January 20, 2009 • 24 mins
Recycling has come a long way since its debut -- and so have landfills. In this twofer HowStuffWorks podcast, discover the realities of modern recycling and find out why the world's largest landfill might be more aptly described as an "oceanfill."
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot com. This episode is sponsored
by go daddy dot com, the world's largest web host
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a month. In a promo code stuff ten at checkout
(00:21):
and save ten percent off your entire order. Get your
piece of the Internet at go daddy dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should
Know appropriately enough, I'm Josh Clark with me as always
is who it's Chuck. That's right, Chuck. It's good to
be back. I know it feels like it's been a
well Christmas holidays, right. I know that listeners think, through
(00:43):
the magic of iTunes, that we never leave the studio
at all, but in fact we've been off for a
couple of weeks and now we're back. Yeah. Do you
know we've actually gotten um offers to be rescued from
a couple of our listeners because from Studio one A yeah.
On our Facebook page, I think I said that we're
not allowed to leave. I got a pretty good response. Nice. Yeah, okay,
(01:05):
so you asked for pizza or cash, Oh it's coming, Yeah,
I'm buttering them up. Or shrimp cocktail, your favorite cocktail? Exactly.
I can finally get the shrimp cocktail. Um, Chuck. Yes,
do you remember back in the nineties? Maybe a haze
for you. No, you don't remember the nineties. No, it's
not a haze. I do, right, Oh, that was a
(01:25):
weird response college I was studying and such. Okay, so
so you do remember the nineties. Okay, So, Chuck, you
are a child of the recycling generation. Do you remember
when that thing just blew up? It came out of nowhere?
I do. My brother and I were talking about this
the other day with the initial Yeah, we were with
(01:46):
the Crying Indian in the seventies, which was just about littering,
right when the good old days when you would just
start trashing like an anchorman. They're walking through the parking
but just so nuts. Do you ever see anybody in
their car just throwing something out occasionally and it's just
boil your blood and it's like, what are you doing?
How can I be that unaware? You know? I hit
(02:08):
them with my car. Okay, so you're talking about the
the Amerindian who is crying because of the trash, right.
And then later on recycling became like newspapers kind of
where I remember it starting. It did. As a matter
of fact, the first curb side newspaper recycling program started
in nineteen seventy three in University City, Missouri, I believe,
or Missouri as my mom would say. But it took
(02:31):
a little while for it to take off, from nineteen
seventy three to the nineties. But in the nineties it
really gained traction and gain ground. And if you remember correctly,
you used to have to have like all these different
bins for you know, this colored glass, right, this kind
of plastic or paper, you know, and then then all
of a sudden it just went away. They're like, just
(02:54):
throw it all in one bin. And because recycling seems
so important, I know, I always wondered, like, is this
stuff really getting recycled. And then when when they went
to this whole you know, just single bin hodgepodge of everything,
I was like, well, that's it. I mean, they're not
even trying to keep it that they're that they're not
(03:15):
dumping this stuff, right, so UM, it turns out that
they actually are that you can pretty much guarantee that
almost all of what you are putting in your recycling
bin is getting recycled. And the thing that threw us
off where all of a sudden, we're just throwing everything
in one bin. It's called single stream recycling. That's a
(03:37):
result of UM recycling technology, which is awesome because it
made it a lot easier for people that maybe wouldn't
be prone to recycle because they didn't want to separate everything. Yeah,
so yeah, it was awesome. It was a pain, it
was definite pain. And now you just throw it all
in one bin. They come and get it. And back
in the day there there used to be a lot
of human contact with your garbage that was being recycled.
(04:00):
But these technological advances, so imagine that's okay. There's like
a uh, this conveyor belt that your recyclables are dumped
onto and they go through this weird gauntlet where there's
like magnets that attract like tin cans and then drop
them into into bins. Lasers lasers always you know, a
personal favorite of mine. They they're they're infrared lasers that
(04:23):
are used to scan the wavelength that's emitted by um
different types of plastic, and then they're appropriately taken off
the conveyor belt. And then there's there's others that have
puffs of air that can only get like, um, like cardboard,
like a toilet, paper, paper towel roll, just puffs it off.
