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Recycling or trash? It’s a question you may have asked yourself when faced with a gross can, a heavily-stickered art project, or some weird plastic thing. Benton hijacks the podcast to teach Abi the behind-the-scenes of the recycling process: How it works, how effective it is, the consequences of “wish-cycling,” and why plastic sucks so much. He addresses what steps you can take to make recycling work better, besides just putting things in the right bin.
Sources and further reading
TC Talk episodes mentioned:
- “Cult rhetoric.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Cult-rhetoric-e1b1gpi/a-a70h9n0
- “Tech comm from outer space: More lessons from alien movies.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Tech-comm-from-outer-space-More-lessons-from-alien-movies-e1md55n/a-a8cdbc1
Wikipedia articles mentioned:
- “Recycling” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling
- “Sustainability” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability
- “Microplastics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
- “Greenwashing.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
- “Wishcycling.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling
Music credits:
- Opening theme: S: Disco Funk Loop by SergeQuadrado | License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0
- Ensemble. (2008). “So they say” [Song]. On Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog Soundtrack [Album]. Mutant Enemy.
- Wheatus. (2000). “Teenage dirtbag” [Song]. On Wheatus [Album]. Columbia.
Image credit:
- Siera Wild, “Recycling sign green.png.” CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Transcript
| A | Ah man, how did all this ranch dressing get in my keyboard? |
| B | Hello, this is Benton, a trained engineer and science literacy fanatic who has been described as a walking Wikipedia |
| A | By me. |
| B | By you. |
| A | But others agree. |
| B | Yes, I will be your host this week on what I’m hoping will be the first of many episodes of Still Don’t Get It. Still don’t get it is a podcast that explores subjects that are largely misunderstood or oversimplified by the media or the general public. |
| A | Everything? |
| B | Given infinite time, Sure. |
| A | Okay. |
| B | So the purpose of this podcast is to convey scientific and to a lesser extent, policy literacy to the people. this is not your regularly scheduled TC talk. |
| A | But it kind of is because I mean, if Tech Comm doesn’t intersect with science literacy, then I don’t know what does. |
| B | Then what are we even doing here? With me in the studio for this episode is |
| A | Dr. Abigail Bakke. I’m a technical communication professor and I specialize in topics like medical communication, information literacy, and as of late, user experience research methods. |
| B | Fabulous. |
| A | So I know you haven’t asked for advice. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | But, so you want to start a podcast called Still Don’t get it. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | So you’re insulting your audience right off the bat by implying their ignorance. Do you think that’s a smart move? |
| B | Yes? |
| A | No. Tell me your reasoning. |
| B | So my reasoning is, first of all, I wanted to have a catchy name that’s not very long and kinds of gives you the idea of what the podcast is about. |
| A | You know, come to think of it, it’s in the same vein as You’re wrong about, |
| B | which sounds like an insult, doesn’t it? |
| A | Yeah, but I mean, it’s pretty much right. Every episode is something I’ve been wrong about. |
| B | Fair enough. |
| A | So do you think that there’s enough science illiteracy that you? |
| B | Oh, God, yes |
| A | I know that was sort of a rhetorical question. |
| B | That was a softball question. |
| A | This is kind of a trial and we’re publishing it as a TC Talk and your goal is to see what response you get? |
| B | My goal is to see what response I get, see if there is interest for more. Please do give us feedback if there is a means to do so. |
| A | We don’t use Twitter anymore. |
| B | Because Twitter in the Shitter. Enough said about that. |
| A | But I mean, I still have an account and that’s where I’ve pointed people in the past. So if you DM me, it’ll at least show up in my e -mail, and I won’t miss I so Ar_bakke. |
| B | So I wanted to start out by saying, thank you, Abi, for allowing me to hijack your podcast for this experiment. |
| A | And you know what’s the best part about it? |
| B | What is it? |
| A | You’re going to do the editing this time. |
| B | Yes, I am. |
| A | And you’ve got 12 pages of notes, which means you’ve got your editing cut out for you. |
| B | Yeah, that was good. |
| A | Footnote. Benton did NOT in fact edit this episode. We do have a cocktail here that I prepared in anticipation of recording, so even though it’s not our regularly scheduled TC Talk, may we have our regularly scheduled pre-TC talk toast? |
| B | Yes. I like that. What’s it called again? |
| A | A gin buck. But today, it basically amounts to a fancy looking ginger ale because we ran out of gin midway through the preparation. |
| B | Also, if you don’t hear our usual theme song, it’s Spotify’s fault. |
| A | Spotify. |
| B | Yeah, they took that option away. |
| A | If this is your first time listening to TC talk, start somewhere else. |
| B | Ooh, but where? One of my personal favorite episodes is cult rhetoric. We did that back in the early days. |
| A | Okay. I really liked the one where we talked about science fiction, specifically, what can aliens tell us about? Oh, yes. Technical communication. Yep, I think we did that one about a year ago. |
| B | Right. Probably a little more |
| A | Sort of our season opener for a season two. Actually that would be a good place to start because that kind of gets at, you know, the basics of tech comm and audience and such. With alien movies thrown in for good measure. |
| B | Mm hmm. Or, I mean, I guess you could listen to this episode, But don’t let it set expectations for the excellent work that Abi does. |
| A | Oh, you’re too kind. |
| B | Uh, sometimes, |
| A | The excellent work that Abi does? It’s a joint effort, buddy. |
| B | It is. |
| A | And I know some people listen just for you. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | I mean, it may be like your mom’s best friend, but that counts, nonetheless. |
| B | I didn’t expect this to turn into an exercise in |
| A | mutual adoration? |
| B | But I’m not mad at it. Okay, so today I’m excited to talk about recycling. Now, just for listener context, I am the discard czar in our home, am I not? |
| A | You take the garbage out, you take the recycling out, et cetera. |
| B | Yes. And I sort our household discards into trash, recycling, plastic film recycling, and compost. So you would probably say I’m a touch fanatical in the subject, right Abi? |
| A | Yes. I mean, you could call me the discard Czar in another sense of the word, that I love to throw things out and to me it matters less where the final destination is, as long as it’s out of our house. |
| B | Right, so you’re the Discard Czar, with discard being a verb. I am, with discard being a noun. |
| A | Yeah, that’s fair. |
| B | It’s a co-czar ship. And how do you feel about our subject of recycling? |
| A | I have mixed feelings about it. I really care about it. But I’ve also heard in recent years about how it originated as sort of a deflection on the part of the polluting corporations to kind place responsibility at the individual level. |
| B | Individual and municipal levels. Yeah |
| A | And I’ve also heard that a lot of stuff doesn’t actually get recycled, which is discouraging. |
| B | Yes, it is. |
| A | So I want to know more about it and I want to know that there’s a glimmer of hope that when we do, or I should say when you do deliberately sort out recyclables, that it’s making a difference. I suggested calling this episode recycling rhetoric, because I think it’s kind of about that. But I know that’s a little bit like me trying to make it about my thing. |
| B | helping the environment, That’s an excellent purpose to identify for recycling. One of the early uses for recycling was to get easy feedstock for manufacturing like specifically metals. And I’m going to ask you to interrupt me as you see fit. Oh Fern, |
| A | Can Fern interrupt you as she sees fit? |
| B | Oh, she can’t be stopped. To help me keep this from being too heavily a data dump |
| A | another piece of advice that you did not ask for. |
| B | Okay, |
| A | but kind of the point of tech comm is to do the work yourself of transforming a data dump into a meaningful message. So I think you’ve skipped an important step potentially. |
| B | Okay, well we’ll see. Wikipedia’s definition of recycling is “Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. This concept often includes the recovery of energy from waste materials… this is an alternative to incineration of waste.” A little more digging revealed that this referred to the recovery of electricity and/or heat from the incineration of waste. Which allows some people to pull some semantic yoga and call burning garbage recycling. |
| A | Ooh see, it is about rhetoric. |
| B | Yes, so we’ve barely started, but we already managed to venture deep into the heart of green washing land. Wikipedia defines greenwashing as “a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization’s products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly.” |
| A | Can I give a sort of funny and pathetic example? |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Okay. I saw on Reddit somebody posted, so this was in the mildly infuriating sub red. It. Mm hm. Somebody said that they had ordered a bunch of bamboo straws to cut down on their carbon footprint. |
| B | Uh huh. |
| A | And every straw was individually wrapped in plastic packaging. |
| B | Ugh. I know I’ve seen that with metal straws, people posting that sort of thing. So key words in that definition are spin and deceptive advertising. In this case it’s selling products or image as though they are responsible. |
| A | Can I give you another example? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | And this one stands out to me because it was just such egregious product placement. But we were watching a movie, I can’t remember which one, but somebody was, you know, on the loose and the police were like, yeah, he drives a Prius? What kind of criminal drives a Prius? A socially conscious one. It just struck me as like very oh, what’s the word? |
| B | Ham fisted? |
| A | Yeah. And also like, you know Prius paid to like, have that association |
| B | reiterated for everyone to see while they think they’re watching a movie. |
| A | Yeah |
| B | All right. So if you would please try to keep this idea in mind as we talk. Back to recycling. Pun intended because bringing it back. Yeah. Anyway, collection of recycling tends to be done exclusively by the same companies that do trash collection through a contract with the local government. So right there you’ve got typically big business dealing with small governments on a monopoly basis. What could go wrong right? |
