ST. LOUIS, MO – September 28, 2026 (STL.News) A major change to St. Louis’ recycling program has created an unexpected opportunity for a locally owned small business that is selling something the city no longer provides to many residents: convenient recycling pickup.
Recycle With Me, founded by St. Louis entrepreneur Erik Kozlowski, provides residential recycling pickup for customers who don’t want to haul their recyclables to one of the city’s drop-off locations.
The business emerged after St. Louis decided to discontinue recycling collection from blue alley dumpsters in August 2025.
While city officials say that decision has substantially reduced contamination and lowered costs, it also changed how thousands of residents living in neighborhoods served by alley dumpsters recycle.
Instead of putting recyclables into an alley container, those residents must now transport their materials to designated recycling drop-off locations.
Kozlowski saw a business opportunity in that inconvenience.
Local entrepreneur fills recycling gap
Recycle With Me operates on a straightforward subscription model.
Customers can pay $45 per month for recycling collection every other week or $58 per month for weekly service, according to St. Louis Magazine. Customers can add plastic-bag recycling for $5 per month, while certain corded electronics can be collected for an additional charge.
The company does not require customers to enter long-term contracts.
Kozlowski told the publication that Recycle With Me has grown to more than 25 customers and remains essentially a one-person operation.
The concept isn’t to build a competing recycling processing operation.
Instead, Recycle With Me is effectively selling transportation and convenience.
The company collects recyclable materials from participating households and transports them to designated locations within the city’s recycling system.
That distinction makes the business particularly interesting.
St. Louis continues providing the recycling infrastructure. Recycle With Me has created a private service around the part of the process that became the resident’s responsibility after alley recycling collection ended.
St. Louis ended alley recycling in 2025
Mayor Cara Spencer’s administration announced in August 2025 that the city would discontinue alley recycling collection.
At the time, the city said recycling collected through alley dumpsters was costing nearly five times as much per ton as ordinary trash disposal.
Contamination was an even bigger problem.
More than half of the material residents placed in alley recycling dumpsters was ultimately rejected because the loads contained trash and other unacceptable materials.
The city converted the blue alley recycling dumpsters to regular trash dumpsters and directed affected residents to recycling drop-off locations.
Households receiving recycling service through individual blue roll carts were not affected in the same way and continued receiving curbside recycling collection.
The decision was significant because it shifted responsibility for transporting recyclables from city government to residents in alley-served neighborhoods.
That shift ultimately created the opening Recycle With Me is attempting to fill.
City reports major recycling improvement
There is another side to the story: St. Louis says eliminating alley recycling has substantially improved its recycling program.
CityStat data published by St. Louis indicates recycling contamination declined by roughly 85% during the first six months following the change.
The percentage of collected material successfully recycled increased from approximately 37% under the previous system to as much as 78%, according to city data.
The city also estimated the change saved more than $450,000 during its first six months.
St. Louis expanded its network to 46 recycling drop-off locations as part of the transition.
More recent figures have placed the successful recycling rate at roughly 75% to 76%, still considerably higher than the rate reported before the alley program ended.
Those numbers complicate the argument for simply restoring the former system.
The new system appears to be producing cleaner recycling streams at a substantially lower cost to taxpayers. Its main disadvantage is the inconvenience for residents who no longer have recycling collection immediately outside their homes.
That’s precisely where a small private company has found its market.
Residents pay for convenience
St. Louis residents already pay a monthly comprehensive waste-services fee that covers municipal trash and recycling services, along with services such as yard waste and bulk collection.
Recycle With Me’s customers are paying an additional $45 or $58 monthly because they value having someone collect their recycling and transport it for them.
At $58 per month, weekly service amounts to $696 annually.
That means the company isn’t attempting to beat the municipal recycling system on price.
It is selling convenience.
The distinction matters because it shows how changes in public services can create opportunities for small businesses without necessarily replacing the government service itself.
For residents with vehicles and convenient access to a drop-off site, transporting recycling themselves costs considerably less.
