Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry'll be here eventually, but for now, all you got is Josh and Chuck. But really, what more do you need? Ton of stuff you should know?
Yeah, in our world, in about two or three minutes, Jerry will just come in and go, hey, I'm here, gos, Sorry, I'm late.
I feel like she's learned not to do that. She'll just sit there on mute for a while. Really, yeah, she hasn't done it in a little while. She's really turned over a new leaf. All right, we'll see, we'll see. We should leave it in if she does come in, Yeah, we should do that. We'll share with everybody.
Except they'll just hear our ends. Although here is oh god, Jerry.
Well, no, I think as she chimes in on riverside, we could edit that into the final all.
Right, edit. This will be a fun test.
It will be and there's a little peak behind the curtains for everybody of how we do our thing slap dash, that's right while making fun and Jerry.
Yeah, hey, I just noticed we were not on the list of time magazine's one hundred greatest podcast of all time?
What really?
Yeah, it was funny because I saw that list and my first instinct was, I mean, top one hundred, Like that's a lot, Like, surely we cracked the top one hundred.
They probably haven't heard of us, is what it is.
Now. We're not on there. Literally all of our old time colleagues, you name it, Radio Lab ninety nine percent invisible, Ira Maren like every podcast of note of the past eighteen years except for spe Wow.
That's very stuff you should know, isn't.
It It is? It is very fitting.
We don't let that stuff get to us.
So do we know Time magazine who cares?
Yeah? And even though they put out a stupid podcast list.
Yeah, watch, we're going to be Men of the Year. Now.
The headline on the cover will be like, oh gosh, we forgot.
Well you'll be Man of the Year, but I won't be mentor That's how it would work.
That's what Time does. They tinker with relationships by dividing.
That's right. Speaking of tinkering, I think we could all tinker with our worldwide economy a bit and perhaps make it more circular.
What are you talking about?
Well, Josh, I'm talking about our topic at hand, mhm, talking about circular economy.
My friend, Oh, I got I didn't get the reference. M So have you heard of this before? Uh yeah, okay, yeah, I ran across it. As far as I know, it's fairly new from the two thousand aughts. I didn't see that it was an idea that was laying around already in this exact form and then was picked up and promoted. So it's possible it was generally created by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Hats off to Ellen MacArthur.
Yeah. So, Ellen MacArthur, as far as I know, still holds the world record for the fastest solo sail trip around the entire world, twenty six thousand miles of circumnavigation circular in seventy two days. Yeah, she loves circles and apparently on her trip. I was reading about it. It sounds just insane. And by the way, whenever I read of like world sailing trips, I can't help but think of one of the best documentaries of all time, Deep
Water about Donald Crowhurst. I believe you've seen it before. I know we've talked about it. Oh, if you haven't seen it, I actually envy you.
Is this the guy h the diver?
Nope, he's a sailor. There was about like a nineteen seventy five World Sailing competition.
So he was, mi, is it deep water if he wasn't deep in the.
Water, because he's he's sailing over deep water.
Oh, over DeepArt. They should call it over deep water. You sailing over deep water?
You should actually all wait, but let's just pause recording and go watch it. Is that good?
I'll look into that. I've been on a documentary kick lately, so I'll I'm ripe.
This is time. Would put this one on their top one hundred documentaries of all time probably, so yeah. So while she was sailing around the world, she just started. She had, I guess, a lot of time to think and saw a lot of waste and junk and terrible stuff and realize that there's a better way. And a lot of people have thought like, Okay, there's a better way to do this. There has to be. And what she promotes, what she's kind of come up with is
this idea of a circular economy. In a very short back of the envelope sketch of it, the outputs, the waste of the economy get reused as inputs as basically turned into aw materials, and people say, oh, recycling, that's a big part of it. But as far as the circular economy is concerned, we idealize recycling like we're like, that's the best you can do. They're like, that's actually the least desirable out of all of them. There's a bunch of other stuff we can do instead. So circular economy.
Yeah, I mean it sort of aligns with the whole reduce, reuse, recycle ethos. I think we could best explain it by maybe starting with what we generally have now, which is linearar economy. And that's who helped us with this. Dave.
Yeah, Dave helped us.
Yeah, it's smacks of Dave, but Dave calls it and Dave didn't invent this term. But it's a take make waste economy system where you take resources and you know whatever, like cotton or any kind of raw material, you make something into that to a product to sell to people, and then that thing maybe generally quickly wears out and you throw it away and it goes into a landfill.
It's very I mean, it's kind of the worst possible scenario you could ask for if you care about planet Earth and people in the world and animals in nature. And it's linear because it goes in one way. You have something, you make something, and then that thing wears out and you throw it in the landfill.
Yeah, you take the cotton that you grow, you make it into a car. You drive the car into a landfill and jump out right before it goes over the cliff. That's what everybody does.
That's right.