| A | Are there not small business garbage collectors? |
| B | Yes, there are but broad brush typically you’re dealing with like the waste management companies, national businesses or even international, in some cases dealing with local governments. They want monopoly contracts which the smaller the city the more they’re able to flex that power. So these companies are used to dealing with a single stream or single sort where all trash is created equal. They have this equipment and training for one thing and they want to do it the same for recycling, which is how you get single stream recycling. Have you ever had to sort your recyclables, Abi? |
| A | Yes. |
| B | How hard was that process? |
| A | It was more ambiguous than you’d think. Like, we still have that question too, like, is this cereal box recyclable, you know, or this pizza box is not? Because whatever. You know, multiply the categories you have to sort in, multiply the complexity. |
| B | But in terms of how to sort things, I think that the more categories they give you, the easier it is to say that, oh, this is not that, this is this, would you agree or? |
| A | In theory. |
| B | On an individual level, so not too hard, especially if you sort it as you create it. |
| A | If it came with like a PSA or something like actual technical communication about how to recycle and why or how to sort and why, that’d be different. |
| B | I remember having to have the recycling sorted when we put it out on the curb when I was growing up at home. The city went around with a pick up, pulling a trailer that had different bins on it. This is the city doing the collecting as opposed to a big company doing it. That was like in the ’90s. |
| A | I thought the single sort recycling nowadays was because they have better equipment that can automatically sort it. Shouldn’t technology be able to do that by now? |
| B | Yes, that is one of the reasons. Do you remember going to Cash Wise in Fargo where they just had like a dozen bins sitting in the parking lot for you to drop off recycling? |
| A | No, because you were the discard czar. |
| B | Even then. |
| A | Yep. |
| B | But yeah, that’s something that still is the case in a lot of places, but we currently have single sort recycling collection where we live, so everything recyclable goes into the same bin. Have you ever had to fish through the mixed recycling bin for a particular thing, |
| A | No. Like what? Why would I need to do that? |
| B | Like a kid put a thing in, something that had to be rescued from the recycling bin? |
| A | Oh, yeah. Yeah. |
| B | And what was that process like? |
| A | I don’t know. Anytime you have to dig your arm down into like a slimy bin of refuse, that’s not pleasant. |
| B | Exactly. A time consuming gross pain. Now imagine that at industrial scale, because that’s what we’re talking about when even with a city of 50,000. All those tons of material have to be sorted for any of it to be recycled. A facility dedicated to sorting single stream recycling can typically process a truck load an hour. The flip side of this is that single stream typically sees a 30% increase in participation. Which is good |
| A | because it’s easier at the consumer end. |
| B | It’s easier for the consumer to put a thing in the bin, so you get more things in the bin. |
| A | That’s a very interesting stat, thank you. |
| B | It’s a balance of more material captured versus a lower quality of material captured. One weakness of single sort is that all of the material has to go through the sorting machinery. This means that things that are too small, like jar lids or aluminum foil candy wrappers, or too large like a polypropylene tote are fully recyclable, but the system cannot handle them. Also note on the machinery, plastic bags are an absolute no. They gum up the works. Please remember not to put them in plastic bags when you put things in the recycling bin. Another element of single sort that makes it the Walmart of recycling is that it generates the least valuable product. But as things are currently, economically, money does matter and does drive decisions. The average value per ton of single stream recyclables is lower than most of its components would be if they were presorted. That’s because it has to be hauled to a sorting facility and processed. This brings me to another key issue about recycling: transportation. |
| A | Oh, I never thought of that. So they don’t just have these sorting facilities in every city? |
| B | Not in every city, no. Sometimes the value of single stream recyclables is lower than the tipping fee at a landfill. Meaning the amount per ton that is charged for just landfilling something. |
| A | If it’s cheaper, that’s where it’s going to go. |
| B | If it’s cheaper, a lot of cities will make the economic decision instead of the moral one. That isn’t the rule. A lot of times the value is high enough that it’s worth processing at least then sometimes the various streams that come out the back end of a sorting facility will just be quietly thrown. Generally, recyclables are fairly bulky, meaning that when they’re being moved around the truck doing it isn’t at full weight load, thereby it isn’t getting its ideal hauling efficiency, which is already not great. So at this point. How are you feeling about the decision to let me hijack the podcast? |
| A | I don’t know. I mean, you’ve got a captive audience. I can’t, I can’t just run away when you get into lecture mode. |
| B | Next question. Do you feel like you’re getting the reality about recycling? |
| A | Yeah. |
| B | Well, I have news for you, you’re still not getting it. |
| A | Oh, nice Set up. |
| B | Thank you. |
| A | I walked straight into it. |
| B | Uh huh. So there are, as we’ve discussed, a number of types of materials that can technically be recycled. New complication, there are two different categories of recycled materials. It’s not really that complicated though. Pre consumer and post consumer are the designations for where the material to recycle came from. You may have seen these distinctions on packaging. Where the manufacturer is trying to brag about how green their product is. Pre consumer waste is scraps and failed products or by products that never see the consumer. This gives it a much higher potential for reuse and recycling because there is much lower diversity of material collected at a specific location than you would have as discards from an individual or group discarding waste from all of their activities. In some cases, such a minimal amount of effort is required to reclaim these materials that it’s barely considered recycling by the company, but rather waste reduction or something of the sort. So claims that something contains pre consumer content are less praiseworthy. Post consumer waste is obviously waste discarded by the end consumer and is therefore usually much more difficult to recycle because it is often mixed in with other items, probably contaminated, and takes more energy to collect it because it isn’t generated in industrial quantities at industrial purity in a single location. |
| A | I do have a question. |
| B | Sure. |
| A | Are we going to talk about how much you have to clean your recyclables because, you know, say something canned. How much do you have to rinse it out versus, can you just dump it in or you know? We had this debate the other day when the kids finished off their spray cheese. |
| B | Oh, yes. |
| A | Which they begged for and I was glad to see it go. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | But I was like, Put it in the trash and you were like, No, put it in the recycling And I said no because there’s no way to like clean it out based on the way the container is designed. |
| B | Mm hm. That is a good question. And I don’t have the answers to everything. Obviously, it will depend upon the processor, the facility that does the actual recycling. |
| A | Yeah, so hire technical communicators to educate your people. |
| B | Even better. Hire technical communicators to educate your engineers and CEOs, because they’re the ones responsible for what you’re able to buy. |
| A | That’s fair. |
| B | And it’s a smaller group, |
| A | Less receptive. |
| B | Yeah. I’ve got some numbers comparing countries in the percentage of household waste by weight that is recycled. It actually gives a bunch of disposal categories. Recycled, composted, landfilled, incinerated with and without energy recovery and a few different flavors of “other” as categories. My personal science based opinion of these categories is that in terms of kudos to the country, compost is the best, then recycling. Beyond that, we’re talking about various flavors of bad. Landfilling is probably the least bad, followed by incineration with energy recovery. Then worst of all is incineration without energy recovery. |
| A | What about dumping stuff in the ocean? |
| B | Okay, that’s worst, that’s worse than landfilling. But that isn’t in these statistics. |
| A | Are you going to talk about why landfilling is bad? |
| B | For the general environment, it’s a good thing for there to be landfills. But for the location where the landfill is and around it, you’re concentrating waste. So something that wouldn’t be toxic if it was spread over a much larger area |
| A | Oh so we should litter. |
| B | Funny. When you gather it in one place there is a capacity for more toxicity because you get a greater concentration of it. |
| A | And so incinerating is when they just |
| B | Burn. |
| A | Yeah. They want to take up less space. But why is that bad? |
| B | Burning garbage does reduce the volume and weight of waste, but it’s not a great solution because it only reduces it to about 15-20 percent of the original weight. And then you have that substantially more toxic ash and slag to deal with. |
| A | What do they do with that? |
| B | I know that sometimes they use it for making concrete, which ash is, without getting too much into concrete, ash is something that can replace I think it’s called clinker in Portland cement which would otherwise be created by baking limestone to create calcium ash. |
| A | So that does sound like a type of recycling. |
| B | It’s not exactly recycling, but it’s a replacement of mined minerals. |
| A | And I’m sure the burning process itself |
| B | releases garbage like nobody’s business |
| A | and hurts the ozone layer or whatever |
| B | hurts the surrounding communities that are predominantly |
| A | Poor? |
| B | Poor and minority and poor and underprivileged. So getting back to my numbers, the recycling number doesn’t mean how much of the recyclable waste is recycled. It’s a percentage of all waste. It also makes no accounting of the absolute quantity of waste produced per household. So, keep that in mind too. For the purposes of evaluating a country’s laudability I’ll combine the composting and recycling percentages. |
| A | You’re not a walking Wikipedia. You’re a walking footnote, sorry. Okay. No, you’re sitting, honestly. |
