Brilliant Minds of Trash and Sewage

for all of New York City. That's one point three billion gallons of wastewater every day, sixteen million pounds of trash, eight million pounds of recyclables every day of every week. Today you'll hear from two of the best people tackling all that waste. After the break, New York City's first recyclings are but first. Pam Alardo a big name in sewage. Since last year, she's led New York city is Bureau

of Wastewater Treatment. Mayor Deblasio poached her from Seattle, where she spearheaded an unprecedented upgrade of that city's wastewater treatment infrastructure. Why did you leave Seattle to come here? Great question? Do you ever look at your life as an older person and you and you kind of look at your life as a third party like that wasn't me, but I'm observing it right. And and there's a few things

that are foreshadowing, like I my both my brothers. At one time a rather lived in Manhattan, and so I would visit New York frequently, a couple once or twice a year, um, and I would come, I would land, I would have a great time. I'd be thinking about Holy Cow. I can't imagine what it'd be like to work in New York City with just think about all the pipes under the street. It's crazy. And I would take a tour on Hudson. I would see one of the treatment plants is on the Hudson up by Harlem

and be like, wow, that's a treatment plants. Huge. Um. And then I would get on a plane and I would fly back to Seattle and I go, oh my god, I don't have any problems here. This is easy there.

There's there's no compared person. You know, in Seattle, I did great and I plateaued at the top of my game in the wastewater world there you want to kill him Jarro of Wastewater Treatment, Yeah, yeah, yeah, the kill him and Jarro of Wastewater mount Everest, maybe because you know, I used to work in the pall, so that's kind of where I got my appreciation for the value of

wastewater in a Peace Corps experience. Actually, UM, children don't make it to their fifth birthdays or their twelfth birthdays often because of the amount of disease that's out there. And that's what you know. It makes me take my job seriously because we do save lives every day people, you know. Controlling sanitation, Controlling disease that comes from sanitation that's not handled properly is what we do and it's it's the fundamental reason why we enjoy the quality of

life we have. Fact in point, UM British Medical Journal did a study in two thousand seven about they interviewed hundreds of doctors what is the biggest medical breakthrough in the last hundred fifty years? What came on top sanitation? It's responsible for extending lives. It's it's the biggest reason why really we have the kind of quality of healthcare throughout the world and living in places where that didn't exist. UM talking to parents whose children died because of dysentery

or other diseases that come from lack of wastewater. You know, that's what makes me passionate about this stuff. My goal in life is that everyone should know what happens after the flush of toilet. Yes, because it is a communal, social, responsible, environmental, environmental, public health and people don't want to think about it. They wanted to go away and be gone. And we have the luxury in this country for it to be taken for granted, and it's because we do such a

great job. So, by and large, are the systems generally and principal in terms of science and so for that engineering, are they the same in all major cities where what happens to warter that goes down a sink, down a shower, bathtub, at toilet, it all pretty much has managed the same way. There's there's a variety of technologies. I mean they're good. One. Uh, let me just talk about what happens from the beginning to the end. It might be let's say you use

your toilet. It goes down out of your house and then into a local collection lines. So there might be one down your street and that will dump into a larger collection system which is a larger pipe. Usually it's called an interceptor, and that eventually will take it to a wastewater treatment plant. And New York City, for example, we have four teen wastewater treatment plants. We have ninety

six pumping station. Big stations continue to force the material and the liquid and everything whatever is down there down towards the trash train plant. So we at the tream planet. Moving water is expensive and going by gravity is always cheaper. So where there's a hill, we take advantage of the hill, but at some lower points we always have to elevate it and get it back to gravity so we can

flow it to the treatment plants. UM very expensive the pumping systems, so when it gets to the treatment plant, the first step there is a screen. There are bar screens are about half the three quarter inch spacing and they collect trash things that people should not be flushing on the toilet like wipes, baby wipes, facial wipes, dental floss. All that stuff gets to get stuck, get stuck, and if it weren't trapped there, it's actually on the way.