For people who are busy, don’t own an appropriate vehicle, have mobility limitations or simply value doorstep collection, paying someone else to handle that task can be attractive.
Kozlowski appears to have discovered enough of those customers to establish a small but growing operation.
Business grew largely through neighborhoods
Kozlowski reportedly obtained his first customer within about 30 minutes of launching the service.
Rather than relying heavily on digital advertising, he has promoted Recycle With Me through neighborhood meetings, flyers, door hangers, and word of mouth.
That hyperlocal approach fits the business.
Customer density is particularly important to businesses built around pickup and delivery routes. The more customers an operator can serve within a relatively small geographic area, the less time and fuel are required between stops.
For Recycle With Me, growth therefore isn’t simply about signing up more households.
Where those customers live can be nearly as important as how many customers the company has.
A cluster of subscribers in the same St. Louis neighborhood could be far more efficient to serve than the same number of customers scattered across the city.
Founder has previous business experience
Recycle With Me isn’t Kozlowski’s first entrepreneurial venture.
Better Business Bureau records identify him as president of Autos on the Move LLC, a St. Louis-area automobile business dating to 2006.
Kozlowski has also worked in automobile sales, including with locally based Lou Fusz Automotive Network.
His latest venture is considerably different from selling and importing vehicles, but it follows a familiar small-business strategy: identify a service people need and determine whether they’re willing to pay someone else to provide it.
Recycle With Me had already attracted some public attention before the latest coverage.
Nine PBS featured the operation in May during reporting related to St. Louis’ recovery from the May tornado and changes affecting recycling services.
City is aware of private recycling service
One potentially important question is how a private recycling pickup company fits into a municipal system whose drop-off locations are intended for St. Louis residents.
City recycling locations are generally designated for recyclable material generated by city residents rather than commercial recycling generated by businesses or institutions.
Recycle With Me’s model differs because it transports material collected from participating city households rather than generating the recyclable material itself.
The city is also aware that the company is operating.
St. Louis Chief Operating Officer Ben Jonsson told St. Louis Magazine that he knew about Recycle With Me and indicated residents could use the service.
That provides an unusual example of a small private business operating alongside, rather than directly competing against, a municipal service.
City considers help for residents with disabilities
The private service could eventually encounter some overlap with another initiative being considered by city government.
Officials have been discussing ways to assist residents with physical limitations who cannot easily transport recycling to drop-off locations.
Jonsson said the city has been working with Ward 7 Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier on a possible program to help residents with disabilities.
Depending on how such a program is structured, qualifying residents could eventually receive transportation assistance without paying a private company.
That wouldn’t necessarily eliminate Recycle With Me’s market. The company’s potential customer base extends beyond residents who physically cannot transport recycling to people who simply don’t want to spend the time doing it themselves.
Small business born from a policy change
Recycle With Me remains a very small operation.
With just over two dozen reported customers, it would be premature to describe the company as a major recycling provider or rapidly expanding enterprise.
But its emergence provides an interesting example of how changes in government services can create highly specific opportunities for local entrepreneurs.
St. Louis eliminated alley recycling primarily because the system was expensive and heavily contaminated.
By the city’s measurements, the decision has largely accomplished its objectives. Recycling contamination has fallen dramatically, a much larger percentage of collected material is actually being recycled, and hundreds of thousands of dollars have been saved.
But greater efficiency came with a tradeoff.
For many residents, recycling became less convenient.
Kozlowski turned that inconvenience into a business.
Instead of building another recycling processing facility or competing directly with the city, Recycle With Me inserted itself into one small part of the recycling chain: getting material from a resident’s home to the city’s collection system.
Whether the business can scale beyond a one-person operation will depend on customer demand, route density, operating costs, and how St. Louis’ recycling policies evolve.
For now, however, it represents something increasingly familiar in local entrepreneurship: a small company finding revenue not by inventing an entirely new service, but by making an existing one easier to use.
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