New Show, Recycled Topic

That's of course, reducing, reusing and recycling. We were talking about the future of trash and is recycling part of that future and where does it play it's part and how important is it and does it make sense? Uh? And some of the answers are are might you know they might surprise you. Um, it's not even across the board. And also it's something that's constantly changing due to our improvements in the technology and processes. Let me guess it's

for hippies. You shouldn't do it, according to and teller, Yeah, what you should do is go out consuming. That doesn't surprise me. They had a they had a show. Um, I'm not sure if I can actually say the title of the show was was the name? That was the name of the show? And um, and they had an episode on recycling in which Pen in particular came down very harshly on it. Yeah, well, I mean most of it. And there there are certain arguments you can make against

recycling certain products. I think a lot of that again will change over time due to improvements in tech and processes. But to really, first of all, I mean, let's talk about what recycling is. Obviously, it's it's for those who just have never heard the term Welcome to Earth. Recycling is, of course taking material that you normally would just throw away and and uh and breaking it down to be reused in some form further down the line, whether it's to create more of the same product as what you

were currently using or something entirely different. I think part of the key of understanding recycling is the idea that there's some reprocessing involved, right, that it's not just reusing, saying right, right, right, It's not taking a jar that you've used and putting something different in it, hopefully after you've washed it. Um that that would be reusing. By the way, if anyone comes over to my house for any sort of party or whatever, you're going to be

drinking out of Mason jars, I'm not a hipster. It's not that I think that that's a cool thing. You're just Southern and that's what you have. I buy a lot of pickled vegetables, and then I think I want to keep using these jars, and so that's that's my glassware for the most part. I mean it just it is. I got to collect your urine for the apocalypse somehow, that's right. Well, I'll start on my urine later. I'm

collecting other people's right now. And it turns out that it's a lot harder to convince people than I first expect, like biometric falsification, yeah, or just throwing at aliens just in case that happens to be their weakness. So recycling has been has it has been used actually for for for really for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Um, going going back to when people were making metal tools, realized I don't really like this one. Let's melt it

down and make it again. Um, technically is recycling. Got that tool or sword or etcetera. Right, Right, So if you've if you folded in a thousand times and major katana for your end of Days duel against the Kurgan, you know, yeah, or if you just were, I guess, if you were to beat your swords into plashhairs, right, recycling. So, but but really that's not you know, that's that's one form of recycling, but it's not really what we think of when we're talking recycling. It's not the industry level

thing that we've got going on today. Yeah, there was a I mean, obviously there was a big push to recycling back in the thirties and forties, right right, well even even before that, around the turn of the century is is when a bunch of industries started getting together

and um processing scraps. World War One was when this became much more important because because because materials became so scarce due to the global war efforts that uh, some companies began rendering garbage to recover grease and make make tankage out of the rest of it. Tankage being um uh non fat related proteins, usually from from animal parts

that can be used for fertilizer um and uh. And then yeah, the through through the nineteen thirties, during the Great Depression here in America certainly, and hard economic times in many other places, conservation recycling became so important due to I mean a lot of people made most of their income by collecting items and selling them for scrap. And then you get to World War Two and there's

more recycling efforts for the war effort. Again, Uh, you had fewer people to work on things because you had so much of the workforce sent off to war that you know, you didn't have as many people to actually get the raw materials you usually would need to produce. And in wartime production is a big part of it, right, I mean everything from the stuff you would think of like vehicles and weapons and ammunition that sort of stuff.

Two things that you might not necessarily imagine, just to keep everyone who's still, you know, away from the fighting supplied with the stuff that they need. Boots did you need to make in World War two? Lots? Yeah, rubber and UH and nylon items that were made that were used at the time to make lots of common clothing items wound up being used in Uh. Nylon was used for parachutes for the war effort, and UH, and of

course rubber for tires and yeah. Actually, the fact that they switched from like DuPont was making nylon stockings, they stopped making nylon stockings in order to make materials for the war effort, and apparently that caused a bunch of um well they were called nylon riots when when DuPont went back to creating nylon stockings, there was apparently a run on stores because I rum didn't mean to make a run joke. Boy, that was a pun. That was complete puns. We're so yeah, that was that again, And