| B | Thank you. So minding all of that, what countries do you think do well with their waste and which do you think do poorly? This data is from the OECD in 2019, so the countries included are: and I’m going to speed this up for comic effect. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. |
| A | I’m going to say Luxembourg is the best and the United States is the worst. |
| B | Okay. So I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that ten of these countries responsibly dealt with more than half of their household waste. Slovenia scored the best with a combined compost and recycling fraction of 71.8%. Germany also impressed with a combined score of 66.7% followed by South Korea, which itself had the highest recycling rate of 56.5% Just recycling. |
| A | I’m picturing them receiving their gold, silver, and bronze medals. |
| B | Very good. |
| A | Made of post consumer recycled material. |
| B | Yes. I will asterisk this by saying that Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Denmark all reported zero landfill use. Which seems like clever accounting to me because typical incineration leaves about 15 to 20% of the original weight as ash and slag. But I suppose it is possible they figured out a way to make industrial use of the ashes and other slag created by their incinerators. The last general concept before we get into the specific materials will be Wishcycling and contamination. Do you recall what Wish cycling is? |
| A | Yes. It’s when you feel bad about throwing something away, So you think it might fit in recycling. So I’m just going to put it there and feel better about myself. |
| B | Bingo. Wikipedia defines it as the disposal of consumer waste in a recycle bin in hopes of it being recycled, whereas it cannot or is unlikely to be recycled. |
| A | So I was right |
| B | about the spray cheese can? |
| A | Yeah. |
| B | I don’t know that. |
| A | Okay. |
| B | I get it. I’ve done it and you’ve done it too. We all have, except for people who, on principle, don’t put anything in the recycling. |
| A | Yeah. If you’re already a person who cares enough to recycle at all, then you’re already prone to wish cycling, I think. |
| B | Mm hmm. The motivations for wish cycling are easy to see, but the consequences are less so. Here you see how wish cycling feeds into contamination. Nearly one fifth of all recyclables are contaminated with wishcycling which loads trucks faster with useless material that they haul around, burdens workers who have to manually sort out non recyclable materials at the processing facility, can damage processing equipment, and can even cause whole batches of otherwise acceptable recyclables to be thrown away. Contamination is, of course, a bigger subject than merely well intentioned errors. It includes consumer contamination, like not rinsing out food containers, manufacturer contamination like labels, marketing, branding and the use of composite or difficult to separate materials that consumers don’t realize are unrecyclable. And to a smaller degree process contamination like dissimilar materials nesting in transport, and rain soaking paper and starting to rot it. |
| A | Honestly, because you explained this to me a while back, I’ve shifted my recycling habits and I put fewer things in the recycling. You don’t like that though! |
| B | It’s hard isn’t it? |
| A | You’re the one who told me not to wish cycle and yet you’re the one who kind of does it more. |
| B | I won’t say that I’m perfect. |
| A | That’s funny. |
| B | You think that’s funny? |
| A | Practice what you preach. |
| B | Yeah, sure thing. Here’s a question that everyone but the most jaded recycling cynic has asked themselves, what is recyclable? Do you know? |
| A | Plastic, glass, paper, cardboard, aluminum cans? |
| B | What do you think it depends on? |
| A | Oh, how pure of a material it is I guess? That’s not the right word, but like not mixed size if it’s going to fit through the sorter. You told me that that matters earlier. |
| B | Good memory. |
| A | How clean something is like that is a question I always have because, you know, as I’m rinsing out the can, I’m thinking about the water I’m wasting too. Right. Like there’s an offset. Whether I recycle something also depends on what I think is a reasonable trade off of my time because I’m not going to peel the label off the ketchup bottle. |
| B | Good points. But what I have found is that the most comprehensive answer to that question is that it depends upon where you live. Even though that answer is totally a cop out. |
| A | Spoken like a rhetorician, it depends on the context. |
| B | Because as I’ve mentioned before, recycling collection is handled at the local or county level. So listener, because waste and recycling handling is not uniform in the US and I could only speculate about other countries you will have to check with your city and or county government to know for sure. |
| A | But that’s work. |
| B | Yes. And even from our county to the one literally across the street with the websites in the same format. Our neighbor has information more concise and organized |
| A | Like our literal neighbor? |
| B | Well, Blue Earth County as opposed to Nicolet County that we live in. |
| A | Oh, not our next door neighbor. |
| B | The county that is across the road. |
| A | Gotcha. I was like, that’d be an interesting over the picket fence conversation. So, tell me about how your county communicates what materials are recyclable? |
| B | Uh, I gotta go. |
| A | Oh yeah. Let me show you this pamphlet. |
| B | That’s weird, I’m leaving? Our county still has the waste wizard to look up anything but having to go through items individually, what do you think that will do for educated recycling? Another thing to note about recycling is that some states actually have made it illegal to throw away recyclables. These states are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Carolina. |
| A | I’ve been breaking the law all this time? See, I’m more of a bad ass than you’d think. |
| B | Oh. I think that that statement is more applicable to a municipal level, that they are not allowed to throw away waste. Although I will say that our neighbor, Jamie, said when he was at the landfill, he saw a truck a dump an entire load of green glass at the landfill. |
| A | Oh, come on. |
| B | Which is illegal. |
| A | Think of all the effort it took to sort not only glass, but green glass only. |
| B | Exactly. One thing that’s not so bad about glass in a landfill is that it’s not going to, you know, like it’s inert. It’s not going to cause chemical trouble, but still maddening. Still a waste. A waste of waste. Some cities and states make it mandatory to recycle and will fine businesses for having more than 10% of their trash being recyclables. But households will instead get reminder tags put on their bins so it’s not overly punitive to people, whereas businesses should know better. |
| A | Fair. |
| B | All right. Now I’m going to make like a processing line and split recyclables up into their major groups: Glass, metals, organics, cardboard and paper, and plastics. Perhaps though, I should zoom out a bit more and note the other major components of household waste that I’m not considering recyclable: clothing and fabrics, composite materials, electronics, ash, yard waste, chemicals, construction waste, and medical waste. With the exception of yard waste, some construction waste, and ash the concept of recycling doesn’t work for these groups of materials. Clothing and fabrics I will get into why I didn’t include them in recyclables later. I’ll also note that organics like food waste and yard waste can be recycled, quote recycled by composting. But since it’s a biological process, I’ll mostly set it aside for this discussion. |
| A | And this is off topic. But the composting of human bodies is a thing. If you care about things like green cremation, then this might be an option for you. |
| B | Yes. An option to reduce your final carbon impact. By specifying that you want to be composted |
| A | they put you in a tube and let you sit, and then what emerges is beautiful dirt that you can plant a garden with and remember your loved one. But it’s not legal in every state, true? Where is it legal, Washington? |
| B | I think. Washington, California, probably Oregon. And I didn’t do research on that, so I’m not sure. Yeah, Talk to your state legislatures, Slaters about it because that is a state level issue. |
| A | Turn me into dirt. Cause I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby. |
| B | Nice. So in terms of glass, metals, cardboard and paper, and plastic, what is your intuition, Abi? Where is the good news and where’s the bad news? |
| A | I think you’ve told me that metals are pretty high value. |
| B | Hey, no cheating. |
| A | No, you have told me that. But I am looking at your notes, so I guess that is cheating. |
| B | Aha. |
| A | Uh, I think glass is easy to sort maybe, but doesn’t have a very usable end product. Plastics is the worst. |
| B | What about cardboard and paper? Where would you put them in the, in the line up. |
| A | Pretty good. fun fact. Our daughter did a science fair project on that last year. On what material will recycle or can be turned into paper. And she tested cardboard, regular paper and onion skin. Oh, dryer, lint. |
| B | Dryer lint. Yep. Yeah. That created more of like a felt not so good for writing on. |
| A | Mm hm. But you built all the equipment. I don’t know. That’s the most original science fair project I’ve ever seen. |
| B | Okay, before we get into the why, I’ll give you the highlights of what seems to me to be the actual situation. Metals are some of the most recyclable materials out there. Paper and cardboard don’t recycle super well out of a single stream but they do okay. Glass can be recycled well, with some caveats. Plastics, on the other hand, are really what inspired me to choose recycling as my topic for episode number one. They are the radioactive waste of non radioactive waste. To be sure, hash tag not all plastics as I’ll get into in the details, but broad strokes, plastics are some of the worst materials conjured by humanity. |
| A | I was kind of right. I was close. |
| B | Of those groups, put them in order of what you think the rate of recycling is. By rate of recycling, I mean the fraction of recyclables that are recycled in that group. |
| A | I’m going to put plastics at lowest paper at highest, I don’t know. |
| B | Okay. These statistics that I have from the EPA in 2018, which I had to do some real digging to find, are that 68.2% of paper and cardboard, 34.1% of metals, 25% of glass, and 8.7% of plastic is recycled in the US. |
| A | So you’re not going to acknowledge that I nailed it. |
| B | You got it. You got the best and worst for sure. So Monetary economics aside, the energy and pollution economics of recycling metals compared to generating fresh material from ore is phenomenal. |
| A | In a bad way. |
| B | No, no, no. the value of recycling metals is phenomenal. |
| A | So there’s good news? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Okay. |
