There's something illuminating about standing on the floor of a transfer station. The scale of it - the noise, the volume, the sheer quantity of material moving through - makes abstract conversations about waste feel very concrete, very fast.
Over the past few weeks, we visited the Renton and Shoreline Transfer Stations in King County. Thank you to Nina Olivier and Cynthia Adams from King County’s Solid Waste Division for the in-depth tours!
A Problem Both Government and Private Sector Are Working to Solve
These visits didn't happen in isolation. Both King County and the City of Seattle have recognized that the current linear model of waste is unsustainable; King County's Re+ program is built around keeping materials out of Cedar Hills Landfill (expected to reach capacity by 2040) and Seattle Public Utilities’ Zero Waste strategic plan has explicit goals around waste prevention and reuse. Both institutions are actively looking for partners to help them reach their targets.
Gone has been in conversation with representatives from both King County and the City of Seattle about integrating with existing waste infrastructure to capture municipal solid waste that still has useful life — before it's gone for good. The transfer station visits served as a chance to see the problem from the inside and understand how we can best support waste diversion.
What We Saw at Renton & Shoreline
The Renton facility processes over 700,000 tons of waste. Of that, only about 5% gets recycled; the rest is bound for the Cedar Hills Landfill. The Shoreline facility had a noticeable larger volume of goods flowing through, with built-out areas for mattress, appliance, and styrofoam recycling.
One detail that stuck with us across both visits: both facilities use old mattresses as squeegees to push material around the floor. Practical, resourceful, and a little surreal.
Unfortunately, a meaningful portion of what arrives at both transfer stations still has real useful life remaining: furniture, appliances, electronics, and household goods that someone decided weren't worth keeping, but that someone else might have wanted before the items got mixed with other waste. The transfer station isn't primarily a sorting facility. Its job is throughput; 90% of the floor has to be cleared every single day, with limited infrastructure available to pause and ask whether an item could go somewhere better.
Current recycling opportunities are largely oriented around self-sorting, a model that requires incentive, effort, and knowledge from the person or company bringing items in, and therefore puts limits on the proportion of items saved from the landfill.
Recycling at both the Renton and the Shoreline Transfer Stations is reliant on self-sorting by individuals or junk haulers into these containers.
King County deserves credit here. They're doing more than most, and they are recognized as a leader in waste diversion nationally. However, even a well-designed self-sort system has a ceiling.
The Insight That Keeps Coming Back to Us
Visiting these facilities confirmed something we'd suspected but needed to see up close: by the time materials reach a transfer station, the window for recovery has largely closed. Reusable items get mixed with unrecoverable ones, the floor clears daily, and the operational reality of running a high-throughput facility doesn't leave much room for sorting and redirecting.
The implication is straightforward: The most important intervention happens before items arrive.
Gone is built to operate at that earlier moment. We meet you in your home, not at the transfer station. We handle the logistics of getting goods with remaining useful life into the right channels - retail, resale, nonprofit partners - before they ever reach a point where recovery isn't possible, saving people the time and effort of figuring it out themselves.
King County and the City of Seattle are doing the hard work of building the policy and infrastructure frameworks. Gone's role is to be the operational layer that makes reuse practical at scale. We're proud to be in ongoing conversation with the people leading that work, and are looking forward to building more of the circular supply chain in the Pacific Northwest together.