that was sort of changing gears for production. But it also meant that repurposing this material for something else. Repurposing and recycling was so big during the wars. It was more far reaching than than most people today really realize. UM. For for example, during the UH during the Victorian era, fancy cemeteries, UM every cemetery plot would have these gorgeous wrought iron fencings around them. And during the Two World Wars, you won't find those today basically anywhere because all of

them were melted down during the wars. And so you know it's its People would picnic there. It was very nice, you know, cemetery, that's what you do. Yeah, sure, but doing yere in Atlanta to Oakland Cemetery does it all the time. That is where I learned about this. By the way, visit Oakland there you go. Also, so you get up to like the nineteen seventies, that's really when

we got into the environmentalism movement. So recycling up until the nineteen seventies was more about conserving resources for use for particular efforts, like the World War effort. When you say resources, you mean the raw materials themselves, like the thing that's being reprocessed. Right, it was. It was recycling because in order for us to meet our needs to do them. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't you know. It

wasn't a save the environment kind of thing. It was we need more X. The best way to do it is to pull up a bunch of Y, melt it down and turn them into X. Right. Right. And in fact, immediately after the war, especially here in the States, we went through that economic boom where people were very um conspicuously consuming, and it became argue, we're still there, are more conspicuous than others, especially at the time, by pair of glasses buying new stuff. Jonathan just got his Google glass.

It's very exciting, um or our Google glass. It's all of ours, you can share, come on over. But yeah, it wasn't until the first Earth Day in nine seventy and um in three was when the first curb side recycling program got off the ground here in the States. Um and and then through through the nineties, I think is when it started really picking up, you know, due to a Captain, Planet and Gully. Tim Curry played the bad guy in that he did you know? I laughed?

But Captain and Planet made an impression on me, did he? I think? So? Were you? Were you a planet tier? I guess you know, I never got a ring. But see, for me, it's always I just go back to the image of the Native American with the one tear going down the cheek to avoid littering. That's that's where my environmentalism comes from. Isn't it funny All these issues kind of get blurred together, like waste waste management, littering, landfills, recycling.

But it'll be worth us talking about exactly what the real benefits of recycling are. Well, first I kind of curious, like how does it happen? Like how does recycling work? Well? Yeah, that's interesting. So there are um okay, well let's start at your house. I guess. Okay, so you've got a bunch of recyclables and they'll be say glass bottles and uh, plastic containers, paper products like cardboard and newspaper, and cans, aluminum cans, steel cans, tin um. And you want to

get all this stuff recycled, Well there are two. There's a big distinction you want to make right at the beginning, which is sorted versus unsorted um, And different municipalities I think will deal with that in different ways. Like some people require sorted, and that makes sense because it's much easier to process when the recycling a drives pre sorted to the processing facility. But what I've read is that that also lowers participation because you're putting the burden on

the person and for some people that's just too much trouble. Yeah, they don't they don't want to go through the effort of sorting through the stuff that they want to recycle and put it into one of five different bins or whatever. Um. So it also just makes it it makes it less convenient for the person. And the sad fact is is the more inconvenient it is, the lower the participation is

going to be. Yeah, So these facilities get more materials overall if they allow mixed mixed mixed materials material Yeah, yeah, but then that makes it more difficult to actually to actually recycle the stuff, right, and they sort it. Interestingly,

we're getting a lot better at that. Um. So, the so you put you take these mixed materials and you have say curb curbside pickup, so a tryan spur truck comes along along a route and and picks up all the materials and takes them to a place called materials recovery facility. And from there you essentially put all your materials on a conveyor belt and from here. It's not the same at every facility. Um But so I'm just gonna give kind of a standard view of some things

I've seen. Um One thing that's going to vary between all these facilities is the level of automation versus manual sorting. Um So, more advanced facilities have fewer human workers working to take these things out and have better processes for sorting automatically. But so, usually the first thing will happen is there's some kind of initial purge where obvious trash is removed because you know, what, do you know, people put pizza in their recycling and stuff that they can't take.

Um So you try to remove that at the beginning, and then usually after that, one of the first things they want to do is remove glass, because glass is kind of a different animal than most of these other things we recycle, and so glass will be moving along conveyor belt, and if it's not removed manually, it can be removed automatically by like a raking mechanism that separates based on weight and shape, or there can be gravity sorting, so that there's a conveyor belt moving sort of upward

at an angle with enough friction to carry up plastic and paper products, right, but glass rolls down off of it. And so once the glass is separated, that's usually crushed up into a constituency of shards called cullet, and that that can be used for all kinds of different things.