So you left out, kick back and watch the money roll in, because that's ultimately what the biggest challenge to implementing a circular economy is. One of the biggest ones is that the linear economy that we have set up that's been around since the Industrial Revolution is a money making machine. And it's easy to criticize when you sit there and look at all of the terrible waste and
pollution and inequality that's been generated from it. You can also say, yeah, this wealth has funded a lot of science, it's improved a lot of living conditions. Even the poorest people in America are living high on the hog compared to the poorest people in other nations, like the wealthy nations have really done well for themselves with the linear economy, and again that's a big reason why there's a lot of reticence to transition to something different.
Yeah, for sure, there are some you know, notable I'm trying to think of a term we could come up with that labels instead of a gold star, like an industry that gets the opposite of that, like a turd pin or something that.
You wear that worn't so much tird. But yes, that would work very well.
Do you know what makes turd worse is that it's spelled t rd.
Yes, that definitely does make it worse. Everything about that word is so bad.
Yeah, totally, totally. So the four sectors that are sort of the worst are food, electronics, consumer goods, and construction. Food obviously, and we're going to get into these, you know, more specifically as we go on, but generally speaking, food
is a pretty terrible sector. And we've talked about food waste before, but it's not just the food waste that's like tossed by grocery store and restaurants and stuff like that, but it's also you know a lot of places still are just using those single use bags and people are like, sure, double back it triple back it. I don't want my tube of two face to fall through that thing into the parking lot, and then all the packaging that goes into it. And we've you know again, we've covered all
this stuff in various forms here and there. Unsustainable farming, electronics. Don't even get me started on electronics. Recycling and electronics that are basically impossible to repair or get repaired.
Well, they're designed that way. If we did an entire episode on that planned obsolescence.
And nothing gets me more mad. Almost.
Yeah, when a company purposefully designs a product to break in a short amount of time, like they'll put some sort of sensor or electrical component next to something that generates a lot of heat so that it degrades faster, Like it's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one. That's a big problem. Yeah, like you said with electronics, But clothing is another one too.
It's designed to just be worn. You buy it cheaply, you wear it for a little bit, you throw it away, and we'll, like you said, we'll talk more about this stuff later. But my eyes started popping out when I was reading about clothing.
Yeah, that's one for sure. And then construction. A lot of resources used in construction and you know, basically construction materials anytime we've done any sort of like renovation project. Because you know, we live in like a hundred year old house, so we instead of moving, we kind of stayed and fixed it up over the years, at first by ourselves and then with you know the help of
contractors and such. And as you know you've been through stuff like that, it's like when that construction dumpster pulls up, we do everything we can. We fight tooth and nail to give stuff away, Like, hey, can you put all these awesome hundred year old bricks out by the sidewalk. Someone will take them and you know they will acquiesce. You know, they hate dealing with us because they just want to throw that stuff in the dumpster. But we've managed to get rid of a you know, we're going
through a little thing now. And I had this really awesome screen door and they were literally throwing this really nice screen door. It was like a good one. It wasn't just like a forty dollars screen door.
It was like a Prada screen door.
No, this is Gucci, I think, no. But it was like a from like a craftsman company for craftsmen homes. It was sort of like an upscale screen door, and they were throwing at the trash and almost tackle the guy. And I put that thing out there and it was gone in an hour, you know. And I bet just little things like that make me feel like, oh God, I saved one little thing from the landfill.
Nice work man.
Not for a pat on them back, but you know what I mean, It.
Just it's a conservant.
It just kills our consciences, just burning up when they're throwing away, even old wood and stuff. You know. I try to take that stuff to the camp and burn it.
You know what I found. When you're dealing with contractors and subcontractors, if you want them to do something, you have to tell them directly, yeah, and a kind of an authoritative voice and then finished also with chop chop.
Yeah. And also stand there and watch them because as soon as you leave, they'll just say like whatever, dude.
Yeah for sure, yeah for sure. Okay, So you guys out there listening probably have bloody crescent shape fingernail marks on the heel of your palms from hearing all this stuff. So just settle down, relax a little bit, because now we're going to tell you a little bit about an alternative to that, the closed loop model, not linear circular, the circular economy, and it basically says it takes a look at everything wrong with the linear economy and fixes it one by one. And it's like there's a lot
left open. It's not like this is just a like a completely ready to go economic model. It's going to solve every single problem and it's not going to create any other problems. It's more we're at the most conceptual star. Yeah, that is being presented to people to say, hey, there's another way, and here are some of the ways we can do it.
Yeah, And it's sort of just the opposite of everything we were just saying. Instead of planned obsolescence, there's a planned Permanen's like, hey, let's make something that lasts for a long time. That's one. Makes something that's repairrable. That's another. One.
Really kind of brilliant thing that we're going to talk about later is this idea of instead of owning something like sharing stuff, renting things, sharing things, paying for the use of things that you don't own, right, like, you know, splitting that up and then if something finally does reach the end of its life, because not everything will last forever,
even the most well made thing. Those components then you can take down and hopefully most of not all of that can be recycled or remade into something else.