All your stuff going through this is being assaulted. And
(04:44):
you know the way it reacts to these assaults, they're
gonna end up in the right kind of bin. So
you need very little human contact, or much less than
you did before. So um that that should put the
single stream fear to rest, right. Sure, I I've heard
well I never really doubted it too much, but I
do know people that think it's a liberal conspiracy and
(05:07):
that nothing is being recycled. So well, actually, there's a
there's an economist I can't remember his name, but he
went to the trouble of proving that recycling is actually
more harmful than good. Yeah, um, as far as like
an environmental cost benefit, it's actually more harmful because I
think he took into account like all the gas that
(05:28):
the trucks burn, that kind of thing, uh, and in
the electricity used in the recycling plants, and he came
to the conclusion that's actually more harmful than good. I
I don't necessarily subscribe to that, right was I'm sure
he was contradicted by more than one person. Yeah, but
he was a respected economist. He wasn't just you know,
some crack potter Joe Schmoy economists. No, right, exactly. But
(05:52):
he he may have very well been a conservative economist because,
as you said, recycling is a big liberal conspiracy in
some people's eyes. Exactly. Few, I would say, probably a
lot of people on board now and in the two
thousand's exactly. But I was having a conversation with my
father the other day, and he is the herbal Elvis exactly.
(06:14):
He was down, actually was he was kind of you know,
at the at the equilibrium point, which is good. So
he's very lucid. Um. And he uh, he and I
were talking. He said that the people at his recycling center, uh,
they don't have curbside pickup where he lives out in
the sticks. Um, they take their their stuff to the center,
and that they were told by one of the employees
(06:36):
that works there, um that there they don't recycling or
they just take all the stuff to the dump. Yes,
and I told him that the man at the recycling
center was a total idiot, and uh, basically Dad wanted
to know why, as is his one um, and I
told him that that's just an awful business model. So
(06:58):
think about this. There's this thing called it tipping fee.
And in two thousand eight, the tipping fee is what
you pay to dump your stuff at a landfill, and
it's usually per ton. In the US, in two thousand eight,
it was about forty two bucks on average for per
ton of everything anything you wanted to come dump. They
(07:19):
weigh it by ton and then you pay forty two
bucks to Have you ever been to a landfill? Yeah?
I know they actually have been to some that are
kind of tranquil, quite nice. Yeah, they have like ponds
and stuff, so you would never ever want to swim in.
But there's like rolling hills filled with garbage, but it's
grass over it. I've been to somewhere they're actually going
to the effort to make it look decent. But yeah,
(07:42):
and then you turn around there's like some rest of
refrigerator with like a corpse in it or something. So
they can be depressing places. Okay, but there's there's that
tipping fee. Right, So you drive up and there's a
scale that's embedded into the ground. It weighs you, and
you pay appropriately. Some states are are more than others.
I think ver Months tipping fee. The average tipping fee
(08:02):
in the state's nineties six bucks a ton, and then
I think Oklahoma is on the low end, it's like
fourteen or seventeen bucks a ton. So clearly, the more
you charge and tipping fees, the more people are going
to recycle exactly. But the point is is that there
because you have to pay too dump this stuff. Sure,
and you're not charging anybody money to come drop off
(08:24):
their recyclables. All you're doing is throwing your money out
the window. You might as well empty out your bank
account into a dump truck and back it into a landfill.
Did you explain this to your father? I did. Yeah,
this is actually you don't know this, but you are
trapped right in the middle of a recreation of this
conversation we had, um. So that's number one. The other
thing is that you you can actually get money from
(08:46):
recyclables their commodity. So what I mean, what happens when
you take your recyclables to uh to a recycling center
and they're they're diverted from the dump, thank god, to
you know, a recycling plant. What happened? I mean, what
do they get turned into? Well, they get turned eventually
back into the original raw material, which is a commodity.
(09:07):
It's worth money, like you said, so they have every
incentive to recycle. So like that mixed office paper is
being turned into um cardboard maybe you're old newspapers Actually
are really very commonly used for cardboards, stuff like that. UM.
Or you know, plastic bottles are being turned into um
like a fleece jacket. And actually there's a plastic bottle
(09:31):
you want to avoid if you ever tip it upside
down and you look, that's where you're gonna find your
recycling symbol, right and the number correct. Yes, So if
you see a triangular recycling symbol with a three inside,
you should actually do this while you're at the store.