But most of the rest of the products apart from glass, eventually what the goal is to bail them, like hey, um, And so after glass is removed, they'll usually sort out paper products and they can do that by mechanical action or by hand. Um. And you separate those out and take them to a fiber bailer and bail them up together. Uh. Steel cans are often separated by magnets and that's interested. The UH conveyor belt will just pass under a very

powerful magnet just sucks them straight up. But then you've got a problem that you've got all these aluminum cans and these other alloys that aren't their non ferrest materials, so they're not attracted to magnets. So one of the popular ways of dealing with that these days is you have something called an eddy current separator, and that's this powerful magnetic rotor that generates a field that blasts non

ferrost metals off in some direction. It creates a separate magnetic field within the can itself, and UH and and and that magnetic field will be at at odds with with the field being generated by the device. We'll just pop it right off the belt. Interesting, so you've got so say you've separated everything else by now, and you've got non ferros metals, and you've got plastic and they're

rolling along. The plastic will just sit there. But when the the aluminum cans pass over this thing, they shoot, shoot, you know, fly away, I guess into a big basket or whatever you use, take them to the bailor smash them down into a cube. Um, those will be ready and then finally, usually you're gonna have plastic, and that's sort of according to type. So you've probably seen like number one plastic, number two plastics, like type two plastics

like milk jugs and laundry detergent jugs, that kind of thing. Yeah, And those things are separated into different groups for ease of reprocessing um and uh. And that can be done by hand or automatically by things like they're sort of optical field separators. So they shoot out some beam of light that penetrates a different plastics in different ways and use a sensor to to figure out what bits uh

exactly which. Yeah, as it passes over like a like a gap in the conveyor um or or something like that, it will use air jets to to to shoot out

the ones that it wants to. Yeah. So then at the end, and so you got your plastic leftover and smash that into bales, and then at the end, your final product is you've got glass color, bales of plastic, bales of paper products, bales of aluminum, bales of steel um and all of these things are then sold to manufacturers or I guess really whoever wants them, and you can buy recycled materials and just go pay for a

bale of steel. Yeah, and in fact, um, let's talk about some of the stuff that can be made from recycled materials. Now, there's some stuff that you know, is you've probably heard of things like you know, made tires made out of recycled materials, even pavement made from recycled materials. Uh. Typically a lot of the stuff ends up making more

of whatever it was before. So, for example, a lot of paper, recycled paper ends up going into things like paper plates, napkins, paper towels, uh, that sort of stuff. So a lot of that reclaimed paper just becomes more paper products. Same thing with aluminium, a lot of like you know, the odds of an aluminium can becoming something like a car frame are low. It can happen. There are manufacturers out there that will use recycled aluminum as

part of their materials for designing this stuff. But it's far more likely that the aluminium can you tossing the recycling is going to become a new aluminium can. Glass some glass depending. Glass is tricky because glass comes in a lot of different kinds as well, Like you can have glass that's and colors or you can have clear glass that can change things up. Often glass will get down cycled. Now, down cycle means that you convert this into material that is slightly less valuable than what the

raw material was or what the original product was. So, for example, a glass jar, you might throw that out in in recycling or whatever, and it gets re cycled as part of uh something that's made out of fiberglass, and by weight, it's less valuable. That's why we call it down cycling, because it's moved down a level. Um, So that will uh, that's fairly common to for a glass to go into things like fiberglass. But then there's

some kind of cool stuff. I'm going to mention some specific companies too, just for some sort of nifty products that are made of recycled materials. For example, Uh, there's a group called Keens Harvest Bags. They make like messenger bags, okay, but they make them out of recycled air bags from cars. Are actually really cool. Uh, you know, they just kind of a nifty way of reusing this material that otherwise

might not ever be used. There's violence, what's that I just imagined getting a messenger bag that had like blood or I'm pretty sure that wouldn't happen. I think that might be bad press for the company. Um, I appalled gized to Keene's harvest bill. No, I'm not that would happen. I know, I know, it's just the first know, I'm right there with you. U. There's vinyl luxe. Vinyl Luxe uses uh something that has beloved to me old vinyl records. So some old vinyl records are beyond the uh they've