Yeah, and if you'll notice, reduction of consumption isn't an emphasis of this. I didn't see that talked about much at all. So no one's saying like, hey, you can't keep growing. It's just that the stuff that you're creating needs to last much, much longer, and the greatest thing you can do is to keep it as close to the consumer as possible. Right, So let's say you have a hammer. Everybody knows a hammer breaks, like the second time you ever use it.
Would you hammer in the morning more of the evening for me?
Okay, but I would do it all over the land, right, So when you take a hammer, I was kidding about it breaking. But if you have a hammer and you don't use it a lot, the best you could do is give it to somebody else who is going to use it more, rather than throw the hammer away. That's a terrible example. I know people don't really throw hammers away, but keeping it it reused, so that there's no inputs
or very little inputs. That's the ideal. The more inputs necessary, taking it apart, transporting it somewhere, putting it back together, refurbishing it, that is the least desirable, even though that's still within this scope that we currently have in the linear model. That that's like the best you can do. The you know, like recycling, recycling is the last thing you want to do.
Yeah, and hammer's not the worst idea, my friend, because I'd say ninety nine percent of the people out there, if they're hammer handle breaks. Let's say you have a wooden hammer handle and that breaks, people just throw it in the trash and you can fix that. One of my favorite things to do is I follow a few Instagram accounts where people fix things in front of your
face like that, just simple everyday things. And it's incredibly rewarding to see someone take something that would normally be in the trash and they're like, Oh, you need to do is get another piece of wood. Get that other piece of wood fully out of there, h and shape it like the broken piece. And then you've got another hammer.
How do you shape it like the broken piece? What tool do you need for that?
Well, I mean, these people do this for a living, so they may have a lath or something, but like, it doesn't even have to be pretty. I could I bet you give me a broken hammer, buddy, with my limited tools and skills, I could make that hammer new again if I really wanted to.
Okay, here's a challenge. I challenge all stuff you should know listeners to mail Chuck your broken hammers and he will show every single one of them for you for free and mail them back out of his own pocket.
That's right. Send it to a top one hundred podcaster at one two three Lane, Atlanta, Georgia. Should we take a break, Yeah, let's.
Take a break.
All right, we'll be right back.
So okay, so far basically what we've been saying are all good ideas. Very few people are like no, I want to throw my hammer away. I get the deep satisfaction throwing that broken hammer away. Most people just don't want their hammer to break, which again is addressed like making products planned for permanence, making them just better rather
than cheaper. But all of this stuff like is going to take a complete shift in how we view economics, how we view growth, and also how we view consumer behavior because we're in a linear model right now, and the basis of the linear model is making it as easy as possible for you to buy and use and throw away get rid of whatever product it is you're buying, whether it's potato chips, a hammer, a cotton for a car, whatever.
You're gonna get me every time. By the way, I could keep going back to that. Well, yeah, but you know, there are examples of things and companies that are and have been doing this. You know, Dave looked down on his kitchen table and saw an aluminum can, was like, hey, there's a good example right there. Aluminum is a very recyclable thing, and thankfully it's it's being recycled and at pretty good rates. It depends on where you are. If like you're in Brazil, that's about one hundred percent, if
you're in the USA about sixty five percent. But the average aluminum can that you're gonna purchase in the United States is made from about seventy one percent recycled material. So we're doing okay there, it's a good example.
We're doing great. It's a great example. It's the probably the top example as far as the United States goes. People tend to recycle cans, and they're easy to recycle, So we have a process in an infrastructure that makes the whole thing fairly low hanging fruit. And because aluminum cans are light enough but also compactable, you can transport a bunch of them, so it's worth your while to transport them from a pickup site to like our actual
recycling centers. It's just checking all of the boxes. Even still, though you see, with as easy as it is, thirty five percent of those aluminum cans just get thrown away in the trash.
Who's doing that?
A lot of people? I mean, I'll do that. Yeah, I know, it's it's kind of nuts, but that is the case. So that right there just kind of goes to show you like that's where the consumer behavior needs to change. Everything else is basically in place for us to recycle all of the aluminum cans that we have, we're just not doing it. So that's like kind of one pillar or an example of one of the pillars that has to be adapted to go to a circular economy making people more thoughtful.
I guess, good luck, buddy.
I know, I think that's probably more than anything what makes this a pipe dream, I should say. The most cynical side of me says that.
Is, getting everybody on board with a single idea these days is not possible, basically.
Yeah, because all it takes is one schmo to throw his can away in the trash and you just lost you one hundred percent recycling status and then everybody goes, what's the point of a circular economy anyway? And goes back to the linear economy.
Yeah, but the stat that could throw out then is one hundred percent except Gary, mm, you.
Know, and it would be a Gary.
Yeah, I'm sorry Gary's. You know, it's true.
Yeah, not all Garys are bad, but all bad people are Gary's.
There's the stuff you should know shirt, not all Gary's. Just that's it, okay. There are also some examples of companies that, you know, I'm a big Shark Tank fan of that TV show, and it seems like more and more companies are coming through there that are that are small, and obviously they're small because they're on Shark Tank and looking for initial investments, but they're trying to do the right thing here. Getting corporations on board is the big problem.