Look at the bottle and if you see a three,
put it back and keep looking until you find, you know,
(09:53):
the laundry to churchen or whatever you're you're looking for
that doesn't have a three, and it has a one
or a two or something like that. UM. And then
all of a sudden that one with the three will
go away eventually like PC. And that's because it's is
it impossible to recycle or it's not hard. It's very
very The the ways you can recycle or the things
(10:14):
you can recycle into a very very limited, like maybe
a plastic park bench or something like that, because there's
so many additives and plus it there. It's actually um.
There's there's whole websites and organizations dedicated to getting rid
of PVC. Wh There's number one, it's it's impossible recycle.
So just that does generally end up in the dump
unless you take it to a specialty recycling plant. UM.
(10:37):
And number two it contains thalamites, and thalamites are UM.
It depends on the plastic. Thalamites are like a softener
to to soften plastic. So like your vinyl shower curtain
that has thalamites in it, when you put it in
and it starts smelling weird, that's the thalamites. And they're
actually really harmful that children's toys, like the kind of
(10:59):
mouthble ones that they chew on. Bad news. PVC thallamites
not good stuff. So if you start doing this at
the store, if you start, if you stop buying things
that are made in or delivered in PBC containers. PVC
is gonna go the way of the dinosaur pretty quick. Um.
But okay, so you want to look what you want
to look out for PVC? Right, Oh, I know what
(11:21):
we're talking about, raw materials. Back to raw materials, back
to raw materials. So recyclables are commodity because they're broken
back down into their original composition basically, right, okay, and
then they're sold for for big dough. It can be
big dough. Actually, I was reading an MPR article and um,
(11:43):
the price per ton that wholesale purchasers of of recycled
mixed office paper we're paying in this this past summer,
it was like ninety bucks a ton, big money. And
these are these are companies that are buying hundreds of
thousands of tons a month um. So it was big
business to recycle. And by the fall it had dropped
(12:04):
to nothing because even you know, recycling is subject to
inflation and gas fuel prices. Well, not just that, but
the economy. People stop buying goods, so less goods were manufactured. Um.
But it's also because it's it's it's subject to economic whims.
It's also subject to consumers. Right, So like if you
(12:27):
if you only buy um products that are sold in
recyclable or recycled materials, that are made from recycled materials. Um,
you the people who make these things are going to
start buying more and more recycled stuff, okay, because that's
what the consumers want. And if you stop buying stuff
(12:49):
that's made with you know, virgin raw materials, all of
a sudden, these trees are being saved or more plastic
isn't being made. And it's so it's kind of cool
to know that you can have this each person. Yeah,
you can also have an effect by making sure or
doing your best to make sure that everything that you
(13:09):
putting your recycling ben gets recycled. And one of the
ways you can do that is by cleaning the stuff.
I know that I know you referenced Minnesota in the article,
and I believe it's the same here in Georgia. About
pizza boxes, I've heard that pizza boxes they won't recycled
because they have you know, cheese and grease and stuff
on it. Actually just throw mine away, now, do you. Yeah, Yeah,
it's probably good idea, And um, I I do a
(13:32):
real good job about cleaning out all my glass products
just because it stinks and you don't want, you know,
the barbecue sauce smelling after a few days. So that's
the reason I do it. But it turns out it
has a better chance of getting recycled. It does and
if you kind of look at it, like your your
bottle of barbecue sauce. If you look at it, you
will see that it's not just a bottle of barbecue sauce.
There's several components to it, the lid, maybe that little
(13:56):
ring that held the lid in place, to the safety
seal um that's not just kind of dangling around the
neck of the bottle of the label. If you break
this thing down into its parts, you're increasing its chances
of being recycled as well, because if you think about
the labels paper, but the bottles glass and the cap
is plastic. So you separate it, you're making it easier
(14:16):
for the people at the recycling plant, or I should
say the magnets and lasers at the recycling plant. And
it's it's going to be likelier to be recycled, right,
it won't become a residual, which I believe that is
what the refuse is called it. They cannot recycle correct, right,
and they want to any any recycling company would want
to cut down on residual, right because that's just lost money.
(14:38):
So they're gonna do a lot to kind of make it,
UM get as much money as possible by recycling as
much ASTU as possible. But you can definitely help, right, Yeah,
that's great. I agree. So does that take us too?
