Recycling Update: How’s It Going?

or before this is again? Um? Before it was from my understanding, it was the premise was is what you're recycling actually getting recycled? Right? That was the basis of it. That's kind of everything, and then we just kind of went over recycling here there. Yeah, I mean it was it was year two of the show. It's about a half an hour in linked that was long for back then, and probably eight minutes of that covered the garbage patch, which we went on to do in an episode just

on that did. Yeah, for sure, we talked about the eight minutes of the garbage patch something. Yeah, I mean the name of the episode was recycling in the Great Pacific garbage Patch. Did we combine those two into one? I don't know. I think I'm having some sort of weird like flashback or yeah. So here's the deal, though, folks. We're redoing recycling. Updating is what it's called. We're updating with new information. And there may be some of the same stuff. But I listened to that episode, and we

weren't very good at what we did back then. I thought, I thought we. I'm almost positive we did a separate episode on the Great Pacific Garbage We may have. But all of this to say is don't freak out and say you as are repeating yourselves. Are we Are we already there? Because no, we're not. No, No, this is an update. This is so important, and things have changed enough since what two it may have even been nine. Yes,

quite a bit has changed since back then. As a matter of fact, Um, we've gotten better recycling, we've gotten worse at recycling. Simultaneously, recycling has turned into a huge business. We understand it more. And then there's been major colossal changes just this year to the global recyclable material commodities market that is going to change everyone's life one way or another. If you care at all about recycling because

of China. Yeah, and you know what, we'll we'll get to that, but I'm just gonna come out and say it good for China, all right, but depending that one. Right, we've been putting pins all over the place. I'm afraid that we have just bins everywhere. No, we've been going back. I don't think we've left a single pin in place, which is unusual for us because we do that a lot. And I also want to say that it's nice that we're all three together again. Yeah, Jerry is back again.

She keeps leaving, but she's back, and she has a summer cold. Yeah, that's just the worst that that to me is like that is a clear indication that you have been working too hard. If you go on vacation and get sick because you're like work, work, work, and then you relax on vacation and your your immune system goes down. You interesting, you gotta take it easy, You gotta you need like a step down vacation like a

work and then staycation and then vacation. Jerry. Jerry gave a thumbs up, sickly thumb it's a little pale green. Uh so chuck, Yes, I think I think also, Uh, we agreed that you're going to participate even more and I'm going to participate less. Well, the last one it was pretty funny to listen to. You should give it a listen. Oh, we'll see if you notice. Oh I've noticed before, like sometimes I'm just like cringing and pinching

the bridge of my nose, like shut up, josh. Uh. So that is the last we will speak of that episode. And let's just pretend like we're starting a new or updating recycling. What is it? So let's talk about recycling. Yeah, one of the three the third best of the three rs. That's your favorite one, or it's the your least favorite of Well, it's not the least favorite, it's it should be the third option. As a green human, you should

try and reduce and reuse first. Yes, And that's why they put them in that order, because recycling is the the last line of defense. Yeah. I thought it just kind of float off the tongue a little more. I didn't realize that they had them in order. It's in order of preference. Well that's cool, okay, So you it is best to reduce reuse and then when all else

fails recycle. That's an ideal world, right, yeah, because if you go to a website and you look up like can I recycle my toilet paper tubes and the recycling ben Sure. Yeah. But if you go to like you know, tree Hugger and all these other sites are like, well you can, but what you should really do is this, And then it's they first, find a way to not use toilet paper at all, and so you don't have those that would be the reduce. Turn it into the

stand for like a pipe cleaner tree. Well, that's everything else, that's the reuses. They're they're like, there are so many crafty things you can do with toilet paper too. You can use it as a telescope, which will eventually end up in the trash. You can use it as a harmonica. Maybe I can do this all day. We should so,

actually I don't think we should. So when you recycle that toilet paper too, when you drop it into a bin out front, you may notice that you're also dropping in like glass like you're your old like Captain Morgan's bottle or um it took you eight years to drink? Sure, uh, you're drinking them run these days? Oh, I love rom I'm not big on Captain Morgan, but I love rom alright, It's one of my highest favorite I'm like, wow, I really like Rum. I say that every time I take

a sip of rum. Just look at my glass and go, wow, I really love romdd everyone in the house Momo rolls, rolls her little eyes, um, big eyes, so um. You dump all this stuff together in a single bin, and you may stop and be like, wait, wait, this is crazy. How am I dumping all this stuff in a single bin? Didn't we used to have to separate? Yes, we did. But thanks to the event of single stream recycling, people recycle a lot more stuff than they ever did before.

Recycling participation is up. You may have noticed, like back in the nineties, early two thousands, they gave you like a little tiny bin. Now you get like a big old garbage can with wheels on it so you can put even more stuff in it. That's how much recycling participation is up. Programs all over the country, everybody's recycling. So on the one hand, it's really good that we have single streamer cycling because it makes people more likely

to recycle. On the other hand, it also makes us more likely to recycle stuff that we really shouldn't be recycling or or using as much up to begin with. Right, But even if it's stuff that, like, um that, even if you're you're reducing and reusing, you people still have a tendency to throw stuff in that recycling ben even though it can't be recycled. Yeah, with that one article

you sent called it aspirational recycling. Yes, like, I don't really know if this can go in there, but I'm gonna do it because it makes me feel good, right, I hope, So I hope it can be recycled. So that doesn't sound like that bad of a deal, you know, if like you're like, okay, well it can't be recycled, so it doesn't get recycled, it cares you know, it just disintegrates into nothingness magically. Right, it's actually not what

happens that stuff ends up at the landfill. Right, So you're basically saying, here, recycling company, throw this away for me, will you. Yeah, And if you listen to our show on landfills, which was a good one, yeah, um, we we sort of had glowing praise for landfills and that was I think in terms of in the context of hey, if you're going to have a landfill. They're really have made leaps and bounds from the old days. Yeah, for sure, but obviously we want to do this instead of the landfill. Yeah.