| B | This is good news. Recycling aluminum cans back into aluminum cans takes only about 5% as much energy and creates about 5% as much pollution as creating a can from raw materials. And a can go from curbside back to the grocery store aisle in as little as 60 days. |
| A | Wow. |
| B | Mm hmm. Steel takes only 40% as much energy and makes only 14% of the air pollution and 24% of the water pollution as fresh material. Recycling copper saves 85% of the energy. Recycling lead saves 65% of the energy and also obviously keeps lead out of the environment. I also saw that the recycling rate for lead is probably the very highest of all materials in the US. It’s like 99% is recycled. |
| A | Good, but who needs to use lead? I have certainly never handled a lead thing on purpose. |
| B | You’ve never handled lead, but you’ve driven a car. Lead acid batteries are the standard for vehicle batteries at least before electric vehicles. Actually probably the place where most lead is lost into the environment is sportsmanship. Hunting and fishing, because sinkers in fishing are made of lead and lines break. It happens and some people still use lead shot for hunting. |
| A | And see, I had been led to believe, |
| B | oh, I see what you did there. |
| A | That lead was largely eradicated from paints and stuff at least |
| B | Yes, from paint certainly. |
| A | that has not been leads water supply, unless it’s Flint, Michigan. |
| B | in the case of paints and plumbing and all of those things, there are still cases where it exists because it’s historical and just hasn’t been remediated yet |
| A | That’s just that’s just evil, though Yeah. To let that persist when it’s a known risk. |
| B | Right. And honestly, Plumbing got its name from lead. |
| A | How so? |
| B | The Romans, they made all of their pipes from lead. It’s why the atomic symbol for lead is Pb. |
| A | No way. |
| B | Plumbinus was the Latin term for lead. |
| A | Interesting. See you are a Bentonpedia. |
| B | Plumb line was a lead weight on a string so you know which way is down. I should get back to my list. Recycling zinc saves 60% of the energy. And all metal recycling has a massive impact by reducing the impact of mining, and the impact of discarded metals leaching into soil and water. Paper takes 60% as much energy and creates only 27% as much pollution to recycle compared to fresh material. Cardboard takes 76% as much energy to recycle as to produce from new materials. Glass takes 70 to 95% of the original energy to recycle and creates about 80% as much pollution. |
| A | You’re kind of getting into data dump territory. |
| B | Yeah, I know that’s the end of it. |
| A | Oh. No, we need some visualizations here. |
| B | Oh boy. |
| A | Some Bar charts, pie charts, |
| B | and how is that going to help people listening to a podcast |
| A | Fair. Could post them on TC Talk website as supplemental materials. |
| B | I’ll think about that. |
| A | Or you could just highlight the best and worst instead of going down the whole list. |
| B | Mm hm. So these numbers are taken from a study that looks at the current process. There’s certainly room for improvement, but even this is an amazing start. If we averaged a one third reduction in energy required and pollution created for all material fed into the economy, that’s a huge step towards reducing the toll we exact upon the natural world. |
| A | That’s really encouraging to hear actually because I was afraid you were going to be like recycling is an entirely made up sham. |
| B | No. It is a good stop gap, but it’s not a perfect solution and it’s not the whole solution. |
| A | Exactly. |
| B | There. That’s your TLDR right in the middle of the podcast, and since we’re talking about material fed into the economy, shifting from fully sourced from the natural world to being primarily sourced from our own waste stream, that’s a much bigger boon for the sustainability of society. |
| A | Can I ask? So mining is a dying profession in some cases. Can you see some people resisting recycling to try to keep miners in jobs because the economy? |
| B | Well, I didn’t do any research on mining. But |
| A | because it’s the same thing with oil companies, right?. |
| B | So mining for coal is something that’s dying, yes. Mining for minerals is not. You see it as you look back through industrial history. The discovery of a new fad or a new thing creates a new mining industry. Especially when the atomic age started. There were so many things that were just of zero mineralogical interest to all industries that once we start talking about the physics of neutrons and how they interact with certain materials in ways that are different from other materials, I mean, there was obviously uranium mining, there was zirconium mining |
| A | Where, where does radium come from? |
| B | You would ask. |
| A | Only because I read the book, The Radium Girls. By, I want to say Kate more. It’s just wild to me how for so long people were convinced that radium was not only not dangerous but a healthy |
| B | A health boon. And right now there’s a big boom on mining for lithium and on rare earth elements that are used in the construction of electric vehicles. |
| A | So there is an environmental impact with electronic vehicle or electric vehicles? |
| B | Yes, the environmental impact is at the front end, not continuing as it’s used. |
| A | Yes Exactly. Again, I want to see a chart. Like at what point does the electric car make up for its front end pollution? |
| B | What’s break even point. |
| A | Yeah. Do you know how many miles driven or? |
| B | I’m sure that it depends on the model. |
| A | Okay, not a cyber truck. |
| B | They break even more. |
| A | They do. |
| B | So, um, one last caveat is that the data I found here didn’t look very far beyond energy and pollution. Recycling is a bigger boon for the sustainability of society as a whole than it is for any of these specific elements of recycling. Wikipedia defines sustainability as a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. So, let’s get into the details now. |
| A | What! How is what you shared already not detailed? |
| B | Okay. The details |
| A | of the details. |
| B | The details, yes. The details of each type of recyclable material. |
| A | You know what, Ben, |
| B | What? |
| A | I still don’t get it. |
| B | You still don’t get it. |
| A | I think I need to hear about all the individual types of materials that can be recycled. |
| B | Yes, some details. We’ll start with metals. Metals have been recycled almost since they were first refined from raw ore, going back about 10,000 years. Because all mining in those times was powered by human muscle, with some of the heavier lifting assisted by beasts of burden, and refining performed with wood-fired heat that was similarly procured by muscle power, the preciousness of every scrap of metal was not lost on early metal users. Since the process of recycling fit into a late step of the process of refining, it was a simple matter to toss the little bits removed by shaping and breakage back in to reforge them. Little has changed since then in the recyclability of metals, only that our more sophisticated manufacturing creates alloys that can complicate the recovery of metals from discarded items. I suppose you could say that recycling has had its standards upped with modern metallurgy being a bit more picky than your typical medieval blacksmith. Along those lines modern metals recycling has some contamination, challenges that weren’t present in earlier times. Container residue, container coatings and labels and paint come to mind. All told, though, the melting process will handle much of this pretty adeptly. It will all turn into some combination of fumes and slag. |
| A | What is slag? |
| B | It’s a glass like substance, so, ash is when you have a fire. Ash is something that flies away. It’s called fly ash. Burning residues or unburnable residues that just clump together are called slag. |
| A | Is slag the thing that then gets reforged or is it like a byproduct? |
| B | It’s a byproduct, it’s typically viewed as waste product. |
| A | Okay. So it separates out from the metal somehow, |
| B | Right. It separates out from the metal, typically in, typically gets caught in a molten metal filter, |
| A | So I don’t need to rinse my cans that much. |
| B | It’s not that crucial. Surprise, cans. Metal cans not as important? |
| A | I’m going to go back to recycling more now. |
| B | Great, I mean, you do want to rinse metal cans so that they’re not like oozing on other things and contaminating them because not everything is as, you know. |
| A | Ah. That makes sense. |
| B | You don’t want to put something icky in there because first of all, it’ll start to smell, it’ll gum up other things. But it won’t affect the recyclability of the metal. |
| A | Right but if your black bean liquid oozes onto the paper, it will affect the recyclability of the paper. |
| B | Yeah, probably. So one other pleasant form of contamination present in all steel is mild radioactivity. Because steel is so often recycled, a lot of it that was exposed to atomic tests or radioactive material processing was recycled before these effects were fully understood. This doesn’t mean that steel now is dangerous radiologically. But for scientific instruments that require high purity steel that won’t interfere with radiation readings, like space program stuff, they have to source their steel from pre atomic sources like sunken World War One ships. |
| A | Cool. Huh. |
| B | Yeah. Talk about turning swords into ploughshares. |
| A | That must be expensive. |
| B | Well, I imagine it isn’t. |
| A | What do you send divers down or do you drag the ship up? |
| B | Oh God, could you imagine trying to lift a boat that’s had, you know, marine life incorporating itself for years? |
| A | Yeah, fair. |
| B | I think it’s typically gun barrels that are so thick that it’s easy to get a salvageable amount of metal out of a chunk. Yeah. They’ll have like underwater welder type people go down, cut a chunk off. Typically, it’s the thing that is you know watched over by a government of whoever has the rights because it’s a special kind of steel. No steel foundries operate with exclusively virgin ore, so that’s always contaminated in that way. Anyway, paper and cardboard, as you’ll remember from a few minutes ago, take less energy to produce and create less pollution than producing them from raw materials. Here, however, we start to run into more impacts from contamination. What do you think might contaminate the paper and cardboard recycling streams? |
| A | Black bean liquid. |
| B | Yes, black bean liquid. We’ve touched on that. |
| A | Did you know that chickpea liquid has its own name? |
| B | Aquafaba. |
| A | You knew! |
| B | I actually saw it gosh, yesterday, something I was reading. |
| A | It can be a vegan form of |
| B | Egg |
| A | In a cocktail. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | What else would |
| B | I think nutritionally, it actually functions like egg too. |
| A | Weird. What else would contaminate, if it gets wet I would guess. Colors maybe. Cereal boxes have like that kind of sheen. |