Plastic and where that might end up? Yeah, you know,
plastic is kind of a big problem, right, and not
just PBC, but you know there's some play stick that's
(15:00):
a lot easier to recycle than others, UM, but it
doesn't always get recycled, and when it doesn't get recycled,
it can end up in some really screwed up places, right,
most specifically the ocean. Yes, a lot, a lot of
this stuff ends up in the ocean. And I have
a stat for you if you if you're into that,
(15:21):
you know, I'm into your stats. Uh. The the u
N did a little study their environmental program and they said,
in two thousand six, every square mild ocean has forty
six thousand pieces of floating plastic in it. Not awful,
forty six thousand pieces per square mile, And of the
more than two hundred billion pounds of plastic that we
(15:43):
produce each year all over the world is not United States,
about ten percent of that ends up in the ocean,
and a lot of that ends up on the floor
of the ocean. Well, not just a lot of it's
seventy of it ends up on the floor of the ocean.
So if every square mile has forty six thousand pieces floating,
that's thirty of what's actually in the ocean. The rest
is on the ocean floor, right, all right, So plastic
(16:05):
is it's well, it's plastic, right, It's super wonderful material.
It's so useful. But yes, it doesn't biodegrade. It does
break down, it photo degrades, but it doesn't break down
molecularly into simpler compounds that can be absorbed by nature.
It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of
the same thing, conveniently bite sized pieces, which is one
(16:26):
of the big problems. What they're called mermaids tears or nerdles. Yeah,
that's probably the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life.
It is. It's almost as bad as the American Indian crying. Yeah,
some mermaids here. Uh so yeah, what happens is the
stuff ends up in the ocean and filter feeders like
our friend the whale, shark and catfish they take the
(16:49):
stuff in because they think it's food. Uh, seagulls, albatross
they eat the stuff and uh it ends up you know,
killing a large chair. Yeah yeah, but wait, there's more
aside from the choking hazard or you know, any problems
digestive problems that can occur. Um. These little mermaids tears
actually have this added property of attracting toxins like a sponge.
(17:14):
So like the anything, any toxin it comes in contact
within the ocean, it can actually draw stuff to it.
It soaks it up, absorbs it, hangs onto it, and
then when it's eaten, little poison pills. Basically pretty much
shooting and sinking any ocean. And this is all over
the place, but there's actually there's this. There's a place
in the Pacific Ocean. This is startling to me. There's
(17:36):
a place in the Pacific in between Japan and California, right,
and it is called the North Pacific subtropic gyre okay um.
And basically a gyre is just it's a circulating area
of water. But this is this isn't like a funnel,
it's it's much more wide than that. Actually, one of
(17:58):
these gyres is twice the size of Texas. This this
subtropic gyre, the one in the North Pacific is actually
there's two, and they're connected by a six thousand long
subtropical convergent zone miles of basically trash and other things
making its way from one to the other. This is
where the garbage goes. This the the garbage that if
(18:20):
you have a cigarette lighter and it goes out or
it comes out of your pocket because you had it
in your bathing suit when you jumped in it, it
will likely end up in this huge garbage patch. There
is a garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that's twice
the size of Texas, and it's just kind of slowly
(18:40):
sitting there turning. There's actually there's there's two versions. There's
a western in the eastern right, and just one of
them is twice the exactly and that's they're connected by
the little trash trail on the six thousand mile trash trail.
And this is having you could say, something of an
impact on some of the Island, the island chains in
(19:00):
the area right Hawaiian Islands, some of the wine islands,
some of them are Some of them have beaches that
feature um five to ten feet of trash ten ft
deep and the plastic sand is what they call it. Yeah,
bads tears that that turned into these really tiny tiny
bits that you just can't do anything about. It comes
(19:21):
and mixed in with the beach. So it's bad news.