It messes up a lot of the pumping systems because we have so much of this this material UM, so we we take it out there. We spent about seven million dollars a year just for just in landfilling the trash that people flush. And then it goes to UM some kind of grit removal to move remove like sand and chunks of rock, and then to a primary sedimentation basin that allow solids inorganic salads for the most part

that are suspended to settle onto the bottom. And it also has skimmers on the top that takes grease off the top. Right, So that goes to a solid treatment system. And then the next step, and this is UM the fascinating world of biology. The next step we use a community of bacteria that actually digests the suspended organic material and clean the water. Via that method, you're bringing things

innatives for right. And from there it goes to another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that just

consumed all this this organic matter UM. But the water that comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that gets either just charged to receiving waters or in some cases in some cities they're able to polish a little bit more easy for irrigation purposes, especially in the arid Southwest and you see what happens to it here, what happens so here it gets discharged deeply into the

surrounding water bodies. After I'm getting cleaned up. Um, you might have noticed, and I'm taking credit for this, and all the people who work in the Bureauvoice Water Treatment can people. Um, we take credit for the whales coming back because because of the work that they do and the experience and skill, um, those whales have been able to come back into our is discharged deep into the neighboring waters. It's it's that clean, very clean. And what

about the solids where human waste solids? Where does that? So the salads are basically the bacteria that's settled out as well as the salads we collected in the in the primary basins, and that gets thickened um, and then

it goes to a anaerobic treatment process. So if you if you're in Brooklyn, you see those big eggs shaped metal eggs, Um, those are actually digests and those are heated to ninety eight degrees and within that we're using an anaerobic bacteria, so bacteria that live without oxygen, and they'll digest those solids even more. And then that is a valuable fertilizer product. So it's a very valuable product.

It's called biosalads um New York's bioslide yes and thinking of like a conveyor belt, like a giant Brownie is coming up every day about fourteen hundred wet tons we create of biosalads. Now, it's not only great because it's a great resources we don't want to waste, but it returns carbon to the soil and you actually can run a wastewater treatment plant at carbon neutral because of all the carbon benefit we have the sequestration benefit from that

bio salds product. Now, another thing I think that occurs to me is that there's auto mechanics, and there's places where where work is being done and chemicals of every fashion are being used to clean parts and cleaning solvents and motor oil, just to pick one industry. I'm not even talking about, you know, PCBs up the Hudson from ge and the fifties, that kind of thing going into the Hudson River. I'm talking about right here in New

York in restaurants. Every time somebody washes their hair and every time somebody dies their hair in a beauty salat all this stuff is going down the drain. What's the process that removes all those chemicals? So some of those chemicals break down very easily. They're they're biodegraded quickly within the plant. They respond to the biological conditions within the wastewater plant, and you won't find traces of it in

the effluence. Some of them break down into different types of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, right, you'll get you know, people have chemotherapy. You know that waste from their bodies might even end up in the in cream pliant system. And you know you're not you know, and so there are micro contaminants. So there is some studies about potentially um ecological impacts from some of those microplutants. We don't see that in the scale New York City. The water bodies here are

well flushing. If the waste why chilies just charging to a small lake for example. Um, you're going to have much stricter standards on that end. Um, you know, it's it's interesting. I'm I'm a strong environmentalist. I have been my entire life since third grade as a matter of fact, and I I care about trying to do the best we can by nature and get us back to nature the best we can. We live in a world that's

got plastics and papers, and and and also so many things. Um, we're really, we're really doing in a fantastic job and eliminating the risk to the environment into health. And as monitoring and chemistry gets better, we can get down to lower and lower concentrations and we're gonna learn a lot more about ways that we can make it better. But today we're just miles ahead of where we've been, and we're safe to say that it's been about environmentalism for

you and an environmental environmental work. I became an environmentalist and third grade and I'm still environmentalist. It kills me now that some environmental groups think I'm a polluter. I'm a very practical environmentalist. We've we're spending public money. We've got to be good to the dollar and make sure that we're doing the most effective way. Um, there's not an unlimited amount of money. What would you say, what's

the Mercedes ben what's the Rolls Royce of? For lack of a better way of putting of wastewater management around the world? So let me wastewater treatment, like many things, is an evolution, right the the Cadillac version depends on the situation you're in now. Well, back when everybody were farmers and people did not live in concentrated cities, it didn't matter that people pooped in the field. Use pitlar trains, maybe,