But I've seen a lot of companies come through Shark Tank where they're like and the reason I mentioned this is because Unilever is one of the examples of a corporation that's partnered with the Ella MacArthur Foundation. They're reducing plastic waste and they sell a ton of stuff. But like when they're selling detergent and stuff like that, or shampoo, now they have programs where you're like, hey, send in your empty shampoo bottle and we will fill that thing up and send it back to you or get it
and concentrate stuff like that. And there's a lot of like shark Tank companies that are doing similar things, including cleaning products, where they're like, hey, there's a better way to do this, where you're just not even if you're recycling that plastic, just burning through these things on a daily and weekly basis and tossing it in the recycling or worse trash.
For sure, right, And I think like entrepreneurs creating small businesses and focusing on like one thing that is sustainable, reusable, whatever, that's how larger corporations start doing that stuff because they buy those smaller corporations for that idea and implement it company wide hopefully. So that's great that those people are out there.
Or they squash it, yeah, or they squash it. Yeah.
Lord, I just wanted to tell everybody we should say hi, Jerry, Jerry's here everyone.
Oh I was I was wrong.
Yeah, I saw that there are I did not see a single shampoo refilling station in the US there. I found them in Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, and Pakistan so far.
I mean that's that's even better because then you're not, you know, mailing stuff, you know, because that's another type of ways. It's like just mailing the empty bottles and having that mail back.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you're going to the store already and they're like, they're attractive little shampoo refilling centers, and I guess if you were really hard up, you could go just put your head under the nozzle and do a little little squirt and then run home and wash your hair.
Yeah. I mean they've been doing that with the big five gallon jugs of water forever, you know, at most right, I thought of that too. Yeah, that's a good thing because those things are are huge, and just swapping those out and refilling them just it only makes sense. Yep.
There's also there's a Dutch company called Niaga, which is again backwards. You'd never know that unless someone told you, or you happen to be wearing a Niaga T shirt in front of a mirror.
Yeah, it is the word again. I think just the way you said that might be confusing.
Okay, I got you. Yeah, I'm sure it was confusing. Can't you just hear like a time podcast monitor going and like checking some box that keeps us off the list?
Yeah, like one on one.
So if we're lucky. So this company, they're Dutch, they targeted carpets and mattresses and those are two of the worst offenders as far as at least as far as textiles go, but maybe as far as all products go. Yeah, because they're big, they're essentially impossible to recycle. They're very, very hard to recycle, and people throw a lot of them away. I think twenty million mattresses are thrown away
in the United States alone, thirty million in Europe. And we tossed about two billion pounds yeah, of carpet away every year in the United States into landfills. Only five percent of carpet gets recycled. I couldn't even tell you where you would recycle carpet.
I don't know. Is there a place called recarpet Maybe that's what it should be called, right.
Or carpets again, right, or all of that backward. Yeah.
I mean the other reason those two they're targeting those two a is because the people of the Netherlands are great. And hey, if you live in the Netherlands and you would go see a live podcast of us there in Amsterdam, let us know. Sure, let's go ahead and just say that we're putting out feelers for Europe, so we'd love to hear from people about where we might could get an audience. Sure, is that okay to say that?
Yeah, we should probably tell everybody it won't be for two years.
Yeah, we're targeting twenty seven, but we're going to get back on the road next year, coming for you Canada in a big way.
Yeah, for sure, So you better close the borders.
That's a little Well, they might hope it will be welcome to get a pass.
I hope it's up in the air.
But long way of saying, the reason that they are targeting those specifically is not just the lifespan, but they actually have a name. They're called Medium Life Bulky Products. They you know, this stuff lasts about ten years, and they're just full of nasty chemicals, and so all of that leads to them being the two of the worst defenders. Mattresses and carpet full of chemicals don't last long, and they're fairly large.
Yeah, especially if they're stained mattresses.
Yeah, yeah, good luck recycling that.
I saw eighty two and twenty years for a mattress to degrade in a landfill, which actually seemed a little fast for me. You know, it's still not fast enough. So this company is like, Okay, we're actually going to make this stuff out of recyclable materials. But even better than that, we're going to make it so that every part of the mattress is replaceable.
Imagine that or repaarable.
Yes, so you're like, I got just a gallons of urine staining the cover of my mattress. I need a new mattress cover. Rather than throwing out the whole mattress and waiting one hundred and twenty years for it to degrade, you just call up Niaga and you say, hey, send me another mattress cover, and they say, hey, we didn't know that you could call direct from the United states to the Netherlands. But that's new for us. We'll send it to you straight away and they send it to you.
You put it back on and there's no yearine whatsoever until the next time it happens.
That's right. But they say what's the magic word and you have to go bug in like it's like a two year old.
Again, that's the actually do that.
It's great, And we'll look at other Dutch companies because they they're they're doing the right thing. It seems like in a lot of ways. One key to all of this is, uh design. If you have a linear economy, which we do. Like we said, it's it's purpose it's purposeful. It's designed in such a way to make it, you know, either obsolete or just you know, a mattress that can't be recovered or whatever. So you have to start with design.