just they've passed their prime right there. There might be scratches, there might be some sort of warping, and anyway, it makes the music less than or whatever was recorded on

them less than interesting or pleasurable to listen to. And so what vinyl X does is it takes old vinyl records that are you know, kind of messed up and then creates things like bowls or clocks, uh, ornaments and other stuff and uh, anything that they don't use, like any scraps that are left over from their their projects gets sent to a plant in Nashville actually, and all of that those scraps are melted down to create new vinyl records, to help to be the material for new

vinyl records, so nothing gets wasted There is another company called Looped Works, and they have used recycled neoprene, nylon, vinyl polyester leather to create all sorts of different products, like like electronics covers, like a cover case for you know, a tablet or something. Uh, some really cool designs coming out of them. And then there's a company called Moving Comfort like this one a lot. They remove chemicals from coffee grounds and turn it into yarn and then we've

cloth out of this stuffy fibrous shirts. It's actually the chemicals from coffee grounds. So they're making a synthetic yarn from various chemicals they extract from coffee grounds and they turn that into yarn and they use that to make clothing. So companies called Moving Comfort, you can look them up. Pretty cool stuff. It's pretty pretty Eight. There's a there's recycled Bikes, which is out of here's a here's a shocker. I know you guys are gonna be amazed when you

hear this. Portland, Oregon Recycled Bikes which make bikes out of recycled aluminum um. Their seats are made out of renewable cork. Uh right now. They also are belt driven bikes, not chain driven because they said that the belt driven ones are easier to maintain. Um. They say that their goal is one day to have a recycled materials bike. Right now it's not quite there, but that's their goal, is to to just make bikes that are completely made

out of recycled materials. Up in Vancouver, the city is experimenting on creating new types of pavement that is made up of wax partially from recycled plastic. So they're taking this plastic in and they're processing it into this wax to go into new pavement production, which is kind of neat um. So, yeah, that's just some examples. I mean, obviously there are tons of different examples of ways to use recycled materials. Uh. And you know what new products

you can make from recycled materials. So let's kind of talk a little bit about some statistics like what is actually getting recycled and how much is being recycled. Uh. Now, we're going to be citing some factors from a report done by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is which is here in the United States, and we should also mention obviously a lot of the stuff we're talking about is

very US centric because that's where we are located. There are obviously lots of different recycling companies and facilities around the entire world, but we we are focusing mainly on the US because that's really where we can get the most recent information, uh, the in a very easy way since we happen to live here, it makes it pretty convenient. But the report we're looking at is citing statistics from two thousand eleven, which was the most recent information that

we could find. And according to that report, of all UH newspaper slash mechanical papers were recovered meaning recycled, fifty seven percent of yard trimmings were recovered. Thirty of metals were were recycled. Uh so you know, you see that this number is going down. Glass there was even less um and and plastic is a little weird too. But by recycling the metals, there was actually seven point five

million tons of metal recycled in two thousand eleven. According to the e p A, we eliminated twenty million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which totals more than twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide. And again according to them, they say that that's about equivalent to removing four million cars from the road. For an entire year. So, I mean this is showing that there can be a real impact

these programs. If you participate, you can actually really help to reduce in greenhouse gasses because the amount of energy needed to go into recycling some of these materials, not all of them, but some of them is so much less than what it would take for you to create a new product from raw virgin material that you are saving quite a bit of energy and as a result, emitting fewer carbon carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. UM. So you're doing lots of good work all along the way.