The ideal situation would be for us to UM to basically close the loop on our all of our materials, on our metals, on our plastics, on our paper and that, and figure out a way to reuse them. And now there's enough of everything, and we never have to cut down another tree, we never have to dig up another piece of box site, we never have to do anything. We've got enough, and then we just have these perfect like reusing UM reprocessing techniques and we've just got to

close the loop of these materials. That would be ideal. We're pretty far from that, right, um, But it is a good step in the right direction that we are recycling. Right. So when you recycle, when you put that stuff in that bind, we're gonna get to all this really great stuff. I just tease something that you don't even know what I'm talking about yet, dear listener, what box eye. That was one thing, um, But the the aspirational recycling turns

into play later on. So when you recycle, you put it out on the bin, and then some people come up and what looks like an old garbage truck or a modified garbage truck, except it's usually much cleaner, maybe a pleasant blue or pleasant green color. Uh. And there's no juice usually dripping out of the back garbage juice. Um. And they pick it up and they cart it off, and that begins the the plastic bottle or the toilet paper tubes journey. Yeah. And um, this is a grabstar article.

It's nice to work from one of those. Again. Head points out though, that when things are recycled, it's pretty rare that, um, you get the same thing as the original material. So like that soda can, that beer can may not end up a beer can. Right. Does that make you sad that person out there listening. Um, well, that's that's what I was saying. Like in an ideal world, it would it would become another beer can, right, Yeah. But we're not there yet because when we recycle stuff,

it degrades. Yeah. And that's why you can't recycle paper and think that it's going to be the next thing that you print something on. Uh, it's not gonna come back like clean Lily White does printer paper No, and that's called downstream recycling, where that that office paper you printed on that you recycle ends up becoming like, um,

a coffee clutch for your coffee. And then you recycle that and it becomes low grade like napkin, and then after that it just basically ends up in landfill because it can't be recycled, an then it becomes airport toilet paper. It's just the lowest form of paper. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Like it's just you can see right through it. Yes, doesn't do anything anything, It just provides a false sense of security and then your fingers go right there. Uh uh.

Up cycling is a little different, and that's pretty rare, but that's when something is made more valuable than the original product. Yeah, and I like the example that egg games. You could take a hub cap and turn it into a decorative bird bath. Yeah, that counts. Good job, ed. Hey, I'm all about that. Uh, found Art, like those people do a valuable service. We should redo that episode, remember that one found Art that we didn't do that? Now

I think you're joshing. No really, I'm promised. All right, I'm gonna have to look that one up. Uh, let's talk about the history a bit though, because Ed makes great pains to point out that it's interesting that, um, most people probably think like man in the seventies, in the sixties, that's when it all started, But recycling actually kind of started because of the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, And

it wasn't like necessarily it didn't have green and d well. No, it was more like do you remember when we did the extinct job titles when and we talked about armors and you can't find a suit of armor from the fourteenth or fifteen centuries because they reused that stuff that was just par for the course back then. Yeah, Like things were just too valuable to throw away. You just

found a way to reuse it. And that was pretty much the way people lived for many many years until basically the post war economic boom led to this consumer society that we live in today where it's just very very cheap to produce stuff, including like packaging and materials, and we use it out the yen yang and we just throw it away typically. And it wasn't until the I think the first Earth Day that recycling came back again. Yeah, and that's when it definitely had a more of a

green tent on it. For sure, which is good. Um add points out to that that you know, there were some leneers here and there. I think recycling the United States really had its heyday in the nineties. That's when I first remember it becoming like this thing is a thing now. Yeah, And I've got a couple of stats here. Um, it peaked in actually it peaked in recent years. And this is you know, I believe how many tons are

diverted from the landfill. So if you're going by that stat, it peaked in two thousand eleven at thirty four point seven Um, what is that million tons? Yeah, there are thirty or four point seven percent. I would think, oh yeah, yeah, thirty four point seven percent of the hundred and whatever. What have we send today? About a hundred and fifty

million tons? I saw, so I saw different things, like I think that that's from the e p A. Right, yeah, yeah, Actually in the eighties it was about a hundred and fifty. Now we're down to about a hundred. I think that's going to the hundred million tons that's going to the and fill. Yes, yeah, yeah, but but our recycling is up, But are I think our actual waste production overall is up to Yeah, and more people of course, Stu, Yeah, exactly. But that's that's actually a thing that we'll talk about

that recycling masks. Um Like, we're throwing away way more stuff and luckily we're recycling more than ever, so we're actually putting less than ever in the landfill. But if we would do that first thing, reduce, and then the second thing we use, we could really have a significant impact on it without recycling. Yeah, for sure, recycling is much What would be your guests as to the the number one thing recycled in the United States? My guests would be aluminum cans, that is all the way down

to number eight. What, um, I'm gonna say, rubber chickens then, well, yeah, you nailed it, um, acid batteries. Batteries are the number one thing. Like people, what multiverse did you come from? Today? I think people understand, they seem to have an understanding that you just don't throw batteries away anymore. What do you do with them? You recycle them? Where do you recycle them? Seriously, you throw batteries away, I just like throw them in the closest body of water I can find. Well,

they were known to float. Where do you recycle these? Like in your recycling bid. Well no, I mean you have to take them somewhere. Where do you take them? Like a recycling place? Yeah, like like there are places that accept batteries. Are you talking about little batteries? Are you talking about car batteries? Lead acid batteries? Is that a car battery? Actually, I don't know. I think that's a car battery. Okay, yeah, yeah, I know you recycle cars.

