By Reid Fryhover, Co-Founder

Currently at SUDS:

This page documents the development of SUDS and the milestones achieved as we build a regional plastics recovery system in North Central Washington. I do my best to keep this part of the website as current as possible so you can keep track of our progress. I wish I could update this page daily with exciting news, however building the infrastructure for plastic recovery takes time. Here is where we are so far:

2024: Discovery Phase

SUDS started the way a lot of things start around here. With a problem nobody was solving and a garage.

In 2024, I began researching what could actually be done with the plastic waste piling up across North Central Washington. The answer, it turned out, was not much. There is no plastics processing infrastructure in this region. Every pound of it goes to the landfill.

I started experimenting. I learned quickly that there are far more types of plastic than the 1-7 you see on the bottom of 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, and started testing what I could do with shredded plastic at the lowest possible cost.

One early discovery stuck: certain plastic blends can be incorporated into concrete without meaningfully reducing PSI strength. It was a small win, but it proved something important. This material has value if you know what to do with it.

2025: Validation

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 how fast we could outgrow our equipment. My retrofitted shredder could only process about five pounds an hour.

The bigger breakthrough came from agriculture. This 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 and learned they produce roughly 600,000 pounds of plastic waste per year in just film. The type of plastic most recyclers don't want to touch.

We found a recycling partner willing to accept the material, and between October 2025 and January 2026, SUDS diverted 210,460 pounds of plastic from the landfill. For a company with no outside funding, that was a milestone I'm proud of. We also saved Stemilt a substantial amount on their disposal costs, which validated the core idea: growers want this problem solved, and they'll partner with whoever can do it.

2026: Infrastructure

Early in 2026, our recycling partner informed us they could no longer accept material due to tightening contamination standards and falling commodity prices. Recycled plastic film had dropped to roughly a penny per pound. The economics of shipping material to a third party for processing simply didn't work.

That moment clarified something we had been moving toward anyway: for plastics recovery to work in this region, the processing has to happen here. Not shipped out. Not dependent on a third party's market conditions.

Stemilt stepped up again, providing us facility space at no cost to store material while we built the next phase. We acquired a plastic shredder and injection molder with our partners at Amped Fabrication, and began designing a full in-house processing operation..

These experiences made one thing clear: for recycling to work in NCW, plastic must be processed locally. In just four months of operation with one plastic producer, SUDS diverted 210,460 pounds of plastic waste from the landfill, proving that a regional recovery system is both necessary and achievable.

Current Status

Everything you see at SUDS has been built without a dollar of outside funding. Here is what we have in place:

• Facility secured in Wenatchee at no lease cost

• 650,000 lbs/year in committed feedstock from Stemilt Growers and Douglas County

• 250,000+ lbs of plastic diverted from the landfill to date

• Shredder and injection molder owned and operational

• A seat on the Port's Industrial Symbiosis board, working on regional resource recovery

• 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 processing over 4 million pounds of plastic per year. That equipment turns us from a collection operation into a manufacturer, producing recycled pellets and finished injection-molded products from material that would otherwise sit in a landfill.

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