| B | Yeah, the printing. Coatings. |
| A | That’s all I can think of. |
| B | Yeah, that’s a pretty good list. Ink used to be largely synthetic but now is almost entirely plant based. So while it may literally muddy the process, at least dealing with it is not wholly toxic. More difficulties arise from the variety included in the spectrum that ranges from newspaper to heavy duty cardboard. I want to take a brief rabbit hole to read from our county’s web page, on what paper products can and cannot be recycled. This will conflict with what I have said or will say but keep in mind that this is the guidance given by the collection service, not the recycling plant operator, which are different. They will accept books both paper back and hard cover so long as there are only a few hard cover at a time. Brown paper bags, cartons, catalogs, corrugated cardboard, envelopes including manila and those with cellophane windows, |
| A | Which we just recently learned. |
| B | Yes. Junk mail, magazines, newspapers and glossy inserts, office paper, paper board, phone books, pop boxes, and post it notes. They do not accept pizza boxes, dark colored paper such as black malfunction from a copier, egg cartons, paper tubes, shredded paper, plastic lined envelopes different from just the windows, tissue paper, and release paper from stickers. |
| A | Okay, so being a discard czar in my own right. I have the lovely task of sorting through our kids’ artwork. |
| B | Oh yeah. |
| A | Because we cannot keep it all. And so I discard much of it on the down low. But if there’s paint or heavy amounts of crayon on it or something, I always wonder like, is that going to gum up the process? Do you happen to know? |
| B | My guess is that paint would be, you can’t really have too much paint on it before it’s a problem. Crayon I am less sure about but it seems like it would have a similar, you don’t want much on there if you’re going to recycle it. So there. That’s not too much to keep in mind when you’re deciding which bin to throw a thing in, is it? |
| A | That helps. |
| B | The less the material looks and feels like the cheap brown paper towels you find in public restrooms, the more likely it is to require more chemical processing or coating to become what it is. Some of the processing chemicals may linger in the paper until recycling, but paper that is coated in wax or plastic is awfully hard to separate into clean paper fibers. Also, as noted by the county’s website, glue in paper tubes makes them not recyclable. |
| A | Oh, that’s why. |
| B | Though they are compostable. |
| A | Okay. Actually, that helps with the art projects too. |
| B | Mm hm. |
| A | The glues. Also, I’m not a monster. I save out the best ones and put them in a three ring binder with those clear plastic sheets. Proceed. |
| B | Staples also are present in papers and heavy duty boxes which dull the chopping blades used to break down the paper. This doesn’t disqualify things from being recyclable because obviously that would cut out most office paper. It’s a known thing, they have a way to deal with it, but it is a contaminant. An important note to take into consideration is that contact with food will nearly always contaminate paper or cardboard with grease. Grease contamination makes paper unrecyclable, but it is still compostable. Boxes that go in the freezer though are almost all coated to keep them from getting soggy with condensation when they come out of the freezer. So they can’t be composted, but as long as they don’t get greasy, they can go in the recycling. |
| A | Hm. |
| B | But, paper can’t be recycled indefinitely. Whomp whomp. The recycling process shortens the fibers of the material so that paper can only be recycled five to seven times before it must be down cycled or composted. So even with maximum adoption of paper recycling, pulp forests would still occupy around 20% of the land area that they would with none in place, given the same levels of consumption. Glass, however, has the ability to be recycled indefinitely without degradation like metals, because it is a mineral and basically inert. When you’re asked to sort your glass, it will be based on color. Clear, blue, green, and brown, keeping in mind that the point of sorting is to keep from color contaminating the product. |
| A | If people didn’t care what color their jars came in, if it was like a mix of green and brown or whatever, it might not be pretty. But it wouldn’t be the worst. |
| B | No, that’s a consumer preference question. |
| A | Or more likely probably the company. |
| B | Yeah. Manufacturer preference comes before consumer preference. It could look very cool depending on how thoroughly mixed the colors are in the process. |
| A | Ooh like tie-dyed. |
| B | It could. I mean If you have things mixed very well in the melt pot, then, I mean, it’s just going to come out on average color. |
| A | It may make your pickles look less appetizing though, so I get why they do want to sort by color. |
| B | Mm hm. And in some cases things are stored in brown glass because they need to be protected from UV light, which is the case for some medicines and foods. |
| A | Skin care products. |
| B | Skin care products. Sure. Not all glass will recycle though. Auto, window, and cookware glass do not recycle due to them having a different chemistry from regular glass. You may be wondering now, why did I rate glass below paper given the many limitations on paper recycling and the theoretically endless recyclability of glass? |
| A | No, I wasn’t wondering that. |
| B | Are you now? |
| A | I still don’t get it. |
| B | You still don’t get it. Well, Abi, what do you think my reasoning is? |
| A | Because paper, there’s so much more maybe than glass? |
| B | That’s an answer. My first reason is weight. A 12 ounce glass bottle weighs 190 grams. A 12 ounce aluminum can weighs 14. |
| A | What’s a gram? |
| B | Gram? |
| A | I’m an American. |
| B | Ah, yes. Metric illiterate. Um, |
| A | No, it’s okay. I do have a sense of what a gram is. I was just interjecting for no good reason. |
| B | Oh, good. What fun. The second reason is that glass is dangerous. It is common for glass containers to break when moved around in the recycling process, creating sharp hazards in an array of sizes. |
| A | But but but paper cuts. |
| B | Okay. Sure. |
| A | Not equivalent. |
| B | It’s part of why sanitation workers have one of the most dangerous jobs. Substantially more dangerous than police officers or even pizza delivery drivers. The last reason, |
| A | Probably not as dangerous as the person who dives to cut off a chunk of a World War One battleship. |
| B | Yeah, yeah, probably taking an acetylene torch underwater in scuba. That’s probably got a fair amount of hazards associated with it. The last reason I lowered glass below paper is that recycling glass is a bad use for it. Glass should be reused. |
| A | Oh. |
| B | You do it in your home when you wash glass cups instead of throwing them away. We did it for many decades in the US with glass bottles for milk and carbonated beverages. And we only stopped because beverage makers didn’t like the cost of responsibility. I’ll touch on reuse a little later. Okay, plastics, like some of the other subjects I’ve touched on, plastics and microplastics could each have been given their own episode. but this is the moment that I at least have been waiting for. Before I light up the flame thrower, so to speak, Abi, why do you think I use such strong rhetoric in describing plastic? |
| A | It’s used to make cheap plastic junk that our kids bring home in their birthday party goody bags, |
| B | Making it very personal, but yes. |
| A | That’s all I got. |
| B | Well, there are many, many reasons to side eye the recycling of plastics. The first is right at its beginning, oil. I know that there are many efforts underway to create plastics from non petroleum sources. But good-intentioned as they may be, they’re largely window dressing. More than 99% of plastic is oil based. |
| A | Why did I not know that? |
| B | I don’t know. Is that like common knowledge? |
| A | Because in my mind, plastic is just made of plastic, you know. But of course it comes from somewhere. |
| B | Yeah, a plastic mine, right? Plastic being made out of oil is how oil industry is trying to stay alive with the growing opposition of environmental groups and use for energy starting to smell bad now so to speak. |
| A | Wow. |
| B | Plastic production has been how they keep producing more oil without it just completely glutting the market. |
| A | Now I know. |
| B | Now you know. The next problem is the next step. Manufacturing. Turning oil into plastics releases about half of the carbon in the oil. Not to mention the transportation fuel to get it from well to factory along with a tremendous slew of combustion byproducts, volatile organic compounds, and persistent organic pollutants. Not to mention the trace contaminants of oil like sulphur, mercury, lead, arsenic, et cetera. After being processed into plastic pellets, it’s shipped again to a factory where it’s molded into a useful shape. Depending on the end use, it might get shipped a few more times being assembled into larger and larger sub assemblies before the product is complete, likely enduring at least a single cleaning per stop using yet more chemicals. Then it will be packaged, palletized, shipped to a distribution center, stored, inventoried, shipped to a big box store, purchased and driven to a person’s home. If that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. Pun intended. |
| A | What percentage of oil companies business comes from plastics? |
| B | That is a great question that I do not know the answer to. |
| A | Then you can cut my question out. |
| B | I know that one of the things that it depends upon is the mix of compounds from a particular well. Some wells make crude oil, that’s really good for turning into fuel. Some make crude oil that’s kind of altogether garbage. Some make stuff that’s, that has a lot of aromatic rings and so it’s good for petrochemical industry where they turn it into plastics or metals. |
| A | Aromatic? |
| B | Aromatic rings? You’ve probably seen it. An aromatic ring is a double bonded ring of six carbon atoms. |
| A | Oh, so just something that smells nice. |
| B | No, I mean typically it’s a ring like that that makes it smell nice. Plants make them too in their own way. |
| A | So it’s the same kind of aromatic. |
| B | It is, yeah. |
| A | Weird. |
| B | If you’re looking at like the little chemical stick figure of a molecule, an aromatic ring is a hexagon with a circle inside it. |
| A | Thanks for the chemistry lesson. |
| B | Yeah, no problem. So, I talked about the process of oil turning into plastic, turning into a product that’s in the home. So that litany of moving shit around is a function of globalized trade. It certainly is not limited to plastic. What’s so funny? |
| A | I thought you were dropping in an F bomb. |