That makes sense because you get a little juice when you buy your new battery if you plunk down your old one. Yeah, that would make sense. But still you would think aluminum Kansas number eight, Yeah, number two was corrugated at boxes number three, steel number four or his newspaper, and then all the way down to number numbers eight and nine or soda and beer cans and bottles. That is really bizarre. Yeah, but that you know, how did

they say Brenstein? I don't know. I'm not sure. But at any rate, we've we've been bouncing around over the last decade, somewhere in the thirty two to thirty five percent range. So peaked is a percentage of waste diverted, Like you can't say peaked then, like it's been inching downward. I predict it's going to continue to inch downward, and then it's going to start going up again more than the peak, the recent peak. Yeah, in the next ten

to fifteen years. That's my prediction. Would be great. In America, if you wanted to know, is number five in the world, behind Austria, Germany, Belgium, in Switzerland as far as um most recycling participation or something. Yeah, diverting the most tonnage away from landfills. Number what number five? That's not good, it's okay, And and numbers three through six are virtually tied. It's really Austria and Germany or like ten percent twelve

percent more those guys will recycle anything. Uh. And then America's only city on the list. Take a guess there, I bet you know that one. I M say Portland's good guests, Seattle closer, uh, further away somewhere in Wyoming. San Francisco is the number one city or recycling. It's the only American city to make like the All Star Recycling list. So I think that means we're done, right.

I'll bet we didn't mention that before in the last episode. No, oh yeah, we're not mentioning that should we take a break. Then let's take a break, man, all right, we'll talk a little bit more about landfills and all kinds of recycling stuff. All right, Chuck, I think this is going very well. So far. Great, So let's get back to that process we kicked off and then abandoned, and now

we're getting back to it. When you drop something in your recycling bind and the people come and pick it up, and it begins this beautiful journey of discovery, coming of age maybe of um, really coming to understand oneself. For the say, plastic water bottle that you set off, and when it's collected, depending on where you are, it may be either collected by a city worker or a worker for like a private company, um, and it will be

taken somewhere along this chain. What this is a big picture, and this is something I didn't quite understand fully but for until this time around researching this article, Like that water bottle or that beer can, or that toilet paper roll you just threw out that you just recycled, You just threw it away as trash. It's just it's being put into a different trash stream, the recycled stream. Right, So When you do that, it becomes you were saying, here,

this actually has value. I don't want anything in return for it. I just want the peace of mind that it's going to have another life. It's going to stay

away from the landfill. You do whatever you want with it, and it enters with that exchange into a global commodities market, where it goes from a sorting facility to a place where it's put together with other stuff similar to its kind, sent into put into bails, and then sold on the commodities market to be reprocessed back in of raw materials and then sold the manufacturers who use those raw materials to make new stuff that you then buy that then

you hopefully ideally recycle and the whole process continues again. That's what happens when you drop it in a bin and it goes off. That's ideally. Yeah. And China, like we mentioned, is a big I think, like the number one buyer of US garbage. They were until like late two thousand seventeen ish when they said no on certain things. So here's why I said, UM, good for China. UM. China said that they did not want to be the

world's garbage dump any longer. And um. One of the reasons why why recycling rates kind of started to climb in the eighties and nineties is because there was a market for this stuff. Right. If there had never been a market for it, it just would not have been viable. It would have cost too much to pay somebody to reprocess it. But the fact that you could sell it to somebody who could then reprocess it and then sell it as raw materials to manufacturers that men have value

to it. So okay, now we've got like something going here. And the way that this was able to go, the reason why there was value to it is because China said, you know what, We're gonna become manufacturers to the world. Give us all materials you can you can send us.

And one of the things they got into was reprocessing things like paper and plastic, and so countries around the world, especially in the West and the developed West, started sending all of their trash, but they're recyclable trash to China, and China would reprocess it, make it into like little plastic toys or paper goods or whatever, and then sell it to the world. And because of that, recycling was able to take off well. China finally said, you know what,

this is not working any longer. We're actually on our feet economically more than we were before. And you guys have been sliding in a lot of your trash with these recyclable materials, and we don't want it anymore. Well, and China had has not historically done a great job with their own trash, like they hadn't even sorted that out much less to be able to take on all

this trash from all over the world. And we're talking hundreds of millions of tons of recyclable materials and I saw something like ten percent of that weight was just straight up trash that was slipped in with this stuff. Yeah, it says here and estimated one point three to three point five million metric tons enters the oceans from China's coastline, right because it just was falling out of this out of the recycling stream, right, unbelievable, and into the into

the oceans. That was how many tons, one point three to three point five million metric tons, So that's out of like twelve million metric tons worldwide, So about a quarter of the plastic entering the ocean was going into it from China. Yeah, that's a huge amount, Right, So China finally said this is not okay, this is not sustainable. We're just we're stopping, like we're not going to accept this any longer. We're not going to accept that any longer.

And the stuff we do accept can't be any less than one percent to half of a percent impure, meaning like if we're buying a bail, a giant biale of plastic bottles, no more than half of a percent of that bail bail's total weight can be anything but the

plastic bottles that we're buying. So this this is a big deal because the world's market since the nineties and as far as like recyclable materials has been sent to China, like a third of the world's recyclable materials goes to China, and China was buying it, and they said we're done, We're not doing that anymore. And so the market just went came to a screeching halt. And so what happened.

All that stuff that you were recycling, um that was originally going to China is now just being diverted to landfills because America's recycling recyclers, the UK's recyclers, Europes recyclers don't know what to do with it. The market just stopped, and so they they're just sending it to landfills. Now, So the stuff you're recycling a lot of people, not all of it, and not not everything that everybody's recycling, but a significant amount has been going to landfills so

far in two thousand. Yeah, and this is not the old school argument where people, you know, ten years ago, we're like, oh, they don't even take it to recycling anyway, they just throw it in the trash. I know, if you believe that, then now you're saying, see there, I told you this is something new because of a new policy within the last year, right, So this is not like that old line. I just want to make that clear.