no big deal. UM. As we started to get closer together, we started to volve techniques for dealing with they well, they had collection systems, and prior to UM the nineteen thirties in New York City and prior to probably the nineteen fifties and even the nineteen seventies and the rest of the world, the whole driver towards wastewater treatment was to get it away from people. So they put a pipe in the ground and you got it to the

nearest water body. And that was totally fine. But when the city's got bigger and people were more concentrated, we said, look, we gotta start turning it. First treatment plants in New York City where Coney Island, Jamaica Bay, places where people were at the beach, right, And that's what drove those early early investments around the turn of the last century. UH and the very first treatm plants, and that was

just primary treatment systems. After more and more people started, you know, using treatment, are using wastewater and conglomerating in large groups. We the federal e p A said everyone's going to do the secondary treatment part, which is that biological system, and so that's now the standard tree United States. Um. Some places are treating to the to the extent where

they can drink it directly, and that is Singapore. And they what they do is they do everything I just described, add additional filtration and then a reverse osmosis, which is very very fine filtration to create drinkable water. The city has strict difficult a lot of difficulties, strict limitations on the modern water that can come to their city freshwater. So they create water. Yeah, but you started your education in ninety nine. Not a lot of women were doing

this kind of work, were they that? I think I was like the first quote wave of women in engineering, which the wave has never grown. I think it's kind of flat. Um. You know, my my high school advisor, who was advising about college, told me I can't be an engineer because that was a man's job. Flat out told me that. And my response was, I'm not gonna listen to you. If you told that two girls. There

might be eighty of them. Who's it? Okay? No, you know what I'm saying, and that that, you know, that's too bad. I went to college, my undergraduate Northwestern University, got a chemical engineering degree. Back in you're in the technology building, the engineering building. You can't find a woman's bathroom. You gotta go to where the secretary sit. You know, it was it was frustrating. You know, the forms all started out mr period then blank. It wasn't that you

get to choose. I'm like, come on, you can update this stuff. They're like, oh, we don't want to waste paper. I don't care, just you know, so stuff like that. It was some of the older professors are just their minds were blown. But you know, I just had the calling and what I did, uh, I think was imprinted in third grade, to be honest, what was it about it to intrigue um? In third grade, I had a student teacher, you know probably I was probably eight. So

this person was taught us about environmental science. Changed my life that day forward. I said, I want to learn this, I want to know about I want to fight polluters. I want to make the world a clean, healthy place. That commercial with the people throwing trash on the ground and there's a Native American person standing here. I mean, that was what I was all about. But that's the

difference in New York to me now. I mean, I've got my first home here in nineteen seventy nine, and in the years that I've lived in York, New York is a lot eartier and New Yorkers are a lot earlier. How does New York strike you when you got here and you saw the amount of stuff going into those screens compared to Seattle. Um, I've noticed things like there's a trash can sitting on the corner. Somebody walks by throws their plastic bottle on the street, and I'm gonnn't

get that. I do notice too. I have a dog. I pick up my dog poop. I put it in a plastic back. A lot of people don't do that. I want to do a video for you. I want to do a video for the Department of Sanitation, Waisteboard and Management. ALEC wants you to know when you flush the toilet, let's keep the diapers most of your Let's let's be an equal opportunity. Finger point here, it's the tampons in the comb and they don't break down. Poop, p puke, toilet paper, four piece, that's all we want

to see. Hi, I'm Alec Baldwin here with the four reminding of the four piece poop, p puke and paper. I think the more people know what happens after they flushed, the more people are gonna respect what they put on their toilet, and the more the less they're going to want to litter. And that's why I really appreciate talking with you, and I'm so glad you have this interest. It's just over the top interesting. You're taking poo water

and making it clean. New York City's Deputy Commissioner for Wastewater Management, Pam Alardo, a woman so passionate about her job that we had to interrupt the interview. I'm hitting the table. Don't mash your hands on the table. I think it even says here that you are from an Italian Catholic factory town. Italian Tabolic, Yes, absolutely, whether then stop pounding on the table and the Italian Catholics do. Waste management, with all its implications for our health and

the health of the planet, is still about politics. Like everything else. We can't fix the problem if we don't elect leaders who devote the resources and enforce the rules. And nobody, nobody was better at gaming that system and getting us to vote his way than Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan's brilliant and controversial campaign manager. When Democrats go out and say I want you to turn out your churches, your bus drivers, all the rest of it, we go out and say, here's the payday you would normally get,