| B | It’s certainly not limited to plastic, but all of the incredible positive attributes of plastic as a material increase the likelihood that a unit of plastic will be subjected to this runaround compared to heavier materials that would make more financial sense to produce nearer the location of use. But all of that activity was involved in just producing the plastic and putting it in the home of some poor soul who will use it for some amount of time then have to figure out how to get rid of it. Now, finally, we can discuss recycling the plastic. So Abi, of all the materials we’ve discussed, plastic is the most recent and also the only one for which we have a pretty good estimate of humanity’s lifetime production. Since we do, there are also numbers for final disposition on all of this plastic. Out of all the plastic ever produced, you get to guess the percentage going to each of these categories. Recycled, incinerated, and landfill or environment. |
| A | Ooh. Since you’re really mad at plastic, I’m going to guess 5% recycled. I couldn’t venture a guess on the other categories. |
| B | Well, you have 95% left. |
| A | Okay. 94% landfill, 1% incinerated. |
| B | All right. Sure. Talking specifically about plastics. I actually prefer incineration to landfill in cases where the incinerator and its exhaust are well regulated. That’s because an industrial process has the potential to chemically break down plastic into components that the environment can use again. Potentially does a lot of work in that sentence, because the plastic has to be free of toxic elements like halogens, chlorine and fluorine. For this to be remotely possible, the incineration process has to reach and maintain temperatures around 2000 Fahrenheit, and the exhaust needs to be scrubbed of hazardous things like ash and toxic compounds like nitrous oxides and sulfur compounds. But to date, humanity has produced roughly 11 billion tons of plastic, which is more than the mass of animal and plant life on Earth currently. |
| A | Wild. |
| B | Of this, 9% has been recycled |
| A | So better than my guess. |
| B | Better than your guess. 12% has been incinerated and 79% was either landfilled or escaped to the environment. |
| A | Hm. |
| B | The numbers for what was produced in 2015 are a little better than that for the full history of plastic, 19.5% recycled, 25.5% incinerated, and a mere 55% landfilled or lost to the environment. |
| A | What year were your first stats from? |
| B | The first stats were from the entire history of plastic production. |
| A | Ah, Okay. |
| B | So that is global numbers. But how do you think the US stacks up to it? |
| A | Badly? |
| B | It’s a good safe answer to go with. Only 8% recycled, 14% incinerated, and 78% landfilled or lost to the environment as of 2010. You may recall that earlier I said that by 2018, recycling rates of plastics had risen to an equally uninspiring 8.7%. |
| A | Is there no innovation in the processing technologies though, that could make them less crappy? |
| B | Most of the innovation is in labor replacement, automation. |
| A | Of course. |
| B | So no process of sorting plastic is fully automated. Like there still has to be a person at least involved in taking care of the weird stuff. *We do the weird stuff.* A big part of why the recycling rate is not dramatically improved is economics. Most plastic is commodity level cheap as it gets material, takes more money to recycle plastic than it does to just create it out of new oil. It’s externalizing the costs of disposal |
| A | Yes. |
| B | And so you’re not paying the full costs to deal with your actions. The environment always gets shit on when you externalize things. That’s just how it goes. |
| A | And by extension, people who need to live in an environment, but hey, they didn’t have to spend as much on that cheap tacky plastic thing. |
| B | That won’t last long. So I haven’t even mentioned yet the almost obscene diversity of types of plastics. I’ll start with the RICs, or Resin Identification Codes. These are the numbers you see in the middle of the recycle symbol on plastic containers. Number one is PET or polyethylene teraphthylte. Say that ten times fast. |
| A | No, thank you. |
| B | Which is typical in beverage bottles and packaging because of its transparency and strength. Number two is HDPE, or high density polyethylene, which is used in water pipes, milk jugs, and shopping bags. Number three is PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, which is used in sewer pipes, inflatables, records, and electrical insulation. Number four is LDPE, or low density polyethylene, which is used in freezer bags and squeeze bottles because of how flexible it is. Number five is PP or polypropylene. Insert giggle here. *Did you know there’s PP on your smock? Disgusting. P stands for Pablo Picasso.* Which is used in reusable containers you know like food storage containers? He was iron and ironically, disposable cups and plates as well as yogurt cups and other dairy tubs and bottle caps. Number six is PS or polystyrene. It’s used in styrofoam, plastic clamshells and other high seal packaging. By high seal, I mean the stuff where it’s thermally sealed, so you actually have to cut the plastic to get the thing out of the packaging. Number seven is other. The plastic industry got bored after completing six problems on their homework assignment. Typically though, number seven is either ABS, that’s acrylonitrile utadine styrene, or polycarbonate. ABS is found in Legos and plastic car interiors. Polycarbonate is found in bulletproof glass, eyeglass lenses and CDs due to its optical clarity. All those numbers on bottles and such are essentially not useful in US recycling centers because it’s almost entirely automated here. |
| A | But in other parts of the world, they do make use of those distinctions? |
| B | Yes, other places, put more of the sorting burden on consumers. |
| A | Gotcha |
| B | And that’s really what it’s used for. But wait, there’s more. Along with these plastics, there are innumerable additives which are other polymers that are included in most of the ones I just mentioned, to modify them for strength, flexibility, appearance, and processing. No plastic at all is sold pure, even by the primary producers like Dow Chemical and 3M. They all have at least a stabilizer to protect the polymer against thermal degradation in processing, because you obviously have to melt the pellets to mold it into the thing. Many have several other additives. And PVC can be up to 80% additives by volume, which seems excessive. These additives can leach out over time, which is one of the things making plastic pollution so problematic. You look like you could use a little bit of bright side. |
| A | Go for it. |
| B | Okay, about half of the plastic produced is either number two, number four, or number five, which makes up a group called polyolefins. Polyolefins means structurally, that is just straight chains or straight chains with straight branches. No goofy shit going on here. |
| A | No aromatic rings. |
| B | No aromatic rings. |
| A | Are there any benzene rings? |
| B | Those are in fact the same thing. |
| A | No way. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Cool. |
| B | Now you know. That, the fact that it’s all straight makes these plastics the most inert or least reactive. That’s half of them, half of plastic not that bad. |
| A | Good. |
| B | They don’t interfere with any biochemical processes and they aren’t toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic. The others though, are some sketchy bastards. Teraphthylates, which is what makes up the plastic water bottle are known to interfere with endocrine systems. PVC sheds chlorinated trash molecules like they’re going out of style. Styrene is a uniquely busybody molecule that is toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic. |
| A | What does mutagenic mean? |
| B | Mutagenic means it will change DNA. |
| A | Whoa. I thought the covid vaccines were supposed to do that. |
| B | No, they’re not that good. I guess that the microplastics inside of the vaccines could potentially do that. But |
| A | I was being facetious by the way. |
| B | I know. I know. |
| A | Just make sure everyone knows. |
| B | Thank you for clarifying that for listeners. |
| A | The covid vaccine is safe and effective. |
| B | Mm hmm. Styrene is also flammable. I mean a lot of organic compounds are but styrene will polymerize with almost only a suggestion. Polymerizing releases heat and so given the right conditions Styrene can actually cause its own explosion through self heating. From self polymerization. |
| A | Love that. |
| B | Yeah. Polycarbonate is made from BPA or bisphenol A, whose effects are so troubling that reusable water bottles and baby bottles are all identified as not having that shit in it where it was commonplace 20 years ago. |
| A | Is this like the new lead? |
| B | This is the old lead. BPA, around 2010 is when bisphenol A was the new scare. |
| A | But it’s legitimately scary. |
| B | It is, yes. Because it can interfere with, like I forget what endocrine, or you know it has similarities to biochemicals, and so they can interfere with those chemical pathways in the body. |
| A | And is this proven. This is not just theoretical? |
| B | Oh yes, it’s understood. |
| A | Huh. Why haven’t I heard about it before? Is this the same as those PFAS that you talk about? |
| B | Different. |
| A | Oh. |
| B | Yeah. As I actually didn’t include anything about as in here or polyfluorinated |
| A | Ass. |
| B | Ass. I should’ve looked that up or put a little something in there. But they’re also known as Forever Chemicals because the carbon fluorine bond is not broken down by nature and it will not ever be biodegraded. It will stay there forever. Unlike regular plastics that just will be there for longer than we will. But yeah, BPA is, you know, that was a big scare 12, 13 years ago. It was a big like we got to get this out of our baby bottles now. And they did. And it’s good that they did. I think you have a pretty good idea now of how diverse plastics are. Sorting plastics can be done automatically, but how much variation do you think manufacturers want in their recyclate source material? |
| A | Not much. |
| B | Right. They want consistency like they get from virgin material. That is a batch of very consistent stuff. |
| A | Mm hmm. |
| B | No difference from pellet to pellet. |
| A | I can see that being a safety thing too. |
| B | Yeah, definitely, |
| A | like depending on the product and what it needs to be able to do. They need reliability. Are there other things that could be made with mixed up plastics though? |
| B | So it is possible to make makes plastic things out of mixed sources. Typically, there you get into low, low value kinds of materials. I know that they call it composite lumber, which is really just made from like plastic film recycling and some sawdust that’s available at your home improvement stores. It tends to sag over time though, which is kind of crappy for decking material. So you get into situations where you need to over engineer, build it with lots of factor of safety because you don’t know what kind of garbage is going to be in there, which for certain cases is just fine. Like I’ve seen palettes that are made out of recycled plastic and they’re lighter than wood ones, they’re also still made out of plastic. It’s a good place to make use of this material, but it’s not as strong as wood. You shouldn’t just throw it away. It has its own challenges, to shorten the story that I was going to make too long already. Manufacturers don’t want any variation if they can help it in their source material. So how many separation bins do you think would be required at a sorting facility for that level of purity? |