And again, the reason why that that argument didn't hold before is because China was there to buy the stuff, So why would you throw it would be like throwing away money. So that was a stupid argument. Now it's not even argument, it's just a fact, like they're having to divert some of this and their stockpiling. These people who are basically recyclable material distributors are actually stockpiling the stuff in warehouses hoping that the market will come back,

and there are countries taking up the slack. I think like Malaysia, India, UM, Indonesia. They're starting to buy more of this than they were before. But China accepted so much of it, bought so much of it that you just can't fill that void. It's gonna take a little while, and then hopefully one of the ways that we will handle this is countries like America or like the UK will say maybe we should start getting into the reprocessing business more than we were before and start handling our

own recyclables. Yeah, I'm all for it. Yeah, So let's talk about that loop. Let's let's say, let's talk about let's give an idea of what happens to your recyclables when they're carted away, and let's say it just stays in country. Okay, okay, alright, so let's uh. I guess we can start with paper because that's one that is widely recycled. And there's a bit of a um not a misnomer, but you know, trees are are grown to be used for paper. Um. It's there's a couple of misnomers.

It's not like people go out and cut down these great, old old forests to make the paper that you print on they have, you know, they do this from pulp with trees. However, a lot of times old growth forests are chopped down to create room to plant these pulp

with trees. Ter. Yeah, so it is a bit of a thing like while they may not be making paper out of it, they are clearing area to plant the pulp would trees to make the paper, right, it would be a pretty pretty big waste of those old growth trees to just turn them into paper when you can make like furniture and stuff out of them. But they are cutting them down for this paper stuff. But once that happens, it's not like they're growing the old old

growth or us back again. Right, No, right, okay, uh so then that paper is sorted and you're gonna hear a lot of the word sort a lot, because that's what happens at a sorting facility, depending on how heavy it is. What color apparently, like really brightly colored paper isn't good to recycle, um at all? Or good to look at? Yeah, like construction papor sure like um you know neon green flyers, Oh good lord, they'll get your attention,

but they're bad for the environment. They're bad for the environment. Uh, A hot chemical and water bath can reduce the stuff. And that's really what you want to do, is to make this slurry, the soupy mix of fibrous you know what was once paper. Uh. Then they have like if you always wonder should I take my my paper clips and staples off? If you got a minute, it's probably not a bad idea. But they do have magnets and things and filters to get out the glues and the

staples and all that stuff. Yeah, they basically have a lot of different rings along this line that um or the stream that that can handle your laziness. Yeah, I mean from paper clips to a little bit of mayonnaise left in the jar a little bit, a little bit, they can handle that. But well, I was gonna say, like I said in the previous episode, I'll just say it again, that's stuff stinks in your kitchen anyway, So that's why you should clean it out right or stinks

next to your house, Like who want? Who wants a gross dirty mannai'se jar? Nobody beside their house, certainly not your local recycler. No. Uh, so they're gonna get the staples and all that stuff out generally with the magnets, but if you want to do it yourself, that's great too.

They remove the ink a lot of times chemically, or sometimes this is really interesting, they'll blow it to the surface and skim it off, bleach that pulp, and you've got this pulpy slurry where they can then uh spray it and roll it into a sheet, press it and dry it and it becomes paper. Again. Remember we talked about making paper in our toilet paper episode. That one. How it's made, that hypnotic how it's made episode, it's

pretty cool. Um, So that what you just described probably doesn't take place in like your local town or something like that. That's gone from your your curb to your town's sorting facility to like a material um material recovery facility or MURF is what that's called. And then probably what you just described has done it like a someone who specializes in paper reprocessing, right, Um, their money right exactly.

But along the way, your town made money by not sending something to landfill, because most towns have to pay for landfill stuff. So by diverting this from the landfill,

the town just saved money. And if it's a big enough town because say millions, tens hundreds of millions of dollars in fees um, and then once it entered that murf then they start to sort it for resale to reprocessors and the money started to come in right about that, Yeah, right, all right, So what about glass glasses like similar to paper,

and that they'll usually sort it. And again, so sorting is can be done by machines in a lot of cases, but there are a lot of human beings who are employed in this process whose job it is to say, brown bottle goes here, green bottle goes here, clear bottle goes here. I really like Rome, right exactly, Captain Morgan's and they drop them down these different shoots and it's a convey convey about going past them, and they're like kind of I love Lucy's style, like just grabbing the

stuff and mixing it around and putting it sorting it themselves. Right, Yeah, And glass is significant because, um, you've also heard people say that you know you do you burned just and there have been people that have taken great pains to try and prove that recycling actually uses more energy than just making new stuff and throwing it away. Uh uh,

and that is very fair about it. He points out that it really depends on your material as a whole recycling, I think without question, um uses less energy as a whole from what I understand. Yeah, but if you want to break it down to the individual things, some of them are a little tougher to get, you know, your

money back out of or your energy usage. But glass is one of those that has a significant energy cost savings, right and and in some cases UM glass recycling basically is just the intact bottle is being washed and sterilized and then reused again. Sometimes so when you drink out of like a glass coke bottle or something that may have been used because it's nineteen, you're at the soda jerk.

But I mean, if you think about it like that's if you could buy just glass bottles, you're probably it's probably better off as far as recycling is concerned, because they probably are just reusing the bottle as long as you don't smash it on the ground, then sweep it up, put it in the recycling bin. Well, that's another thing

that can be done with glass, right. They might reuse it like wash it out, burn the label off, put the go put have it go through the whole process again, so it's basically like new, or they may smash it up into pieces and um, those pieces will get melted down and turned into glass again, which is another reason why the glass gets sorted, because if you have a bunch of different colored glass mixed together when you melted down, it has like kind of a modeled color that nobody

would want. So it's very important to have your green glass over here, and your clear glass over here, and your brown glass over there. Yeah. And I think I said on the show they announced in our county or maybe city that they were not doing glass anymore, and so they set up the big ben's like in certain places around the county. That's for you and your wine o friends congregate. Right, Absolutely, what a great bottle that was so um. Hey, you know something You can reuse

a wine bottle by putting a candle in it. Yeah, make it into a candle holder, or make it a water a feeder for your plants. That I've tried that before. I've never gotten it to work. What does it? What does it do? Well? You fill it up and then you plunge it into the soil, and I guess like the I don't think it's ever come out. It's either stuck in there or it's just poured out. I don't remember, but I was like, I don't think this is working. Interesting.