But that's that's kind of like the basic lowdown on recycling. I mean, it's a it's a big deal. It's very much down to individual participation as well as community participation. Clearly, if you live someplace that doesn't have a recycling program, it makes it much more difficult to be part of this. Right. Um, the I think that report said that that overall, UM in two thousand eleven, Americans generated about two and fifty million tons of trash, and UM recycled about thirty four

point seven percent of that. Yeah. Yeah, out of all of the trash that was generated. Uh, usually we were referred to it as a municipal solid waste or msw uh, and it's a very it kind of excludes other types of of trash, things like industrial waste or construction waste that's toxic waste, this sewage. Yeah, these are not included in municipal solids, the kind of stuff that you would see ending up in a typical landfill. And I think that especially in Europe, a lot of other places do

a little bit better than that. But but but again, like Jonathan said, it really depends on the resources here in the States, in your specific community. Of course, it matters vastly by region and what what kind of what kind of plants, what kind of processing plants you have, and whether or not people find it um I mean, you know, fortunately or unfortunately it's it's monetarily based a lot of the time. Well, you know how how worth

it is? Right, if it's cheaper to throw something in a landfill than it is to recycle it, or if it's cheaper to build new products out virgin material than it is to take old material and repurpose it to make this stuff, then from an economic standpoint, you can see why people, companies, organizations pick the landfill option because

it means that they save money in the long run. Now, a lot of us, especially for those of us who feel very environmentally conscious, kind of cringe at that the idea that somehow money can dictate this when you know, you might say, but in the long run, it's much much better for us to do this. That's easy to say. But if if you have to have money to create these systems so that everything works, it's hard. Yeah, you

can't just you can't just wave it away. I mean you have to be willing to put forth that investment. And either that means you know, uh, starting up a private company and trying to make recycling work for you as a business. Uh. And we'll talk more about that in kind of a waste disposal podcast that we'll be doing a little bit later. Or you know, you have to be a government that's willing to go to the citizens and say, you're telling us, you want us to

deal with this this problem. We can do that, but it's going to require this much money. So that means we're going to have to either raise taxes or repurpose money for meant for other products projects or whatever. You know, that's the sad fact of it is that economics are going to play a role, and it really depends from from item to item. Um. That's true. Yeah, and we'll talk about that. You know, I think that that's a

good way of finishing this up. But before we do, I want to mention one other thing about recycling, one other type of recycling, which is e waste, electronic waste, things like computers, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, all this stuff that we use, these electronics that we use. You know, we're kind of uh encouraged to go through these things at a rate that is pretty steep steep. Yeah, Like, so are you saying we shouldn't just throw an old

computer in the dumpster? I'm getting there. I will, I will say that. I will say that, But I was going to say at first that, you know, we we here in the United States in particular, we live in a society where we are encouraged to update our electronics on a frantic basis. For instance, if you are an iPhone user, and you know, if you're an iPhone user, then essentially once a year, you're showing off the brand

new version of the iPhone that is clearly superior. Yeah, the whole thing is designed to get you to buy iPhones, which makes sense. That's the business, right, So I mean, but you know, if, especially in the US, the way that the contract system works for our phones, often those contracts lock you in for two years. So you've got this this level of consumer frustration where I want the new iPhone, but I'm locked into this contract. I'll just

pay to get out of it, or whatever it's. It's it feels like you are obligated to upgrade on a regular basis. I don't mean to pick on Apple. If you're an Android user, that's more like every couple of months, because there's a new Android phone coming from various manufact acturers every few months that is obviously better than the

one you bought last week. And there's that old joke about computers that by the time you get at home, it's absolutely obsolutely yeah exactly, which really isn't that much of a joke. It's pretty true. So we've got so let's let's say that even if you are being as responsible as possible, where you are not buying the newest electronic device every time it comes out, eventually you're going to get to a point where you're going to need

to get rid of some of your electronics. Either they stop working or you've replaced them with something else and you need to remove it from your life. Created an entire wall of dead computers just for example. I'm not that I know anyone. I've got a corner of the garage that is the monitor graveyard. Yeah, and I'm talking about monitors. I'm not talking about displays. I'm talking about

those huge monitors. But yeah, so eventually gonna need to get rid of some of these electronics, right, So what do you do, well, Joe, like you were saying, you don't want to throw them in the trash out. A lot of these electronics have some pretty nasty stuff in them, some toxic materials. I mean things like lead, which is

obviously toxic. Yeah, not not not the music, but like mercury, which is toxic, berylli um, cadmium, other things from the Table of Elements song that Daniel Radcliffe can sing for some reason anyway, Uh yeah, this is this is dangerous stuff and if you threw it away, there's a chance, depending upon where you live, there's a chance that could

end up going to an incinerator. There aren't that many in the United States but in other parts of the world, incinerators are big business, and it would release this stuff in and you would have to deal with it then, because if it went out into the environment, it could

cause some real health hazards. In fact, in China that's a huge problem because there are some major uh E waste reclamation centers in China, and reclamation by that, I mean they're trying to get anything useful out of these uh these electronic devices that they can, and then they burn everything else and it tends to release lots of toxic materials that can go on to create severe health hazards and a really negative environmental impact in the surrounding area.