just you know, don't turn your vote out. I know the game. I know how to make it work. And part of the reason I know the game is I was trained as a Democrat. More from Ed Rollins at Here's the Thing dot org. After the Break. New York City's original recyclings are former Deputy Commissioner for Sustainability and Recycling Ron Gonan. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here is the Thing. Ron Gonan is a capitalist

even a hippie could love. In two thousand four, he founded a recycling startup that grew to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now he runs a group of investment funds dedicated to new ideas in recycling. In between those two jobs, he was handpicked by Mayor Bloomberg to be the city's first recycling czar. But when he walked into the studio, he didn't look like someone who could have had all that on his resume. You're so young, I mean, how old you were? You ten years old

for the Bloomberg administration. I joined the administration arount thirty seven. I'm about to turn forty three. But Gonan got a very early start As a kid. He cleaned houses and baby sat to help his mom out with the bills. One day he ended up in the house of one of the pioneers of the sustainability movement, architect Paul Mocked, and that Paul mocked When I was in seventh grade, probably the most important thing that happened to me, and

I would tell me about this. I grew up with a single mom, lower middle class neighborhood in Philly, got a sports scholarship financial light opportunity to go to a great private school called Germantown Academy, but needed to get a job because I needed to earn some money for my tuition, and started working for Paul and his wife. This is the late eighties early nineties, and I was doing everything from babysitting to housework, but he would talk

to me about what he was doing over dinner. He gave me a book called Cradle to Cradle, the first book around circular economy. He would talk to me about these issues. I was really uh. I was blessed to be around someone like that. So oftentimes people will come to me and say how do you start these ventures? And say, I've been thinking about the stuff for years. And the first recycling company was what a friend from high school approached me with a concept of could we

pay people for recycling? And that's what ultimately became a cycle bank. Ended up building the business model and developing the software for my first cycling company. I'm a recycling I'm not gonna say nut, but I take it very seriously. And even if recycling it's just an exercise, people want to believe they can participate to make things better. I'm like, don't discourage it, but is it just an exercise or it's not? As far as you're concerned, it's absolutely not

just an exercise. Recycling has tremendous environmental value in terms of resource protection. It also has tremendous economic value to you as a taxpayer and that's part of the message that oftentimes doesn't get out. So I appreciate that you have great spirit behind recycling. You should keep that but also feel good about the fact that you're doing something really important for the environment and something really important for your city. When that when those bags of recyclables hit

the street, where do they go? All of the metal, plastic, and glass goes to a recycling facility in Brooklyn called SIMS Metal Management. They actually have a phenomenal education program there, so highly recommend folks to go uh to see the SIMS facility and also get fifty of the paper. The other of the paper goes to Pratt Recycling out in Staten Island, and that paper then goes over to a mill right next door that Pratt owns, and it's turned into pizza boxes that then get resold right back into

the New York City economy. The box that it comes in was New York Times. Could be was your New Yorker magazine a couple of months ago, could be that's amazing, it could be. Let's let's break it down to two brass economics. If you throw that paper in the garbage, the city would be paying a hundred dollars a ton to export it to a landfill. If you put it in your recycling bin, the city will get paid a minimum of ten dollars a ton, so there's a hundred

and ten dollar swing there. Then it will go over to a New York City business that employs people in New York City turn it into a pizza box. What's the stuff the city collects and what don't they collect? What are some of the biggest misconceptions. So for recycling, the city collects dry paper and cardboard, aluminum and metal, all glass, and all rigid plastic like a Fiji bottle exactly. So any plastic that's rigid goes into the city's recycling program.

A plastic plastic that's flexible like a bag or plastic wrapping, does not, you mean like like like a cup from Starbucks can go in there. A paper cup from Starbucks can go in there. There's not a plastic cup. No, a plastic cup can because a plastic cup has has rigidity to correct. So any formed plastic like cups so forth, the city will take that exactly well, and the city exempts those businesses from doing the recycling themselves. Well, Starbucks

is not obligated to recycle. Now so that the city currently collects all residential recycling, so they collect from every home in the city, not the businesses. Not the businesses. The businesses are responsible to contract for their own waste and recycling collection independently. The Starbucks recycle, Uh, they that's a so so so, so they're not obligated to. They technically are obligated. What the city is working on is a better enforcement system to make sure that everyone actually

is recycling. One of the challenges in New York City sometimes you have so many businesses, the enforcement cost of checking on every business is very, very expensive. Starbucks could be doing a better job. Were the recycling bins on the street. I don't see very I've seen some of them by Washington Square Park where there, especially in Manhattan.