Has it worked for you? You know? It comes out very slowly, like it's not like you're gonna see go glug glog glog globe, because then you might as well just pour the water on it. No, I know, I think I left it in there for a good week or two and this plant is dead now. It didn't work, huh, I don't know. You're sure it was water like on no way to put grain alcohol alcohol. It was weird. Uh So is that good on glass? They ground it up into culor it. Yeah, that's like the ground, the

ground stuff that they eventually melt down. Yeah. Well, the neat re reuses of glass or recycle the one of the neat things that glass and be recycled into his fiberglass. It can be extruded into fiber ak a fiberglass, meaning it's glass. It may have been your coke bottle at one time, and now you're keeping your house. Sure, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I always think of like house installation it's like the pink panther. Yeah. What about steel steal is a big one. It's usually recycled. At

least of American steel is recycled. Is made of recycled steel from what I couldn't find that anywhere but in this in this article. But yeah, he's smart. But the the reason why is number one is just useful to recycle steel. But also apparently it's very easy. You just melt that stuff down and reuse it. Yeah, and Ed mentions the giant machines at shred cars. Uh did you

see these videos? I've seen it before. It's about the best thing ever to watch, Yeah, is to see a man e van just get sucked into a a tooth machine. It's really amazing. Yeah, and it feels like there's nothing that can clog this thing. No, I mean a minivan can't clogg it. Yeah, nothing can can't. Yeah, man, I could have watched that stuff for hours. And steel too. So they don't just do minivans, chuck. They do buildings,

old buildings, Um they do. Uh, there's something called ship breaking, where like you know those old huge ships, Well they get torn apart and recycled eventually. Um, that's actually one that's not necessarily very good for the environment because there's so many like toxic metals and like old diesel and stuff like that that gets like leached out into the environment. But an old ship is probably one of the worst like environmental disasters. It's it's pretty bad. But what are

you gonna do? Just like sink it. You have to do something with it. So, um, that's steal. Another one, this one stuck out to me is um plastic water bottles. Right. Yeah, So with plastics and general, it's tricky because if you ever get into an argument with somebody who's just hell been on proving that recycling is actually not green because they like to rain on people's parade or whatever. Um, they will point to plastic and they are absolutely right.

Like you, you just can't argue it's cheaper and probably less polluting to produce plastic new than it is to recycle plastic. It's just that's how cheap making plastic is. We've got to do an episode on plastics. It's just like we live in a plastic age, right, So, um, that is true, it is. It's it's it's more costly both environmentally and I think economically to recycle plastic than to just make it new. But that's not to say

that you just shouldn't recycle plastics. So if you do recycle like a plastic water bottle, one thing that I ran across it I didn't know before is screw that cap on tightly. And if you'll notice that plastic cap

is a different type of plastic than your plastic water bottle. Um. But if you throw the cap away separately, it'll just end up in the landfill, even if it's in your recycling bin, if you screwed on the The way that the plastics reprocessors are set up these days is that whole bottle goes through and the plastic is separated by density. So the stuff in the cap, I believe, floats and the stuff in the bottle sinks in in like whatever liquid bath they create for it and melt it and

then they separate it like that. But if it's just your caps or whatever, it's not going to make it through the machine. The machines are set up to separate them. Connected with your cap connected to the to the water bottle, still screwed on. A commonly argued that we now have given you the answer to, Yeah, and now I think back, I'm like, how many times I've been like, well, I got to unscrew the cap and throw it in separately, had no idea. Now I know I won't be doing

in that again. I can assure you, Chuck, I'll chick through these recycling symbols real quickly. For plastic, instead of going into great detail, there is one through seven that you will see stamped on the bottom usually of whatever, or you know sometimes on the side of your plastic. Number one is p E, t E or PET. Number two is hd p E, Number three is V or PBC, final four is ld p E. Number five is PP and these all have you know, longer scientific names. Number

five is like your yogurt container. From what I've seen yogurt containers catch a bottles or bottles, medicine bottles, although most pharmacies ask you to bring back here script bottles. Yeah, I am so green. I just go and like make a little basket out of my hands, just say, put the pills in here, just dump dump it into my hand. Number six is polystyrene. That's styrofoam. And then number or seven is other and miscellaneous. That's where everything else goes.

So every single one of those plastics can be recycled. This is like one of the big things about recycling. We can recycle. About seventy of the stuff that we throw away can be recycled. We recycled what about thirty of it? And the reason why is in large part because there's no money in recycling some of those other ones, like styrofoam. You can recycle styrofoam, but the process for recycling styrofoam is so difficult and expensive that it is

it costs money to recycle styrofoam. Therefore, no one recycles styrofoam. And when you step back and think about all the styrofoam packaging out there, and the styrofoam peanuts and all that stuff, it's not getting recycled. You put it in with your even though it has the recycling symbol, it's saying this can be recycled. In theory, there's no one out there, almost no one out there that recycles it,

so it's just going straight to the landfill. The problem is even worse than that, though, and this is thing I was talking about before, Chuck at the very beginning. You put that styrofoam in there, you put enough styrofoam in there. Then you might do what's called contaminating the batch. Where these the recycle um sorting center, the murph might say, it's not even worth paying human beings to sort through

this stuff. There's so much styrofoam in here. Just send that whole batch to the landfill, including the stuff that can be recycled. So that's another big deal. Why we're not recycling a lot of stuff is because we're mixing stuff that can't be recycled or won't be recycled in with the stuff that can and should be recycled, and it's diverting the whole batch off to the landfill, which

is a big problem. Which is the way the best way to address that is for people like you and me to go onto our local recycling website and say what can I actually recycle in my area and they'll tell you, and then the stuff that can't be it feels terrible to throw it away eight but throw it away, like I can tell you by like with experience. It's not a good feeling to throw a big piece of styrofoam away into a dumpster that's going to the landfill.