So E waste is one of those things that needs to be handled very carefully. There are actually quite a few programs out there that allow you to donate your device so that can then be refurbished and sold again. So that means it extends the lifetime of that device and give someone else who wants it that opportunity to

own it. Now. In that case, one thing I would stress to everybody is if it's any sort of device that contains personal information, you want to make certain that you wipe all that personal information off before you donate it. There are a lot of organizations out there that will do this, or at least they say that they do that, that that's one of their their standards operating juice. It's

obviously an important part. Personally, I would never hand over anything unless I was relatively certain that I had wiped it clean. Uh. Just as an aside, I bought my Xbox three sixty refurbished and it had the the gamer tag information of the previous owner still on there because he or she had never bothered to wipe that from the Xbox. Uh. Not to say that I would necessarily have done anything about that, like logged in as that person and done something nefarious. But if I had been

someone else, maybe I would have. I'm not that kind of guy. So what I did was the first thing I did, was I wiped it clean so that I wouldn't have any of that access to that person's account at all. Reformatting the driver is the really important thing to do there because a lot of the especially um services, like if you have Netflix or something on your Xbox, will retain your information for a shocking period of time after you've contacted the company about your stolen Xbox to

tell them to take down that bit from any previous machines. Yeah, so, so just word of warning, you know, and you know, do some research. If you're going to donate some of your or or if you want to recycle some of your electronics, do some research out there and make sure that whatever outlet you're going to use as a reputable one. Um,

that's always a good thing. They're they're more and more of those rising up because people are trying to be more responsible with this sort of approach, which is that's admirable. Just make sure that you know the one that you're going to go with is in fact a responsible organization. So now let's get into this whole idea about does recycling makes sense? Does it make sense from an economic

standpoint and an environmental standpoint? And the reason why we even have this question is because there are certain materials where you could possibly make an argument that it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to recycle. That doesn't mean that we should be using it like crazy and throwing it out the window, but rather that there

may be other alternatives to recycling that we should consider. So, for example, uh, one thing that does make perfect sense to recycle is aluminum is incredibly efficient form of recycling. There's very little processing that you need to make uh some aluminium reusable. Uh yeah, recycling I can, I think saves of the energy it would have required to make a new one. Right, it only takes five percent of

that energy you would take. Like if you were to take the virgin material and then turn that into an aluminium can, and then you were to recycle an old aluminum can into aluminium can, the recycle can would take only five percent of the energy that you needed to make the brand new can. So clearly they're recycling makes perfect sense as long as you have a way of sorting the the the trash, the recyclables in such a

way that you can get at that aluminium. It makes perfect sense that sorting might be what holds you up, depending upon what technology you're using. By uh, if you're using pre sorted recyclables, then it's a no brainer. Plastics a little tricky. It does only require one tenth of the energy to recycle plastic than it would to produce plastic from new material that you raw material that you've

just managed to get. But again sorting is the big problem there and sorting between plastics can be such a huge issue that some recycling facilities will end up sending much or even all of the plastics they received to a landfill. So even though you are putting your stuff in a recycling bin and a recycling truck is picking it up, it doesn't necessarily mean that that is going to be recycled. Some of that or maybe even all of it might end up in a landfill, depending upon

where you are. Now, don't hear this and say well, I shouldn't recycle plastic anymore. I mean, your local facility maybe doing well, but and especially with that with that technology that I was talking about, the optical sorting, Um, I think that it's made that process a lot more efficient. Yeah, exactly. It's not that you shouldn't bother recycling. Maybe that your facility is lagging behind the others, but I hope that most of them are working toward improving those those processes

so that they can recapture more of the plastic. It it makes sense, uh, financially, you know, economically as well as environmentally. It's just for some facilities they have to catch up a little more than others, and so um, it's important to continue to recycle even with plastic. But just know that we're you know, the level of sophistication technologically speaking, when we get to sorting is not so