It has to start on the very conceptual phase of like, how could we make a mattress that could last you forever? And then you design it that way because it's possible.
Yeah, and design doesn't just apply to products, although that's the easiest thing to do, is to say, Okay, how can I design this product to fit into the existing recycling infrastructure, or design it to be reusable or repairrable. That's the easiest one. We also, though, need to design our recycling infrastructure to make it easier to recycle products that aren't designed to be recycled. So there's a lot
of design that has to go. But you're right, like, it has to be a conscious choice, and Dave points out something I think is important too, Waste is a conscious choice too, Like when your little like mini bag of lazed potato chips, when you're done with it, you throw it away. It was designed to be thrown away, like that was a decision that was made by the package designers. They didn't do anything to try to make
it recyclable. They decided that the best thing for you to do with that package is to throw it away. And as much as you hate it, you have no choice. Your choice is to buy those those lazed potato chips or not buy them. And some people are starting to based on the packaging. So people so some companies are starting to wake up. But for the most part, people are like, I don't want to think about but the
packaging that my potato chips come in. I have so many more bigger pressing issues right now that if you can just make it so that the people don't have to think about recycling it, then you're onto something.
Yeah, one hundred percent.
And I was talking about myself. I don't want to think about what I'm supposed to know on a potato chip package. And I'm not being judgy, like I'm including myself in this like I I mean, I would like to think I'm more conscientious than say the average person, but I'm certainly I'm not at like Chuck level.
I'm not like the Emily level. You know me, I'm on her coattails right well. I mean when I was a kid, we had the Charles Chips driver come around. Yeah, I remember that, and we would give them our I mean, if you're of a certain age, you might remember this.
There was a literal potato chip delivery company. They were called Charles Chips, and they came in a big metal ten and you would finish with that ten, and your chip person would come by and you would give them the ten of empty chips and they would give you a full ten of chips.
Yeah. They'd reach in with the cuff of their shirt, wipe the tin out, put the chips in the tin sometimes I saw.
Yeah, And obviously again there's still waste with the delivery truck and stuff, so save the emails. But we're talking about you know, we're not idealizing it as perfect. We're just saying like it's a better thing than what we're doing now, which is those little foil bags sitting in landfills for sure.
And yeah, that's another thing too, is because this is kind of conceptual and not every issue is being tackled right out of the gate with it. Like energy uses a big part of it. So they obviously are like, well, we need more renewables. That's kind of a no brainer. But it's important because not everything can be done with renew with renewable resources. Some stuff just requires fossil fuels.
Some stuff, say, requires nuclear, So you have to be able to design those power plants or those industrial smoke stacks so that that stuff's being captured and reused as an input somehow.
Right exactly. And you know you talked about educating the consumer, but and it's not educating the corporation because they know this stuff. They do it on purpose for a reason, like you said, But it's more about like companies coming along where the end user isn't the single focus. They take a more macro view and say, well, there's something bigger at work with these products we sell, and that's
Planet Earth and Mother Nature. And while the consumer is important and we want to give them a good product, we can start from the beginning and design something that has less of an environmental impact, designed to fit within these recycling networks, like you know, aluminum, like you were talking about, like once those are up and running, and a big one that I didn't even think of that day pointed out was like do you need this new product?
Does the consumer need it or is it just like, hey, I think we could boost sales in Q three if we released a slightly different version of this dumb same thing.
Right, So you kind of mentioned something where like using something like leasing or renting something can also be applied to things we don't normally think of is what we lease or rent. Right. One of the again a Dutch company called Bundles is basically they come to your house. They'll bring you your dishwasher or your washing machine, or your dryer, or your coffee maker, or you can bundle
it all together. It's the name, and they're going to bring you a really high end Mela sustainably manufactured appliance, and you're going to have this thing in your house and you don't have to lift a finger other than to use it. This company brings it, they install it, they come by and maintain it when it's done. When you're done with it, say you're moving and you can't use it anymore, they're going to come pick it up. They're going to refurbish it. They're going to bring it
to somebody else. It's like really circular. And the way that you are charged for it is by the number of washes you I guess carry out. I guess that's how you talk about launder you carry out a wash. It is called a paper wash model, and the whole basis of it is Wi Fi, like your washing machine is connected to their servers, so they're tracking how many
times you're washing. And then from what I can tell, you get a monthly bill based on the amount of washes you did, the amount of use you did for that, or you use for the washer or the dryer or whatever. You know.
It might take away here is what You've never washed your own clothes? Have you?
That is not true. I'm actually kind of good at my own clothes. I had to get good because I don't know how I do it. But there's not a day that goes by that I don't get a spot on one of my T shirts. So I've gotten good at salvaging T shirts.
Same, same. It's incredible how stained my T shirt gets on a regular basis. And I do believe you can carry out a wash like nobody's business.
Shout. That's what I use. I shout it out. It works really well.
