking on doors.

Douglas County Solid Waste agreed to let us take sorted PET and HDPE bales. That partnership taught us something important very fast: we could outgrow our equipment almost immediately. My retrofitted shredder could only process about five pounds an hour. Not exactly industrial scale.

The bigger breakthrough came from agriculture. Wenatchee is the Apple Capital of the World, and the tree fruit industry generates enormous volumes of plastic film from packing operations. I connected with Stemilt Growers, one of the largest tree fruit companies in the region, and learned they produce roughly 600,000 pounds of plastic waste per year in film alone. The exact type of plastic most recyclers refuse to touch.

We found a recycling partner willing to accept the material. Between October 2025 and January 2026, SUDS diverted over 210,000 pounds of plastic from the landfill. For a company running on zero outside funding, that number meant something. We also saved Stemilt a meaningful amount on their disposal costs, which validated the core thesis: growers want this problem solved, and they will work with whoever can actually do it.

2026: Building the Real Thing

Early in 2026, our recycling partner informed us they could no longer accept material. Tightening contamination standards and falling commodity prices made the economics of shipping film to a third party for processing untenable. Recycled plastic film had dropped to roughly a penny per pound.

That moment clarified what we had been moving toward anyway: if plastics recovery is going to work in this region, the processing has to happen here. Not shipped to someone else. Not dependent on another company's market conditions. Here.

Stemilt stepped up again, providing facility space at no cost so we could store material while we built the next phase. We acquired a shredder and injection molder with our partners at Amped Fabrication, and started designing a full in-house processing operation capable of handling millions of pounds per year.

The lesson was simple and final: plastics recovery in North Central Washington requires local processing infrastructure. Nobody else is building it. So we are.

Where We Stand Today

Everything you see at SUDS has been built without a single dollar of outside funding:

Facility secured in Wenatchee at no lease cost. 650,000 lbs/year in committed feedstock from Stemilt Growers and Douglas County. Over 250,000 lbs of plastic diverted from the landfill to date. Shredder and injection molder owned and operational. A seat on the Port of Douglas County's Industrial Symbiosis board, working on regional resource recovery strategy. Active support from the City of Wenatchee and regional government partners.

We are now raising capital to deploy a full-scale inline processing line capable of handling over 4 million pounds of plastic per year. That equipment turns us from a collection and sorting operation into a manufacturer, producing recycled pellets and finished injection-molded products from material that would otherwise sit in a landfill for centuries.

The problem is real. The feedstock is committed. The facility is secured. The equipment is quoted. Now we build.