The the there is one heartening thing to all this,
to the great Pacific garbage pat It can be it
can be reduced. And the reason it can be reduced
is because I think eight percent of the trash and
the ocean it starts on land. This isn't like ocean
going vessels going out and dumping you know in this
(19:44):
jy or anything like. It's it's pulled there and it's
usually from land. That was good to hear. I mean,
it's sad in a way because it's coming from us,
but it's good to know that, you know, something can
change about that, right because it's everyday people who are
doing this. It's not you know, some faceless corporation. It's
not the people who are duping us into thinking that
where our stuff is being recycled and they're actually taking
(20:05):
it and dumping it in the Pacific. There's something you
can do, Like you can not UM use plastic grocery
bags anymore. It's a great ice very popular. UM. You
can recycle absolutely everything. UM. You can. You can if
you have eco anxiety, which we've talked about, you can follow.
You can walk up and down the street and pull
the aquafina water bottles out of the trash and you
(20:26):
can do theirself sure, or you could charter a helicopter
and have them fly you out to the gyre and
get to work. That's so that's just the tip of
the iceberg. On the on the on you know, recycling
in the World's Biggest landfill, which is the Great Pacific
garbage paths and it is UM and we've got a
couple of articles on them. Coincidentally, this is a dual podcast.
(20:48):
This is a bonus street It was Yeah, it's our
first time ever. We hope you liked it. UM. You
can read both of these articles by going to our
handy search bar and typing in world Biggest Landfill or
recycling reality and you can do that at how stuff
works dot com and Chuck we have a little listener
(21:09):
mail we do my favorite part of the show, mail time.
So today Josh, we have I'm gonna start off with
some corrections. Actually I'm gonna start off end end with corrections.
I have a few. We had a recent podcast on
body armor which was a special request from a soldier,
(21:30):
Donald Anderson and Iraq. And um. First correction is Donald
actually wrote us back because we didn't have his We
found out his rank as a sergeant and it's a
sergeant part of the fourth Squadron, third Armored Calvary Regiment,
and he works on the Age sixty f D turbine engine,
which I did a little googling, and that's in the
Apache helicopter. He's got a very cool job. And he
(21:54):
thanked us for the for the podcast. And um, some
people wrote in because we were talking about the spider
silk being made from the goat and we couldn't conceive
of how that would happen exactly. We thought of it
coming out of its dairy air or right right, what
was it? We said, let's listen, yealysis. Yeah, they've actually
(22:14):
genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk. That is, and
I take it maybe their hair grows like that. I
have no idea because I don't know where the silk
would come out of the poor goat, so we did
not know. We put the call out to our our listeners,
and because they're really smart and awesome, we had a
bunch of people right in. And it turns out that
(22:35):
the spider silk is actually created in their milk, the
goats milk, and uh, it's very strong and apparently it's
compatible with the human body, so it can also be
used for artificial limbs and stuff. Now, so I just
have a few names just to give people their due. Uh.
Nick McCracken of Waynesville, North Carolina. Kimberly Fletcher of Campbell, California.
(22:57):
Jeff Buell of the Earth Wow, not see where he
was from. II leaned forward whole stage from California. Michael
Barressitch h Matt Jensen of New York. Sean cash In
who just wrote in like literally ten minutes before we
went on the year, and one final person was unnamed
and he's my favorite because or she because the email
(23:19):
simply said the one so it may have been from
God himself. Wow. Well, thank you God and all the
rest of you for that. Correct and you've got some more. Well,
just one more small quick correction. We did have a viewer,
I'm sorry listener mail on a recent podcast, and we
butchered the name and ginger this person Costs cos said
(23:40):
something like Bitch Tall of Wisconsin. And it's actually a female.
I think we said Costs. Yeah, we're really sorry about that, Costs.
I don't know why we just automatically assumed you were mad.
And so it's actually, uh Coss Bates Stall and she's
a girl and we're very happy for him, and where
we apologize. Yeah, thanks in a snow pop and uh.
(24:01):
If you want to let us know how to pronounce
your name and tell us your gender, talk about goat's milk, whatever,
you can send us an email at stuff podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com.
H brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
(24:26):
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot com. This episode is sponsored
by go daddy dot com, the world's largest web host
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dollar ninety nine and hosting for less than five dollars
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(00:21):
and save ten percent off your entire order. Get your
piece of the Internet at go daddy dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should
Know appropriately enough, I'm Josh Clark with me as always
is who it's Chuck. That's right, Chuck. It's good to
be back. I know it feels like it's been a
well Christmas holidays, right. I know that listeners think, through
(00:43):
the magic of iTunes, that we never leave the studio
at all, but in fact we've been off for a
couple of weeks and now we're back. Yeah. Do you
know we've actually gotten um offers to be rescued from
a couple of our listeners because from Studio one A yeah.