widespread as to be infallible by any means. Uh, paper, about six the energy you would need to make a new piece of paper from raw materials is what is what you would need to make a piece of paper from recycled materials, So a little over half the amount of energy you would normally need. So, as you see, we're moving further away from that that five percent that

aluminum has and now with paper it's more like six. However, paper is a lot easier to sort, So it turns out that you know, a lot of paper tends to get recycled. And if you recycle about let's see, I think a ton of paper ends up being about seventeen trees. So if you think about that, you know you're you're actually saving forests from getting cut down because you're reducing

the need for new paper. And and furthermore, I mean, you know, trees are renewable resource, but um but those old growth forests, um that that really provide a better environmental habitat are frequently torn down. For for pulp wood trees, which grow much more quickly and are much more useful

for the creation of paper. But you know, it's it's not really, it's not really the ecological equivalent, right, And that that kind of brings us up to glass, which is a problem child really Uh so glass, glass is not made from a precious material. Essentially made from sand. Yeah, take sand, apply heat, you eventually get glass. Um, it's a little more complicated than that, but not by a whole lot. And it's basically quartz, right, Well, it's silicate silicon,

you know, it's and and it's a bunch of stuff. Really, I don't know, Okay, I was just guessing. I don't know. It's talcum powder, right. Yeah. So recycling glass only saves about thirty percent of the energy that you would need to create a new piece of glass from raw material. So it's you're not saving that much more energy by recycling than you would be by producing something new. The raw material itself is not a precious material. It's not

something that's incredibly valuable on its own. It's not like taking more sand is really affecting the vironment in a terrible way. So there are a lot of reasons why recycling is it makes less sense with glass. It's not that it's ineffective. It's not that you shouldn't do it, it's that it's just not from an economic and environmental

standpoint as important. What I would suggest is instead of recycling, you reuse, just like I do with my Mason jars that you'll be drinking out of if you come visit me in my house, assuming I offer you something to drink. Who knows, I'm not the most hospitable guy. Um say that's if you if you have bread and salt, you know you're safe. If not, it's a nice day for a red wedding, all right. So yeah, so recycling glass maybe not as as big a deal comparatively speaking, but

reusing is very important. Um. If you if you are able to reuse, that's the best thing to do. If not, recycling is perfectly line. It's not like it's bad. It's just not as efficient as some of the other materials. And I mean, eventually I'm going to reach a point where I don't need more Mason jars because I'm never gonna have four and fifty people in my house. And while making forts of it is fun, it's also really

dangerous with the Jack Russell in the house. So I will eventually be recycling Mason jars as opposed to reusing them over and over again. But uh uh that's that's really you know, the end story there and and again recycling for all of these materials is just going to improve over time as uh it becomes more economically feasible. Uh. In our next podcast, we'll be talking about waste disposal in general, and we'll talk about the economics of that

and how just throwing stuff away costs money. It's not like throwing something away is free. It's actually there is an expense to it. And if recycling ends up being economically more uh advantageous and just throwing it into a landfill, you can bet that that will take off, and that means the technologies will improve that much more quickly and

the environment, the environmental factors will improve as well. Uh. It's again depending upon your point of view, and maybe a little sad to say, this is all kind of dictated ultimately by a price tag, but that's kind of the world we live in until we reach that Star Trek future where we don't need cash anymore, in which case we'll be replicating everything we need anyway and using cold fusion to power all of our everything. Yeah, and

then we'll create some sort of what was it? It was a cold fusion bomb and the first Star Trek, wasn't it the reboot that was? Yeah, I don't understand how that works. I'll get on that, I'll get on the I'll get on the communicator with Spock and we'll find out anything else about recycling. Guys, that's what I got. All right. That was an emphatic note from Joe. So with that in mind, we're going to wrap this up. Guys.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember you can get in touch with us and let us know what you would like to hear on future episodes of Forward Thinking. Our email address is FW thinking at discovery dot com. Go to FW thinking dot com for all of the blogs, podcasts, the video series, which just continues to get more awesome. I love working on this, It's fantastic. I really want you guys to be part of this conversation, so join in, let us know what you think, and we will talk

to you again. Release it. We're more on this topic in the future of technology. Visit Forward Thinking dot Com brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,