If you just look around, you'll see there the metallic looking bins with a green top and a blue top, and the blue top is for your metal, glass and plastic, and the green top is for your paper. Talk to me about a timeline to your knowledge about this movement over the last fifty years or forty years, I mean, before you got started with Bloomberg, what was recycling? What was the dawn of recycling in this country. And is there somebody who's the mother or father of that to

your knowledge, Sure, it's a good credit. So up until the early nineteen hundreds, Americans didn't waste things because there wasn't that much packaging. Recycling really became necessary when a lot of packaging came along. Now, up until the nineties and forties, New York City Department of Sanitation legally collected everything, including all of our bodily waste and what ever waste there was, and just dumped it in the East River.

At the Department Sensation, we literally have pictures of our trucks lined up on the East River dumping garbage, dumping garbage in there. Um. Then you started seeing more and more consumption come along and more and more packaging. With World War Two, however, there was such a huge need for raw resources that America did an amazing job recycling

up until endoring waste exactly. Post World War Two, you actually saw a major divergence between what was what Europe was doing, where they were very poor in the fifties, sixties and seventies, they were rebuilding their economies and countries and they had very little land so recycling was critical to their economy to what you saw in America in the fifties and sixties and seventies, which is people moved

out to the suburbs, there was no collection infrastructure. The concept of more and more and more as a status symbol became very important to people, and recycling took a back seat. And then you saw an emergence of it again in the nineteen eighties and nine and through today. Now. Um, when you started with Bloomberg, which was in two thousand twelve, I believe, uh, he had been in office for how long by then he'd been in all nine years he

was there already there for quite a while. And give some insight into what made him want to hire a recycling czar, What did he see, and what pressures you think were brought on him to take this to another level. He had a deputy mayor named Cass Holloway, who when he came in to be deputy mayor, looked around and said, New York City tax bear spent four hundred million dollars a year exporting waste two out of state landfills. We have recycling companies in New York City that will pay

the city for that material. What is going on here? I want to get someone in here who can fix this system, turn it into a business exactly. And that's what I was brought into do. Why do you think Bloomberg chose you? Uh? People associate me with being very left progressive, but had some success as an entrepreneur, and the waste guys were comfortable with me, So I sort of fit everybody's uh, everybody's criteria. And how did you start?

Infrastructure and communication? So in infrastructure, we started rolling out containers all over the streets to make sure that there's infrastructure collect material, but people would also see recycling winds. We made sure that all rigid plastics could be accepted, so people don't have to worry about can I put this in? Connect put that in? That was the first

thing we did. The next thing we did was, uh, start focusing on food waste and organics, because food waste represents about forty of what we landfill, and we started rolling out a curbside organics program. There's about two homes in New York City today that get their food waste collected separately. The city will be citywide with the program within two years, and all new York City public schools

now separate out their food waste. Is it safe to say therefore that you would discourage people from using putting their compostables and there were gangs into the garbage disposal. That's not bad. That's actually much much better than putting it in the garbage. But there's something even better that we could be doing, which is collecting the food waste separately and turning it into clean natural gas locally, which the city started doing on the Bloomberg is now expanding.

Describe how that happened. You take that, you collect that brown bin, and it goes where there's a process called anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion converts food waste into gas. If mimics what goes on where there's one anaerobic digester right now in the city, which is at the wastewater treatment facility out in Green Point. All the food waste goes there and it gets put through the anaerobic digester. The gas is generated and right now it's pumped right into

the grid. Ten twenty years from now, people are gonna look back and scratch their head and say, let me get this straight. New York City was spending two million dollars a year to pay to export food waste out of state landfills. Now that that can't be possible because what we do with it today is we use it to generate fuel for our city vehicles and gas for our That's what they do. What were people thinking, is that what they do? Yeah, well today it's it's generating gas.