I use and I hate having to use it. But my friend from that has been working in wardrobe departments in Hollywood for thirty years said, zout is the one I've not heard of.
Zout? Why do you hate to use it? Is it made from coal?
It's just one of those disgustingly smelly products.
Is it naptha?
I don't know, but no, I mean they mask it. It smells like, you know, just really really really really heavily fragranced. Yeah, and you know we're not down with that. So it gets out of spot. But it'll it'll taint you gotta wash it by itself. It'll it'll taint your whole load. Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, We'll take a break and be right back. All right, we're back. I did want to mention one thing. We had to take a quicker break. We were laughing too hard.
But on bundles and that renting appliances, you have to do a lot of education in the United States to overcome the perception of what the rented appliances means. Yeah, because we grew up in and you know, it's it's probably still the same way as gen xer is, where you know, appliance rental was something like you did if you couldn't afford to buy stuff, like you rented your TV or whatever. You're like, oh, man, that means you don't have much money to buy a TV. But there
is a better way. And I wish they had the here man, because we've had some really bad appliance luck and it makes me so mad because this stuff's expensive. I would love to rent washer and dryer.
Well, I'll rent you mine a bird.
They can carry out a heck of a watch.
Yeah, it's part of the American dream to own your own washer and dryer.
And I mean, man, no, I hate those things.
The government can take it from your cold dead hand if they try, Uh, Yeah, that's definitely. It's definitely part of American cultures. You own your stuff. Yes, you will talk about food though, Okay, you own that too. If you buy that, you own it here in the United States. Not sure what it's like in other countries. But food is a huge problem. We've done an entire episode I
think on food waste before. I know, we've talked about it extensively because I remember, and what's sad is we've been talking about this for decades now and the stat remains the same. A third of all of the food grown in the world gets thrown away every year, about a trillion dollars worth, and mindless amounts of water and
fertilizer and labor inputs just wasted. Not just in the face of all that loss of like money or resources, but it doesn't even get diverted to the poorest people in the world who are starving.
Yeah, for sure. And that's a great episode, So I encourage you to go listen to those. But one thing I don't know that we've covered on any of these shows. While we were you know, beating those horses.
What dead horses, skinning those cats, is.
The nutrient cycle. And you know obviously, you know, wasting food is a is a moral problem, an ethical problem. But one thing we haven't talked much about is that it disrupts that nutrient cycle. If you look at nature, the system they have is is a closed loop system there.
You know, things grow naturally out in the woods and it is from soil that is being you know, if it's just literally out in the forest, just being treated naturally by the natural processes of Mother Earth, and then an animal eats that thing and then poops it out, and that poop goes back into the soil and feeds the soil. That animal falls over dead one day, hopefully a very old age, then their bodies decompose and release
those nutrients back into the earth. And it is a dare i say, elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted.
Yeah, we make food part of our linear economy where the food waste doesn't just get tossed on the ground and biodegrade into it. You don't want to do that anyway, just the annual PSA. Don't throw apple cores and banana peels on the ground because that's not a good thing to do. What's the best thing to do is to
compost them and to some degree or some way. The worst thing you can do, though, is to throw them in a trash can and have them taken to the landfill, because then those nutrients that were put into that food have been taken out of the nutrient cycle for Earth, at least for however long it's gonna take for that entire landfill to degrade, which I can't even imagine how long it takes an entire landfill that just turned back into nutrients and stuff. So it's disrupted in that way.
Then we also disrupt it because we don't tend to collect our waste for reuse. It's an output, pure and simple, we don't we don't put it back into the system. So there's two ways that we disrupt the nutrient cycle with our with the way that we treat our food.
Yeah, totally. This may be part of a suite, like a playlist one day, because I just realized, we've done things on sewage recycling or sewage treatment plants, we've done them on landfills, So maybe we should do like a little green playlist one day.
Yeah. We got one on permaculture that was pretty great.
Yeah, totally.
Before we move on though, I should say some of that those what are called biosolids treated sewage. They it does get reused in some cases. Have you used malorganite? Uh?
Why do I know that word. I think we've talked about that.
It's a miracle fertilizer. It does wonders for your grass, especially if you pair it with an inch of water flooding your grass. But it's these little particles and they smell, but not smell the way you would think because they actually are treated sewage from Milwaukee's municipal sewerage system. Huh, but they it's like a nitrogen boost for its fertilizer for your lawn. It's insane how well it works. It's cheap, and you're reusing waste from the good people of Milwaukee.
Well that's great, and you can get.
It almost anywhere. It's very it's very abundant and easy to get and I highly recommend it.
I'm down to zero grass now.
Oh, you could use it on basically any plants. So if you have plants that like nitrogen, you can toss a little milorganite on there.
I'll pass out along to Emily Sheep. I'm sure she knows about it.
Zero grass is your entire lawn just or your entire yard just covered with high end antique screen doors. That's right, it's a good look, I'll vet it is. I'll bet they it's a little wobbly though, right walking around?
Yeah?