| A | Sounds like seven, right? |
| B | Well, keep in mind that not everything that has a one on it is the same mixture of plastic. If you didn’t want to have the variation of like a shampoo bottle versus a water bottle versus another bottle with different fillers and different stabilizers and plasticizers and all the stuff that gets added in for making bottles. You’d have to have a lot more places to sort them out if you want to have tight control on what’s in the bin. |
| A | So you don’t have a number, but theoretically as many different types of plastic as there are, which is probably hundreds |
| B | I’d say at least. And mixtures of plastics. That’s the thing that really gets |
| A | Every conceivable permutation. Yeah, I see the problem. |
| B | Because none of them are made pure, none of them are sold pure. So in order to theoretically have a recycling plant that makes that kind of purity, they would have to have an infinite amount of space to sort these bottles into. So that’s one reason that plastic recycling is challenging. Certain places are just more conscientious than the United States in terms of setting policy that drives, that mandates recycling. Other places are driven more by need, like in Southeast Asia. India has a much higher rate of recycling water bottles than we do because they gotta. It’s a way for people to make money. Where here you couldn’t make enough money to have it be your income stream. |
| A | Couldn’t regulations also happen at the level of the company and the amount of waste that they’re allowed to produce? |
| B | So governments put those regulations on companies. Putting regulations on companies is something that Europe is very comfortable doing. They do it pretty well. |
| A | United States, nuh uh. |
| B | The United States. There are many reasons that that falls flat. |
| A | Because mah freedoms. |
| B | Mah freedoms and mah lobbyists and so on and so forth. So talking about recycling, this isn’t like people where diversity leads to greater strength. Here, diversity leads to greater complexity and complication. It’s also not at all helpful that chemical manufacturers who make the plastic pellets that are molded into all of the junk of modern life have proprietary ingredients. So even for a commodity plastic, it isn’t the same from one manufacturer to the next. If you need more points to understand my bias against plastic, which I’m sure you don’t, look to microplastics. Because plastics are not generated by nature, biological processes don’t break them down chemically with a few exceptions. I know that there is a flesh eating bacteria that makes an enzyme that breaks down some plastics. Unlikely allies, huh? |
| A | I mean, if you like multiply the population of flesh eating bacteria to take care of the plastic, you might be introducing another risk. |
| B | Unintended consequences, perhaps? |
| A | Sci fi writers, take note. |
| B | Mm hmm. In this, that they’re not broken down chemically by nature they are like rocks. And like rocks, plastics erode mechanically, creating plastic sediment which is carried around by wind and water as well as animals on the move. This has begun the process of creating plastic sandstone. |
| A | Counterpoint, so we don’t want plastics to disintegrate because they release microplastics. Then wouldn’t forever chemicals be better because they don’t disintegrate? |
| B | No. So this disintegrating is referring to physical size. Like they don’t chemically break down. Like that’s the 1,000 years. Mechanically breaking down into smaller pieces. They do, |
| A | That’s the problem. |
| B | Yes, that’s what creates microplastics. So they’re not necessarily chemically breaking down, but mechanically. And that’s where the danger is. But for some real ominous feel, we’ll talk about other places these microplastics have been found. Wikipedia defines microplastics as fragments of any type of plastic, less than 5 millimeters in length. For the metric illiterate, that’s about 3/16 of an inch. |
| A | See, there you got my conversion. |
| B | Nanoplastics, which is a subset of microplastics, are particles less than one micron in length, which is a 1000th of a millimeter. Small particles of plastics can be taken into animal bodies through breathing or eating. Because plastics are not a natural hazard, evolution has not prepared body systems to identify and deal with these materials. As such, microplastics tend to bioaccumulate, meaning that they concentrate as you climb the food chain. Another consequence of the novelty of plastics interacting with live tissue of pretty much any kind of life, is that the short term and long term effects are almost entirely unknown. The diversity of plastics makes the challenge of studying these effects on the vast array of life all the more difficult. Where have these microplastics been found? They’ve been identified by one study as being present in all 17 arteries, human arteries that were tested meaning that they may be contributing to clogging blood vessels. They’ve been found at the peak of Mount Everest and in the deepest ocean trenches. Microplastics have been found in human blood, breast milk, and feces. In a sampling of 62 human placentas, all had detectable microplastics. |
| A | So they’re part of us no matter what. |
| B | Right now. Yeah. This particular finding troubled the researchers, because placentas only grow for eight months, meaning that other organs have much more time for accumulating these particles. The biggest contributors to microplastic pollution are textiles like clothing, tigers, naughty tigers, tires, and city dust. City dust here is the result of weathering, abrasion, and detergents in a number of contexts on synthetic products. Some products, however, are actually formulated with microplastics |
| A | On purpose. |
| B | On purpose. Okay, you let him in, come on in or out, come in, or leave us alone. An example is cosmetics, where micro beads or micro-exfoliates are microplastics engineered to be used in cosmetics and cleaning products. There we go. Fig has entered the chat. Many companies have stopped the use of micro beads, but have shifted to using metallized plastic glitter for the same purposes which is a crafty way of doing something worse because it wasn’t specifically listed. |
| A | Loophole. |
| B | Yes, it’s a loophole. So one of the weaknesses that plastics share with paper is that they suffer from degradation in the recycling process. This is due to physical similarities. Paper is made of fibers and molecules of polymer are quite long like fibers. I don’t think that plastics degrade quite as quickly as paper does, because paper is entirely broken down through mechanical separation, which breaks the fiber length, where plastics need to be broken down mechanically but melting is where the real process happens for plastics. Melting also contributes some degradation to the end product, which is why many scientists have looked for what’s called a cradle to cradle recycling process that use chemistry to effectively unzip the long plastic molecules into the components used to create them. There are not currently any such processes in wide usage, but one of the interesting concepts I’ve encountered is thermally decomposing plastics into pyrolysis oil, which could be run back through a modified oil refinery to remake plastic. The most interesting part of this is that it would accept a pretty wide range of plastics. There were a few things that I talked about earlier that I said, I’ll get to that later about, well, it’s later. First, clothings and fabric. I didn’t include them in recycling, even though there has been a pretty long history of recycling fabric and clothing. To clarify, by recycling here, I’m not talking about thrift stores which are great in their own right. I’m talking about remanufacturing clothes that are no longer functional into new cloth. In 1813, an inventor figured out that wool could be recycled in much the same way as paper, into what’s called rag wool or shoddy, is that a familiar word? |
| A | Yeah, that’s where it comes from? |
| B | That’s where it comes from. |
| A | Shoddy work. So it must not have been very high quality. |
| B | Well, I’m not sure if there was a quality loss in it, but this shoddy could then be respun into yarn. Much simpler and more common is simply down cycling clothes into wiping rags for wiping off things that are oily or otherwise going to be like a single wiping use. |
| A | That’s a lot of rags though. |
| B | Yes, that is a lot of rags. I don’t think that there’s quite that much demand, which is why they end up going to a landfill most of the time. But clothing can also, of course, be mended when it is damaged. Clothes can also be broken into seamless sections of fabric and used for patches, or turned into patchwork quilts or even patchwork clothes. |
| A | So I’m guessing you’re not a fan of fast fashion. |
| B | Haha, no, fast fashion is one of the things that needs to die fast. |
| A | Okay. |
| B | Some companies have invested in developing a means of chemical recycling of synthetics like polyester, in a cradle to cradle type process. But this is not in the mass application stage. Bits of natural fiber cloth, like cotton, wool, or linen that are too stained to be reusable can be composted. With this array of possible quasi recycling options, one reason I didn’t want to include fabrics in a recycling discussion is because it has so many different shades of reuse and doesn’t compare well with other materials in that way. The other big reason is how many clothing tags I see that have blended fibers. I said earlier that composite materials are almost never recyclable. In fabrics this is not quite as hard a rule because a patchwork item need not be made from uniform materials. But mechanically or chemically separating blended fibers is a complete nonstarter. You’re familiar with stretch jeans, right? |
| A | Mm hm. |
| B | That modification of the fabric that makes them stretch also makes them stretch in unflattering ways after a few years, shortening the lifespan of the garment and making it difficult to repair and impossible to recycle. Finally, Abi, do you remember hearing about the three Rs in elementary school? |
| A | Reduce, reuse, recycle. |
| B | Those are the ones. That is a list put in order of priority of how to deal with waste better than throwing things in the trash. First, you buy less stuff. You buy less stuff by making things go farther or being judicious in what you do use. Do you really need to buy that specialized kitchen gadget that you’ll probably only use once or twice before forgetting you stuck it away on the top shelf. |