It's going into the grid. I'll give you a a forecast. Ten years from now, New York City will be picking up food waste, driving into the anaerobic digester, dumping it, going ten feet away, and refilling their gas tank from the gas that was generated from the food waste that

they dropped off the day before. Whether you think it will become a break even proposition or better or you always be losing money on that, You'll always be making The city will be making hundreds of millions of dollars off because right now the city is spending two hundred million dollars a year to export it to land, just

the organics exactly. So if if you don't make any money on the process, you don't make any money on the sale of the gas, you've saved yourself two hundred million dollars now when you have UM ten thousand restaurants or whatever it is, you're always hearing different figures, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand. I don't even know anymore. What do you need to do to get them to comply? How do you do it? Is it a law you make? I'm

sure they're going to fight like hell against that. Are there's no law now that forced restaurants forced them to separate their organics. That the Bloomberg administration pass legislation that the Blasio administration is now continuing that by certain years, all food service generators in New York City, by law,

are banned from sending that food waste to landfill. This year it came into practice with all large food service generators, that the stadiums, that's the universities, that's the large kitchens. The great news is there are some restaurants in New York City, UH that recognize that they can run their business more efficiently if they can send their food waste to an anaerobic digester rather than paying to send it

to landfill. And we had some great, great restaurant owners or early adopters who said, hey, we want to do this, Predam, you will see a compost been right in every single has been it's been successful. It's been successful. What do you think we're not doing that? We should do? What's the next level for recycling? The great news about recycling is the money is there because we're already spending it sticking the stuff in in a hole. So there's a

lot of opportunities. The Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Ohio. But there's a senator, Senator Casey in Pennsylvania that he's trying desperately to get legislation passed to enable Pennsylvania stop the importation of garbage. He runs into you can't legislate against interstate commerce. But New York City has got a big problem if other states say we don't want your trucks, we don't want your garbage. The city have a plan for that. No, the only plan for that is recycled.

Of what's in the New York City waste stream can be recycled. Anybody who talks about recycling doesn't work. We shouldn't be recycling. They're living in an alternate universe. Why are they saying that? Obviously there's a business interest involved. What business interests are they representing? When They say that there's a few interests. There's the landfill business interest, there's the interest of the companies that export this out of

the city. And then you've got some political interests of folks that like the poopoo anything to do with the environment. But they're all living in an alternate universe because if you don't recycle where you planning to put the stuff. How has de Blasio done in terms of upholding this process that Bloomberg installed, Uh, he's done a good job. Most of the credit goes to the Sanitation commissioner, Commissioner Garcia.

She was the chief operating officer of d e P under Bloomberg, and de Blasio, to his credit, brought her over to become the Sanitation commissioner and she's done a fantastic job continuing the programs are developed on the bloom reginistration and implementing her own programs. Someone told me that dumpster divers as people call them, people who were going into the waste stream and taking out recyclables for their own use to to to to claim the money is

hurting the city's program. Correct. Correct, The city's relying on that stuff being available to them to monetize this whole thing. Correct. Uh, that's one of the curious things about people saying that recycling doesn't work. In fact, the city sanitation department has fifty sanitation police scouring the city trying to stop people from people people are opening garbage bags in front of my apartment on those nights that that stuff is put

out there Monday night or whatever it is. One caveat to that is that it's actually not uh waste pickers anymore or homeless people going around. That's what it still appears to be, but in fact it's organized. So if you were to follow those guys for a couple of blocks, you'll see that they end up at a very large

truck with about the union. They got a union. Now they're coming in from Jersey, they're coming in from Westchester, and uh, they fan people out, they go cut bags, take the material, put it in their trucks, and they drive it out of the city and sell it. And that's a major problem for the City of New York for two reasons. One is that's revenue that's supposed to

go to the city. Number lying on that, yeah. Number two is it uh in impacts our ability to do reporting and understand how successful the program is, because the numbers end up going down, and then people will say, oh, see recycling is not working in Park Slope or the Upper west Side. The numbers are low. It's like, no, no, actually, it's working incredibly well. Someone steal all the go there

right now. Do you believe if they if everything went went I mean, I mean, I know this is a fantasy, but let's play it out anyway, and that is that restaurants and Delhi's markets, Starbucks type of takeout places and everything where there's a big, big flow of recyclable hard plastics and so forth like that. Let's say they all participate in the program better and everybody was more conscientious and people recycled properly and we didn't have the bad commingling.