Or are they just for looking?
No? No, no, you walk on it, okay. So Ellen MacArthur's foundation is looking to correct this and making like basically investing in the biological cycle of the circular economy, like making this a part of it too. And composting is an obvious win. But one of the things that is pretty amazing is called cascading, that is reusing food
waste to make other things. And there's a what a Dutch company called Peel Pioneers because you know in those in fruit peels like orange and lemon and stuff like that, that's the best stuff is in that peel, the zest of those things and the essential oils that you get from those peels, like that's the goal man. And people are throwing that away or composting it, which is okay. But how about taking this essential oils and actually making
other products out of them? And that is what Peel Pioneers out of the Netherlands is doing.
Yeah, and that's I mean, you can find cascading in a lot of different food companies, but that's a great example because those that orange essential oil is in particular, are used in a lot of different other products. So you can have a pretty successful business just harvesting the scraps off the floor of an orange juice processor, you know.
Yeah, converting stuff to biofuel is another pretty obvious one.
Yeah, and then anaerobic digesters I have. I'm putting a lot of like hope on anaerobic digesters in the future where we just figure out the microbes that eat this stuff, or these microbes eat this kind of plastic, these microbes eat this kind of oil, and like just unleash them on all sorts of stuff and then reuse their byproducts as inputs. I really hope we reach that future. That to me is like the greenest of green.
Yeah, we've talked about that too. I can't remember what episode.
I can either. We'll we'll have to use that stuff you should know transcript search tool to find.
Yeah. I feel like it was like someone was using worms to do something than that ring a bell.
It might have been a biofuel app.
Yeah, maybe, So we'll look at up. Can we talk about fashion?
Yeah, this is just crazy to me. I think we should do an entire episode on fast fashion, but we can hit some high points. I think.
Yeah, fast fashion is sort of an environmental nightmare and a humanitarian nightmare because they're made in sweatshops for very little pay by people you know, making very little pay. They are sold very cheaply. Cheap synthetic materials are used, so all the inputs are bad, they don't last long, and it's an environmental nightmare. Basically, I think the fashion industry is the second largest consumer of water. That has to be behind the factory farming, right, Yeah, and it
produces ten percent. The fashion industry produces ten percent of the global CO two emissions total.
Yeah, and eighty five percent of all the stuff that the fashion industry makes ends up in landfills, not recycled landfills. Eighty five percent of all the clothes made in the entire world. There's another issue with it too. When you wash just washing, just using these things, washing them in your bundles least washing machine, you're releasing microplastics into the ocean.
Because a lot of clothes, even recycled clothes, are made from plastics or contained plastics and those things get flushed out and it's a huge plastic pollution problem too, which is I mean, it's ironic. Like Patagonia is always hull up as a great example of a company that tries to make sustainable circular clothing, and one of the things that they you is there. I think their line of
responsibility t shirts super cute. They're made from fabric scraps. Cool, but also plastic bottles also cool because we want to recycle plastic bottles. But the problem is is that plastic gets transferred to the ocean. So it's one of those things where it's like we're so far from figuring the stuff out that even the people who are trying to do something are still having inverting effects that you know, I'm sure keeps them up at night.
Yeah, for sure. And you can also, man, you can send a ten year old pullover to Patagonia that had a collar that ripped or something and they'll fix that thing for you, probably for nothing. Yeah, And you can buy you can send stuff back to them that they will resell, and you can buy like, you know, gently used things from Patagonia online. They are also working with a startup called Infinitive Fiber, And what they're doing is they're they're working on the on the waste on the
front end. It's a process to recycle that textile waste, because you know, it's not like, all right, we've got this much cotton and every single fiber goes into making that T shirt and there's zero waste or that car. Yeah, I'm sorry about that that car. There's you know, there's gonna be some textile waste on the front end. And so what they're doing is they're they're taking that stuff and they're recycling that textile waste into a new fiber called Infina.
Yeah, and that stuff is one hundred percent recyclable. So eventually, over time, if this loop were allowed to really kind of take hold, eventually all the cotton would be put into or transferred into the Infina circle. And since it's one hundred percent recyclable, you could conceivably never have to put new cotton in again. Yeah, for sure, I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. I'm just saying conceptually, that's kind of how this stuff works.
Yeah, it's even compostable.
It is, so you would have to put some new cotton in once in a while, because Gary would go compost it just to be a jerk, right, But yeah, for the most part, you could. Once it really kind of took hold and got going, it could can it could overtake the existing cotton stocks and make them one hundred percent recyclable, and then you wouldn't need more cotton stocks, which is again an issue we'd have to deal with because then all the cotton farmers are out of.
Work, that's right, and we have no more new cotton cars on the road.
But one other thing that I found that really got to meet Chuck. I found a stat that said that most of the returns, like if you try something on, like a clothing, especially if it's mail to you and you try it on and send it back, right, Yeah, most of those things are thrown away into land. Yes, what nine point five billion pounds of just clothing returns alone were put into landfills in twenty twenty two.