But you can take solace in the fact that it's not going to spoil the batch of recycling that actually is going to the recycling center. Yeah. So our community has a styrofoam recycling day like twice a year, and I'm gonna start bringing my styrofoam to your No, don't do that, because we already have loads. Uh. And that stuff does is recycled, but it's you know, you gotta look out for it. It's very specific programs that ask

for your styrofoam, uh, and they do recycle it. So you know, it's sort of like electronics recycling, right, it's really expensive. It's uh to do it costs money. Um. So our community like twice a year again, in fact, I think it's at the same time has electronics recycling and you actually have to pay and you go and

pay them some money to donate your old whatever you know. Um. Very ironically, I was going through stuff you should know Selects and I can't remember what episode it was, but in the listener mail, we basically read a p s A for something called free I t Athens. Do you remember that, Yes, And it's freed to I think is

what it's called. But um, I looked it up and they're still around, but you can give them, at least in Athens, Georgia, your old e waste, your old electronics and and um specifically computer stuff, and they take it, refurbish it and then donate it to people in need. And they're still doing it. And I guarantee that that Athens, Georgia is not the only town in the country that has a program like this. So rather than paying somebody like a chump to recyclist, give it to somebody who

can refurbish it. Well, yeah, because a lot of times like this old Mac is just out of date. It works fine, yeah, and just let me throw it in the trash. Yeah, got an old got an old computer monitor? You can you can trade that to an anarchist for their goods and services. They love those things. So to quickly finishing up on these symbols, they say avoid three, six and seven, look for two, four and five. They're considered to be the safest um and number one is

considered safe. But that's the one that's soda bottles, water bottles, um, salad dressing containers, mouth wash, peanut butter. Uh. It can be recycled and it is safe. But they're just I think they're on a mission to try and get people to use less of that stuff. Especially in ED points out one of the gripes against recycling, one of the few they actually agree with, is people recycle. So they're like, I'm I buy a case of water every two weeks,

but it's fine because I recycle it. It encourages maybe for some people to think, because I'm doing this thing right, and then I can just keep buying water bottles right Precisely. That's probably the biggest argument against recycling today is it allows for this consumer society to keep flourishing and thriving. Let's take a break real quick and come back. Okay, chuck.

So all that stuff has been sorted and um depending on what it is, say like um aluminum cans or plastic bottles or something like that, it is put into these huge enormous bails and then sent off to the reprocessors who then do things like you described with the paper. They basically um clean it, burn off any impurities, scrape off any impurities, get to the raw cial again and then turn it into small little things like um if

it's aluminum in gets or if it's um glass. They're trying to cull it um or if it's plastics, they'll melt it down into nerdles. I can't remember what they're called, but those are mermaids tears, remember that's what they break down to and fish eat them and die. Um. And then those things go to manufacturers and they buy it. So that's that's this. That's the current state of recycling

right now. And that last part, the last two parts them where the reprocessors by the stuff and then the manufacturers by the stuff from the reprocessors that has been disrupted with China coming in and saying we're not doing that anymore. So there's a lot of things that can

change as a result of this. Right if all of these if these things that actually do have value start to build up as they are in all of these warehouses and facilities, um, so there another market is going to develop because these things do have value, because consumers do want to see like, oh, this thing I'm using was made with you know, post consumer recycled material. I feel good about that. I'm gonna buy this package over

that package. There's value to this stuff. Right, So there will be a market that develops, But will it be this continued thing where we're like here, developing country, you don't have like um regulatory and safety and environmental protections like we have in our country. So take this and we can feel good about ourselves because it's out of sight.

That's that's basically how the recycling commodities market developed in the nineties and up till two thousand eighteen, it was just like here, you take our our thing, and we can feel good about things, but but unwarranted and unwarranted feeling of of feeling good about um about recycling. So it's possible that the actual like real deal will develop and that will will continue to recycle and feel good about things, but it'll be you know, justified. That's what

I'm hoping. That's what I think is going to happen. I think that single stream recycling is going to go away. I think that we're gonna have to start like being more conscientious and just know what we're doing more. Because if you put the average person who recycled in the nineties up against the average person who recycles today, do you remember back like in the nineties, like people knew what they were talking about with recycling and way more sideburns.

Sure more so, but like I think of my dad like he's still just a religious recycler. Now. He got like the bug in the nineties because there's such a good campaign, a good public campaign, and yes, fewer people recycled, but the quality of the stuff that was entering the recycling stream was way better than it is today. Good stuff in the nineties it was so great because so depending on where you live in the country, in the United States and reckon all over the world, UM, you

might have different options for recycling. The Abuse Center research study UM found that of the United States has something available to them UM, which is great. Uh, thirty percent has curbside only, drop off only and forty pcent and had a mix of both. And of any town with a population over a hundred and twenty five thousand have curbside pick up now and in the US over a

hundred still yeah, a lot of America. Yeah. So those are the general ways that you're going to recycle, either at a recycling center, uh, like a drop off center, curbside pickup, which you know we love UM buy back centers. You know, if you've ever seen the aluminum can machines, we can collect aluminum hands, throw them in there and

make some money. Uh, and then that's kind of part of the deposit refund program where you know in the good old days when you would you would drink a soda that you actually actually paid extra for that bottle. That Yeah, if it has like a five cent refund, it's called a refund for a reason because you paid an extra nickel to drink that coke out of the bottle. Out of the bottle. But you can always go take it back, sonny, and they'll give your five cents back.