On our Facebook page, I think I said that we're
not allowed to leave. I got a pretty good response. Nice. Yeah, okay,
(01:05):
so you asked for pizza or cash, Oh it's coming, Yeah,
I'm buttering them up. Or shrimp cocktail, your favorite cocktail? Exactly.
I can finally get the shrimp cocktail. Um, Chuck. Yes,
do you remember back in the nineties? Maybe a haze
for you. No, you don't remember the nineties. No, it's
not a haze. I do, right, Oh, that was a
(01:25):
weird response college I was studying and such. Okay, so
so you do remember the nineties. Okay, So, Chuck, you
are a child of the recycling generation. Do you remember
when that thing just blew up? It came out of nowhere?
I do. My brother and I were talking about this
the other day with the initial Yeah, we were with
(01:46):
the Crying Indian in the seventies, which was just about littering,
right when the good old days when you would just
start trashing like an anchorman. They're walking through the parking
but just so nuts. Do you ever see anybody in
their car just throwing something out occasionally and it's just
boil your blood and it's like, what are you doing?
How can I be that unaware? You know? I hit
(02:08):
them with my car. Okay, so you're talking about the
the Amerindian who is crying because of the trash, right.
And then later on recycling became like newspapers kind of
where I remember it starting. It did. As a matter
of fact, the first curb side newspaper recycling program started
in nineteen seventy three in University City, Missouri, I believe,
or Missouri as my mom would say. But it took
(02:31):
a little while for it to take off, from nineteen
seventy three to the nineties. But in the nineties it
really gained traction and gain ground. And if you remember correctly,
you used to have to have like all these different
bins for you know, this colored glass, right, this kind
of plastic or paper, you know, and then then all
of a sudden it just went away. They're like, just
(02:54):
throw it all in one bin. And because recycling seems
so important, I know, I always wondered, like, is this
stuff really getting recycled. And then when when they went
to this whole you know, just single bin hodgepodge of everything,
I was like, well, that's it. I mean, they're not
even trying to keep it that they're that they're not
(03:15):
dumping this stuff, right, so UM, it turns out that
they actually are that you can pretty much guarantee that
almost all of what you are putting in your recycling
bin is getting recycled. And the thing that threw us
off where all of a sudden, we're just throwing everything
in one bin. It's called single stream recycling. That's a
(03:37):
result of UM recycling technology, which is awesome because it
made it a lot easier for people that maybe wouldn't
be prone to recycle because they didn't want to separate everything. Yeah,
so yeah, it was awesome. It was a pain, it
was definite pain. And now you just throw it all
in one bin. They come and get it. And back
in the day there there used to be a lot
of human contact with your garbage that was being recycled.
(04:00):
But these technological advances, so imagine that's okay. There's like
a uh, this conveyor belt that your recyclables are dumped
onto and they go through this weird gauntlet where there's
like magnets that attract like tin cans and then drop
them into into bins. Lasers lasers always you know, a
personal favorite of mine. They they're they're infrared lasers that
(04:23):
are used to scan the wavelength that's emitted by um
different types of plastic, and then they're appropriately taken off
the conveyor belt. And then there's there's others that have
puffs of air that can only get like, um, like cardboard,
like a toilet, paper, paper towel roll, just puffs it off.
All your stuff going through this is being assaulted. And
(04:44):
you know the way it reacts to these assaults, they're
gonna end up in the right kind of bin. So
you need very little human contact, or much less than
you did before. So um that that should put the
single stream fear to rest, right. Sure, I I've heard
well I never really doubted it too much, but I
do know people that think it's a liberal conspiracy and
(05:07):
that nothing is being recycled. So well, actually, there's a
there's an economist I can't remember his name, but he
went to the trouble of proving that recycling is actually
more harmful than good. Yeah, um, as far as like
an environmental cost benefit, it's actually more harmful because I
think he took into account like all the gas that
(05:28):
the trucks burn, that kind of thing, uh, and in
the electricity used in the recycling plants, and he came
to the conclusion that's actually more harmful than good. I
I don't necessarily subscribe to that, right was I'm sure
he was contradicted by more than one person. Yeah, but
he was a respected economist. He wasn't just you know,
some crack potter Joe Schmoy economists. No, right, exactly. But
(05:52):
he he may have very well been a conservative economist because,
as you said, recycling is a big liberal conspiracy in
some people's eyes. Exactly. Few, I would say, probably a
lot of people on board now and in the two
thousand's exactly. But I was having a conversation with my
father the other day, and he is the herbal Elvis exactly.