Unconsionable.
Yeah, yeah, and the reason why is because companies are like, I'm not going to pay somebody to fold this thing back up, put the pins back in it, put it in the plastic, and make it new again. So that I can sell it. It's cheaper for me to just throw it away. And there are programs that divert that stuff to like developing countries so that those clothes are donated. But I guarantee that's not as cheap for the company
as it is to just throw it away. That's a huge impact that the fast fashion industry has on the planet. That's crazy to me.
Yeah, I haven't been this upset about something I've heard from you in a long time.
And I say some upsetting stuff. I know you usually text them to me, but those are upsetting pictures, all right.
One last thing we can talk about is the right to repair movement, which we talked about in the Planned Obsolescence episode. But you know, it's exactly what you think it's. It's, hey, we need to be able to repair our whatever's our small appliances. That's a big offender. A lot of companies are saying because you know, I don't know if we covered this part, but because I don't remember why companies didn't do it, or at least why they say they
don't do it. One thing they'll say is like, oh, you know what with electronics, if we publish like how to other people can fix these things and basically give repair companies repair manuals. Like it's it leads people vulnerable to hackers that they can get information from that electronic device. And I just call foul on that. That sounds like a bunch of bs to me.
They're like, don't forget hackers. Hackers are going to get you more.
Yeah, because you want your whatever your iPhone.
Fixed, right and you can't. I have an Acer Swift laptop that I love, but it's I've tried to replace the battery before and it's designed to not replace the battery. You cannot replace the battery, and obviously the battery is the first thing that goes out.
It's infuriating.
It is infuriating because it's like he made it so that you have to get rid of your laptop and get another one. It drives me nuts. So if you put all this together, chuck like electronics companies successfully lobbying against right to repair laws, companies using planned obsolescens left and right, people like Gary just throwing their stuff away to be jerks like, how can this even be implemented? I can't see it happening, at least in the United States.
I know the EU is really taking some strides towards this stuff, and hats off to them. But in the United States, I can't in the foreseeable future, like as far as I can think out, I can't see this being implemented.
No, I mean certainly not now with what's going on in our country, and that I'm not trying to get too political, but that's just the fact. It's not a not only a priority for our current administration to invest at all in something like a circular economy, but it's not even on the radar, right, or or its outright being squashed right.
Even more disturbing is that even outside of the United States, globally speaking, recycling or secondary materials being put back in as inputs is actually on the decline by significant numbers.
Yeah, we're headed in the wrong direction, right, even though Day points out that like social media posts and articles about the circular economy are have tripled in the last five years, so there's more awareness. But we're going in the wrong direction as far as actual you know, feed on the floor kind of stuff.
Yeah, and consumption keeps growing and growing and growing. Apparently from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty four, we consumed five hundred gigatons of material. That's everything raw material, finished material, fossil fuels, and that is twenty eight percent of the total amount we consumed in the last one hundred and twenty five years. Yeah, so it's just growing exponentially. So yeah,
there's a lot of stuff to overcome. You might say it would take like an authoritarian government to implement this kind of thing. And it turns out China has committed to creating a circular economy for themselves back in the two thousands, and apparently they're focused right now on automotive re manufacturing, which is essentially taking old cars and refurbishing them and their parts, selling them like new at a
discountant price because they're refurbished. Oh okay, so I guess keep an eye on China and the EU to see where things go. Chuck laughed a little bit, but his laugh was dripping with Okay, let's go to a listener mail. So he just unlocked listener mail.
This is a correction on a correction. So we heard from quite a few people about the most famous brand Fortian people wrote in, said Alexander Graham Bell Forget Gretzky and Phil Hartman Alexander Grahm Bell was not born in Branford, so this is from Joel. Hey, guys, probably not the first person to say this, but I'm correcting your email
correction that claimed Alexander Grambell was born in Branford. He certainly lived in Branford, so they claim him he was born in Scotland and move to Branford as a young man. I guess at one point in his life he would definitely say he was from Branford, but that's not where he's from. Love the show. That is from Joel Dawson.
Very nice. So I guess Phil Hartman moves back up to number two.
I guess so. And you know what, whenever someone sends in their business or something and it seems pretty cool, we like to tout them. Yes, and Joel signed his with Free Spirit Tours dot c A. So I'm looking now it looks like paddling and stand up paddle boarding, caving, forest therapy, wine tastings wouldness wellness.
Also, I want to shout out which bolt again? Did you see which bowl got in touch with this to say thanks for the mentioned on the Alchemy episode. I did not see that they did. He did. I should say. He got in touch to say, hey, you guys want some T shirts? Thanks a lot. He's been listening for fifteen years. His name is Nick. He's been a listener for fifteen years. Which Bolt has, Remember the Dungeon synth guy?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he wrote in and I was like, I'm actually a little starstruck right now. So there's like this big circular love fest going on, not a circular economy, but a circular love fest going on between Stuff you Should Know in Which Bolt right now?
Yeah?
All right, Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Joel or which Bolt, you can send us an email too, send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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