Then they take that bottle, wash it out, sterilize it, may fill it with coke again. Yeah. I don't drink those. I don't drink cokes at all. But there's something about that iconic bottle that I love. That green tinted, green tinta that's bright ribbed. No, no, no no, that the original coke bottle has that really faint green. It's not green green like this bright bottle. But yeah, and it's got like that. It's ribbed and it has that curve ribbed

for your pleasure. It's very sexy bottle. They think about it. I wonder I loved it. You just went Should we talk about um stuff? You shouldn't recycle absolutely. Well, let's get to that. But let's talk about the criticisms. One of the ones we talked about was that it gives you and this is the one I think it sounds like we both fully agree with, is that recycling gives you a false sense of um, like you're doing something

for the environment. Yeah, which you are, but not to the point where you can just be like, hey, I'm just gonna buy everything and but I'm recycling it. Yeah, that's definitely true. But also you're not fully like it's amateur hour with recycling these days, where before you you there was less being recycled, like only one to three percent of that stuff was being diverted to the landfill. Today there's like fifty increase in the amount of stuff that's being recycled, but up to like of that is

being diverted to the landfill. Yeah. Right, So if you could just keep that number up, the increase over like the early nineties, and then decrease what's going to the landfill, that'd be fantastic. And you do that by teaching people what not to recycle. You should be the e pH chief I am. You know, like my pen cost me. You might actually want to protect the environment. There, it's right there in the job title. We're gonna get some email for that. Politics. Uh, this is one that we

touched on a little bit. But um that it's basically a zero sum game. Uh with with the you know, the energy used, okay to recycle and like we said, it sort of you know, very much depends on the product. But many of the most common things we recycle. It

is not a zero sum game. No. But even if even if Chuck you took all of material manufacturing and all of material recycling and it turned out that it was totally evened out energy energy wise, pollution wise, you would still be it's still be worthwhile to recycle because recycling has a demonstrably better impact on the economy. Like there are more jobs associated with it, there's more revenue associated with it. Um, there are more goods and services

associated with it. It just has a greater economic impact than sending waste to the landfill does. Like there's money and sending sending waste to the landfill, it's true, but recycling actually has way more of a positive economic benefits. So even if pollution is the same, energy uses the same, it's just shown overall recycling is better money wise. Take the pin out of that one. Yeah. Uh, there isn't a garbage problem to begin with. There is no garbage crisis.

Plenty of landfill space. Um, so we don't need to sweat it this one. You just say, can you just lean forward a little bit and you kick them in the butt. Yeah, technically there is plenty of landfill space. That does not mean that we should fill it as quickly as possible. Right, that's probably the easiest way to debunk that, right, Yeah, I mean it's just because there is space doesn't mean all right, then fill it with

drash exactly? Like who thinks that? Do you look at the ocean and go, well, we could dump a lot of stuff in there, Like that's just that's just that's just dumb. I'm sorry that you're a dumb person if you think that. I don't say that very often, but when I do, I mean, alright, so I think now

we can talk about things you're recycling wrong. Okay, So again, listen up, everybody, because if we can tell you what not to recycle or how to recycle things better, and you can tell other people and everybody just kind of figures this out and actually becomes like primo recyclers like we used to be in the nineties. This would have a signal forgetting positive impact on at the very least the amount of stuff going to the landfill, which we can all agree is not a good thing. Correct. Okay,

So throw away that Starbucks cup. That's a that's a sad one. It is because you want to even if you wash it out with water and it's clean as a whistle, you cannot recycle that and you're gonna get stared at and people are gonna shoot spit balls at you, even though they don't have straws anymore. You just say stop, stop, I'm I'm I'm on your side. You don't understand. Yeah, tell him, Josh, that you know is what you should say back. Don't don't mention chuck. But yes, those disposable

coffee cups have wax on them. It's a very fine film and you you know you can tell by looking at them. Um, that's why your coffee doesn't leak out all over through the paper, that's right, because yeah, it's either wax or plastic, I think. And the problem is is very tough to separate from the paper when they

start running it through that reprocessing process. Yes, And there was a group of people at um stand Earth who did a little experiment where they actually had tagged these Starbucks cups and uh and where Denver, Colorado that went to the recycling bin and then they traced them. They ended up in the landfill. So yeah, with like electronic tags, they were tracking a dolphin. Yeah, or like your child. So throw them away. I'm sorry, Okay, but don't just

throw the whole thing away. You feel dressed that thing, right, You pull the coffee clutch off, you pull the lid off, both of those can be recycled, and then you throw the cup away. Here's the even better thing to do by one of those like ten or fifteen dollar travel mugs and say I would like my Starbucks in this please, and they'll go okay, great. Or if you're sitting in there, I don't know that of Starbucks does this, but every mom and pop coffee shop will serve you your coffee

and a big, delicious giant mug. Yeah. I think Starbucks does too, if you Yeah, but that that's the point, Like re reducing the number of paper cups that you have to throw away, so much the better. Yeah, and what I do is um my, uh germophobes might think is creepy, but I take the little sleeve off what do you call it clutch to keep it from your hand from getting warm. I just stick that back in the thing with the other ones. What do you mean, Well, I use it and I take it off and I

put it back where I found it. Oh, I see smart, just for the next person. So that's the second are yeah nice? Use nice? Just as long as you keep your hands clean. Yeah, I try to poopy hand. We've talked about pizza boxes before, but it is definitely worth saying again, we've talked a lot about pizza boxes. I think it's even they say a little grease is okay, a tiny amount. I think it's best to just cut out the grease spot and throw and throw the rest