And let let's say everything got better. Could the city handle that flow? The city could absolutely handle that flow. Onto the Bloombagin administration, a lot of money was invested in the infrastructure around recycling. All that being said, the most important thing today is what you're referring to, which is people need to get the message that when you threw a paper, metal, glass and plastic in the garbage, that costs the city money, And I'm not interested in

subsidizing your laziness. You you don't want to put it in the recycling, but no problem, but you gotta you gotta pay the tab Number one. Number two is if you see somebody just throw something on the street, you gotta say something. Uh. And And that's that's a really critical part of actually making this better is there's a lot of more money that needs to be spent, there's a lot of innovation that needs to come into place, but the messaging also needs to change, and the expectation

of people needs to change. Give me an example of some city around the world where how they're handling their recyclables is commendable, almost any German or Scandinavian city. And what are they doing that we're not doing? Uh? Everybody recycles. I was meeting with a government official in the Netherlands and I said to him, how much do you find somebody when they put something and the recycling then that shouldn't be put in there. They put something in the

garbage that's recyclable, so we have no fines. So well, what do you do when they don't do it correctly? Why? Why don't they do it correctly? And that's how culturally different we are, is there To your point, there's that expectation around civics that if you've been asked to do something for the betterment of your community society, you do it. So if you look at communities in Scandinavia, they're doing a great job. In the United States, uh, Seattle, Portland,

San Francisco doing a pretty good job. New York City and a lot of neighborhoods doing a great job actually, and a lot of neighborhoods in New York City. Uh, what's one thing we're doing just pick one for the time being. What's one thing we're doing here across the country that you'd love to see a stop first stop doing what allowing companies to manufacture products or packaging that

is not recycled, for example, styrofoam. Good call. Part of the communication that needs to come out around this is those styrophone beings. They're terrible for the environment. You know what also are telling before it was a tax pag Well, New York City, we did that under the Bloomberg administration. The industry sued the city countersuit, but the city has been trying for a really long time to ban styres backs.

And my point of all this has always been it's absolutely bad for the environment, but we need to make sure that people clearly understand the economic argument. Let's take blocks of bags for an example. New York City this year will spend twelve million dollars of taxpayer money landfilling plastic bags. So if you're the plastic, they can't be recycled, can't be recycled, recycle only if they're absolutely clean, and you can't steam clean if you can't put them through.

But the point that should be made to the plastic bag industry is, hey, we don't need to ban these. You can design, manufacture, sell whatever you want, but if it's not recyclable, we're not interested in picking up the

cost of senator to our landfill. And we also need to recognize some of the companies like a Patagonia and some of the other companies out there that have done a phenomenal job incorporating or called material into their products and packaging, and make sure we reward and recognize that.

So closed loop Partners, you're a fund that you're helping to manage, are they looking for technology to invest in to kind of replace styrofoam are you looking for people they're going to make it the next level of packaging. All the time, we scour the country and scour the world for innovative new materials, innovative technologies. We just invested in a company called Amper Robotics, is the first artificial

intelligence and robotics company. And the recycling UH industry, we've UH invest in a lot of super innovative technologies as well as just large UH facilities to recycle materials. So we're always looking for innovation and investments. Well, I want to wish you the best of luck with that because that's something that everybody is counting on. I mean, they really are. I just feel like so a lot of people are sitting home thinking what can I do? What

can I do? When we want to say to people, just recycle aggressively, don't give up, keep keep doing that, do it properly, and hopefully over the next few years, people like you and the funds you're working with will replace styrofoam and it will replace plastic bags with things that are fully biodegradable and quickly, and we will get to a place where we can start to reverse some of the damage which we are getting very close to the point where we might not be able to reverse that.

So I'm I'm hoping we will have you come on the show in a couple of years in your house, some fresh and good news for us. That would be great. You want to get into business with me, if you want to get into the recycling business, it would be great to have you. I'll leave it to the professionals, but I'm glad there are people like Ron and Pama Lardo in New York City making a difference one flush and bottle at a time. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing for ed inst