(06:14):
He was down, actually was he was kind of you know,
at the at the equilibrium point, which is good. So
he's very lucid. Um. And he uh, he and I
were talking. He said that the people at his recycling center, uh,
they don't have curbside pickup where he lives out in
the sticks. Um, they take their their stuff to the center,
and that they were told by one of the employees
(06:36):
that works there, um that there they don't recycling or
they just take all the stuff to the dump. Yes,
and I told him that the man at the recycling
center was a total idiot, and uh, basically Dad wanted
to know why, as is his one um, and I
told him that that's just an awful business model. So
(06:58):
think about this. There's this thing called it tipping fee.
And in two thousand eight, the tipping fee is what
you pay to dump your stuff at a landfill, and
it's usually per ton. In the US, in two thousand eight,
it was about forty two bucks on average for per
ton of everything anything you wanted to come dump. They
(07:19):
weigh it by ton and then you pay forty two
bucks to Have you ever been to a landfill? Yeah?
I know they actually have been to some that are
kind of tranquil, quite nice. Yeah, they have like ponds
and stuff, so you would never ever want to swim in.
But there's like rolling hills filled with garbage, but it's
grass over it. I've been to somewhere they're actually going
to the effort to make it look decent. But yeah,
(07:42):
and then you turn around there's like some rest of
refrigerator with like a corpse in it or something. So
they can be depressing places. Okay, but there's there's that
tipping fee. Right, So you drive up and there's a
scale that's embedded into the ground. It weighs you, and
you pay appropriately. Some states are are more than others.
I think ver Months tipping fee. The average tipping fee
(08:02):
in the state's nineties six bucks a ton, and then
I think Oklahoma is on the low end, it's like
fourteen or seventeen bucks a ton. So clearly, the more
you charge and tipping fees, the more people are going
to recycle exactly. But the point is is that there
because you have to pay too dump this stuff. Sure,
and you're not charging anybody money to come drop off
(08:24):
their recyclables. All you're doing is throwing your money out
the window. You might as well empty out your bank
account into a dump truck and back it into a landfill.
Did you explain this to your father? I did. Yeah,
this is actually you don't know this, but you are
trapped right in the middle of a recreation of this
conversation we had, um. So that's number one. The other
thing is that you you can actually get money from
(08:46):
recyclables their commodity. So what I mean, what happens when
you take your recyclables to uh to a recycling center
and they're they're diverted from the dump, thank god, to
you know, a recycling plant. What happened? I mean, what
do they get turned into? Well, they get turned eventually
back into the original raw material, which is a commodity.
(09:07):
It's worth money, like you said, so they have every
incentive to recycle. So like that mixed office paper is
being turned into um cardboard maybe you're old newspapers Actually
are really very commonly used for cardboards, stuff like that. UM.
Or you know, plastic bottles are being turned into um
like a fleece jacket. And actually there's a plastic bottle
(09:31):
you want to avoid if you ever tip it upside
down and you look, that's where you're gonna find your
recycling symbol, right and the number correct. Yes, So if
you see a triangular recycling symbol with a three inside,
you should actually do this while you're at the store.
Look at the bottle and if you see a three,
put it back and keep looking until you find, you know,
(09:53):
the laundry to churchen or whatever you're you're looking for
that doesn't have a three, and it has a one
or a two or something like that. UM. And then
all of a sudden that one with the three will
go away eventually like PC. And that's because it's is
it impossible to recycle or it's not hard. It's very
very The the ways you can recycle or the things
(10:14):
you can recycle into a very very limited, like maybe
a plastic park bench or something like that, because there's
so many additives and plus it there. It's actually um.
There's there's whole websites and organizations dedicated to getting rid
of PVC. Wh There's number one, it's it's impossible recycle.
So just that does generally end up in the dump
unless you take it to a specialty recycling plant. UM.
(10:37):
And number two it contains thalamites, and thalamites are UM.