| A | In the kitchen randos bin. |
| B | The kitchen randos box. |
| A | We have one of those. |
| B | Second, reuse the things you get instead of tossing them. This can include everything from repurposing containers for plants or crafting with used materials, buying secondhand products, repairing things, et cetera. And then if you really can’t do without a thing or figure out a way to use it again, recycle it. Why do you think, Abi, that this priority was reduced to a slogan that lost its real meaning? |
| A | I don’t know. |
| B | My assessment though is that reducing and reusing would cause a drop in economic activity, but recycling causes an increase in economic activity. |
| A | Yes, that makes sense. |
| B | Perhaps recycling actually has some negative effect on extraction industries, but modest recycling would actually boost manufacturing, which benefits from increased supply of materials. Also, recycling requires less thought and intention than reducing consumption or reducing discards. My very last subject will bring us back to green washing. Where in all of our discussion did you hear something that made you think of green washing? |
| A | Enlighten me. |
| B | Companies are doing it all the time in advertising. Making a thing seem great, for being 2% better, if it is better at all. This gets to what I think is one of the biggest and most dangerous problems with recycling. Throwing a discard in the recycling bin feels good even if it only has a marginal effect or if it has in the case of wish cycling a negative effect. It doesn’t have to, but it can turn into a way of green washing yourself into feeling virtuous when you’re really doing the bare minimum. That psychic relief can cause people to think they are doing something and that’s enough. First they toss in the can, then they throw in the towel. |
| A | Haha, cute. |
| B | Thank you. I am quite proud of that one, to quote my mother in law, for whom I must say, I have a great deal of respect. |
| A | Uh oh, where’s this going? |
| B | I already recycle. What more do you want me to do? |
| A | She said that? |
| B | She did. |
| A | Uh oh. |
| B | It was one of the nights that you were already in bed. |
| A | I bet that got heated. |
| B | Yeah. A little bit |
| A | But Let’s not forget the very first time you met my family. You instantly started in on lecturing my mom about the chemicals in diet Coke. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Made a great impression. |
| B | I do that. Make great impressions. Okay, that is my content. If I’m being honest, it was a lot of bad news. Sorry everyone. But in the spirit of trying to make things better, I’m not going to merely make you feel bad. Studies have shown that the best way to address anxiety is to have anything that you can do about the anxiety inducing problem. Here’s what you can do about the problems with recycling. First of all, check your local government’s website to figure out what is accepted and how to recycle. If you’re not sure where to look for that, start at the state level and it will likely point you in the right direction. Pick up litter if you’re bored in a public place, you can do this all by yourself. You don’t need to ask permission and nobody will stop you. The next obvious thing to say is, don’t put recyclables in the trash. I’m giving you permission to be slightly obnoxious about it. Slightly. If I don’t see a place to recycle an obviously recyclable item, I’ll bring it home. |
| A | Yeah, you are obnoxious about it. |
| B | Yes, I am, but you don’t need to be as obnoxious as I am about it, listener. You could ask a worker if there’s a place for recycling to go and if not, ask if there’s a way to ask the manager to get one put in. In your workplace you can ask the management to put together a recycling awareness drive to help workers understand what is and isn’t recyclable and where to put these items. And with any luck, you could even convince them to set recycling improvement and or waste reduction goals. If it feels like a game or a competition, it’s not drudgery. Another great move is to think twice before buying plastic. There may be a better option or at least an other option. The next step is civic engagement. You can show up at your local city council or town board meeting and push for better access to recycling services and better practices by the local government in their buildings, such as not buying plastics or not buying disposable plastic this or that. You can get involved in a local political party unit and start pushing for better and better practices and policies at every level of government. Join an interest group for zero waste, recycling, or an environmental concern. Go to a protest. Contact your representatives. Contact companies that make your favorite products. Tell anyone who will listen that recycling matters to you and there are ways that everyone can do better. In this case, some progress can happen quickly because the recycling system is already in place. It just needs to be used better. I want to reiterate the words of the one slur from Dr. Seuss Lorax. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, things aren’t going to get better. They’re not. That’s it. Okay. We’re done. |
| A | Well, no, we’re not |
| B | Okay. I’m done. |
| A | So we just, the last episode we did was about the climate emergency. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | So recycling is connected to that. But what about the shoving the responsibility onto individuals part of it? |
| B | Very good point. I thought that I had covered that, but I actually did not in my pages of notes. So that move, that anti littering campaign and even the framing of discards being left in nature as littering, something that the individual is responsible for, which they are, comes from companies like Coca Cola, who in I forget what year, they were part of the group that started Keep America Beautiful campaign. Sound familiar? And so this was something done by bottlers and other groups and tried to make American consumers feel bad about throwing something into nature. |
| A | When it was Coca Cola that was using plastic bottles in the first place. |
| B | Yes, when it was Coca Cola that was churning these fuckers out by the million. Making individual consumers of their products feel bad for having the container that this company made still in hand and not knowing what to do with it. So yes, this is right in line with Shell releasing a carbon footprint calculator. |
| A | Yes. The audacity. |
| B | Carbon footprint again, was a thing created whole cloth by oil companies for exactly that purpose. To shift blame from them, the producers to you, the consumers. |
| A | I’m sure people have calculated the carbon footprint of Shell, and I’m sure, ridiculous. |
| B | It’s probably about like the military footprint of the United States, a great big one. |
| A | Okay. So I am relieved to hear that recycling is not, you know, |
| B | it’s not a sham |
| A | as cynical of a reality as I was concerned it was. |
| B | Mm hmm. I have heard tinfoil hat kind of people say things like, it doesn’t matter if you put an aluminum can in the garbage or in the recycling because it all goes to the waste incinerator anyway. That isn’t true. That’s a talking point. And if it was true, it would be economically stupid because like in our specific town, it doesn’t matter how big your recycling bin is, you get charged a flat rate for recycling. But the bigger your garbage bin is, the more you get charged for it. |
| A | Then what would be the point of arguing that? |
| B | To get people to stop doing it. |
| A | But why? Who does that benefit? |
| B | People who don’t want you to care about the environment at all. |
| A | Trying to cultivate apathy in general. Because secretly it serves business interests. |
| B | Apathy serves the status quo all the time, every time. |
| A | Which means apathy serves capitalism. So metal. Metal is where it’s at, that it’s more recyclable and more useful than someone might think. |
| B | Yes, absolutely. |
| A | More paper products, more types of paper are recyclable than I realized. Glass should be reused instead of recycled when possible. |
| B | All things should be re used instead of recycled when possible. |
| A | Right. Mason jars, man. Like somebody should have |
| B | Mason jars are where it’s fucking at. |
| A | Well, I know, but someone should have like a central repository for people to turn in their mason jars. And like people can come pick them up and then they wouldn’t need to buy them from Fleet Farm. Because all you got to do is boil them and then do whatever. Plus it makes you look socially conscious and cool if you bring your salad in a Mason jar to work. |
| B | That’s true. |
| A | Not very functional though, unless you dump the salad out |
| B | directly onto the desk. Yeah. |
| A | I mean, a plate would generally be less messy, but yes. |
| B | Depends on how clean your desk is, I suppose. |
| A | Oh, man. How did all this ranch dressing get in my keyboard? Plastics avoid when possible. But that’s really, really hard. |
| B | It is. |
| A | And I think that’s a burden that’s not fair to place on individuals, like stop buying plastic because the world is such that we cannot live without it. I mean, it’s embedded in our bodies at this point. So I think that when it comes to plastics. That’s where I think more regulation and |
| B | Systems change. |
| A | and awareness is the answer. Does that seem fair? |
| B | Yes, it absolutely does. I’m not advocating for feeling bad about only having plastic products available and having to pick the lesser evil. I’m talking about cases where you could legitimately get a good replacement for a plastic product with one that is not. |
| A | Like for what? |
| B | In buying clothing, you could avoid synthetics. |
| A | Actually just buy secondhand clothes. |
| B | Yeah, buy secondhand clothes because that requires no manufacturing. That’s true. Yeah. |
| A | I’ve heard people discuss what a problem it is to try to get rid of clothes, that there’s just mountains of clothes out there. |
| B | Yeah. A lot of it gets shipped to the third world. Well, to what has been called the third world, but like to Africa and Asia, which is kind of funny because we ship a lot of clothes here from Asia. |
| A | Similar to recycling, people feel good when they drop off a donation box at their goodwill or whatever. And you know that’s one half of the equation. If you’re still buying new to replace, you’re not ultimately |
| B | You’re not helping. |
| A | Reducing the demand. But again, this is coming from someone who, like I try to buy secondhand most of the time, but sometimes it’s just not realistic for what you need. So again, speaking for the pragmatists out there, it’s something to be aware of. But I wouldn’t get caught up in being a purist about it. |
| B | Right. Yes, our society is not set up to accommodate purists at all in that way. So know that you’re doing your best. |
| A | Thanks Benton. |
| B | Thank you. |