in the recycling bin. Or usually there's only grease on one side, the side where the pizza has been sitting. The other side's fine, just tear that off and throw the non greasy side and the recycling through the greasy side in the track. I'm saying, go the extra mile and cut around the grease because all those corners are recyclable. You go you know. Okay. And here's the other thing I said, throw the greasy side in the trash, no light it on fire. The that that, um, that can

be composted. Uh yeah sure. The cardboard box almost always can be composted if even if it has grease on it. Yeah okay, so um, pizza boxes, no grease equals recycling. Right, And I already talked a little bit about food stuffs. A little bit of food stuffs is okay. But again I just recommend like taking an extra thirty seconds and rents out that mayonnaise jar, right, rent it out. Um if if it if it has like the oily sheen from the mayonnaise and it's still that's fine. The plastic

reprocessor is set up to deal with that. If it has lumps of mayonnaise and it's still, it's not it's too dirty. Um. Same with like peanut butter is another one. Um, if you have like a to go like plastic food tray or something like that, like like get the crumbs out, just get it, like, don't don't sit there and scrub it as I think this is A New York Times article points out like you're'll actually be wasting water at some point, but you do want to you want to

kind of get it prepped. Don't just throw it in there like it's like you would the trash um like because it's trash. And again, if there's enough stuff in this batch that's going to the recycling center, they're gonna throw it away. So don't throw stuff that shouldn't be recycled in with the recycling. Yeah, I get we have a lot of guilt about take out containers. Yeah, so ordering in that's that's the one thing where just like man, I love ordering in food, love that Chinese delivery yeah,

but all that waste. Yeah, and like the Chinese delivery boxes, I mean their waterproof too for a reason, so they're not getting recycled either. You've gotta just awsome. I saw something like this is made up. But it's something like seventy or eighty percent of plastic trash is one time use food packaging, like just some ridiculous amount. Where if and this is the weird thing, what are you gonna do?

You're gonna take like your own dishes to the Chinese food place or your own like tupperware and say put it in this please? People do that? Do they? But I mean, you are pretty hardcore if you're doing that, So there's gotta be another way. And chuck. This is another another thing we can do besides you and me being smarter and better at recycling, like just just making that like a side thing. It's demanding that manufacturers who make packaging make it with this end of life and mind.

Make it so it can be reused, or make it so it can be very easily recycled, or make it so it has a minimal design rather than a bunch of like styrofoam and wrapping and all this stuff. And if you, I mean, just the smallest little things can help. Like if you're picking up food to go, uh, and they're throwing in a bunch of utensils that you take home, yeah to say no, Yeah, like you don't use that stuff if you're taking it home, So what do you do? You probably throw it away or there's a drawer in

your house with those things, you know. Uh. Plastic straws are a big deal right now to like cities are banning them. I think Starbucks just said they weren't gonna use them anymore, So that's a big one. Um. And plastics again, plastic bags are really bad zip block bags, bubble wrap. None of that stuff should be in your recycling,

none of it. None of it. Yeah, like don't. I've seen people take a bag full of alumium cans and throw the whole thing in there, Right, that bag is going to good like they're they're gonna say, well, this whole bag is trash, even though everything inside can be recycled, it's trash now because it's just not worth their time

to empty the bag out. The conveyor belts going too fast. Yeah, dirty diapers can't recycle those that has human bio hazardous waste in it, even if you're even if you're using the diapers that do have plastic in them, get judge. But I wouldn't use those either. But that's there the reason you might think you can recycle them because well, it's plastic. I can recycle plastic. You can't recycle like eight different kinds of plastic that are in the diapers.

They again, they melt them down, and then yes, once you add the whole dimension of poop to it, it's bad news from your child who was eating plastic that was plastic in the poop. I can't wait to do a plastic episode. It's gonna knock everybody's socks off, chuck. Uh. So we're going to stop here and we'll pick this up again in eight years. Okay. Yes, if you want to know more about recycling, go to your local recycling website and figure out what you can recycle and what

you can't and do it. Okay. And since I said do it, it's time for listening mail. I'm gonna call this Zambardo follow up. Hey, guys, big fan of the show and also a fellow movie crusher. Well nice, thank you. Alex. Let's thing to the Stanford prison experiment and reminded me of my own discovery of Zimbardo. In high school, I took a psychology class and the teacher didn't really have

a lesson plan for any day. He would periodically just put on episodes of the PBS show called Discovering Psychology, hosted by some middle aged guy who looked a bit like a Star Trek evil doppelganger. The episodes are pretty elementary. He seemed to be designed for student audience. The host would introduce himself, talk about something like perception or learning for a bit, and then read and then do a reading rainbow esque graphic. Uh cutaway to a famous experiment

on the subject. Fast forward to this semester. We're given some free time to research UH, and I was trying to pick something good and I discovered the Standford prison experiment. It was only then that I realized that Zimbardo was the one hosting that PBS special that I had been watching for the past month. Frankly, guys, im will surprise at UH, the guy that had the lead role in when of the least at the cool psychology experiments was given Well, let's be fair, it wasn't one of the

least ethical. Ever. Things have gotten way worse, But for as big as it was, I just want to be clear, they're poorly, poorly put together. I'm I'm surprised he was given a hosting role for an educational TV show targeting students twenty years after. Okay, fair enough, that's Alex's point of view. That is from Alex Aberman. Alex from Falls Church, Virginia, nice town, buddy NICs area. Yes for running it? Oh yeah, have you ever been to um oh? Man, I can't

remember the name of the place. They're famous for peaking duck there. Oh really? Yeah? I can't remember. There's one specific, amazing Chinese restaurant that has the best peaking duck you'll ever had. Wow, try it all right, okay, um duck, but oh well, don't bother me. The rest of the food is pretty good too, but the peking duck is off your socks off. Um. So, if you want to know more about oh no, I already said that. If you want to get in touch with us, go to

our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com. It has all the links to all our social meds, and you can also send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.