It depends on the plastic. Thalamites are like a softener
to to soften plastic. So like your vinyl shower curtain
that has thalamites in it, when you put it in
and it starts smelling weird, that's the thalamites. And they're
actually really harmful that children's toys, like the kind of
(10:59):
mouthble ones that they chew on. Bad news. PVC thallamites
not good stuff. So if you start doing this at
the store, if you start, if you stop buying things
that are made in or delivered in PBC containers. PVC
is gonna go the way of the dinosaur pretty quick. Um.
But okay, so you want to look what you want
to look out for PVC? Right, Oh, I know what
(11:21):
we're talking about, raw materials. Back to raw materials, back
to raw materials. So recyclables are commodity because they're broken
back down into their original composition basically, right, okay, and
then they're sold for for big dough. It can be
big dough. Actually, I was reading an MPR article and um,
(11:43):
the price per ton that wholesale purchasers of of recycled
mixed office paper we're paying in this this past summer,
it was like ninety bucks a ton, big money. And
these are these are companies that are buying hundreds of
thousands of tons a month um. So it was big
business to recycle. And by the fall it had dropped
(12:04):
to nothing because even you know, recycling is subject to
inflation and gas fuel prices. Well, not just that, but
the economy. People stop buying goods, so less goods were manufactured. Um.
But it's also because it's it's it's subject to economic whims.
It's also subject to consumers. Right, So like if you
(12:27):
if you only buy um products that are sold in
recyclable or recycled materials, that are made from recycled materials. Um,
you the people who make these things are going to
start buying more and more recycled stuff, okay, because that's
what the consumers want. And if you stop buying stuff
(12:49):
that's made with you know, virgin raw materials, all of
a sudden, these trees are being saved or more plastic
isn't being made. And it's so it's kind of cool
to know that you can have this each person. Yeah,
you can also have an effect by making sure or
doing your best to make sure that everything that you
(13:09):
putting your recycling ben gets recycled. And one of the
ways you can do that is by cleaning the stuff.
I know that I know you referenced Minnesota in the article,
and I believe it's the same here in Georgia. About
pizza boxes, I've heard that pizza boxes they won't recycled
because they have you know, cheese and grease and stuff
on it. Actually just throw mine away, now, do you. Yeah, Yeah,
it's probably good idea, And um, I I do a
(13:32):
real good job about cleaning out all my glass products
just because it stinks and you don't want, you know,
the barbecue sauce smelling after a few days. So that's
the reason I do it. But it turns out it
has a better chance of getting recycled. It does and
if you kind of look at it, like your your
bottle of barbecue sauce. If you look at it, you
will see that it's not just a bottle of barbecue sauce.
There's several components to it, the lid, maybe that little
(13:56):
ring that held the lid in place, to the safety
seal um that's not just kind of dangling around the
neck of the bottle of the label. If you break
this thing down into its parts, you're increasing its chances
of being recycled as well, because if you think about
the labels paper, but the bottles glass and the cap
is plastic. So you separate it, you're making it easier
(14:16):
for the people at the recycling plant, or I should
say the magnets and lasers at the recycling plant. And
it's it's going to be likelier to be recycled, right,
it won't become a residual, which I believe that is
what the refuse is called it. They cannot recycle correct, right,
and they want to any any recycling company would want
to cut down on residual, right because that's just lost money.
(14:38):
So they're gonna do a lot to kind of make it,
UM get as much money as possible by recycling as
much ASTU as possible. But you can definitely help, right, Yeah,
that's great. I agree. So does that take us too?
Plastic and where that might end up? Yeah, you know,
plastic is kind of a big problem, right, and not
just PBC, but you know there's some play stick that's
(15:00):
a lot easier to recycle than others, UM, but it
doesn't always get recycled, and when it doesn't get recycled,
it can end up in some really screwed up places, right,
most specifically the ocean. Yes, a lot, a lot of
this stuff ends up in the ocean. And I have
a stat for you if you if you're into that,
(15:21):
you know, I'm into your stats. Uh. The the u
N did a little study their environmental program and they said,
in two thousand six, every square mild ocean has forty
six thousand pieces of floating plastic in it. Not awful,
forty six thousand pieces per square mile, And of the
more than two hundred billion pounds of plastic that we
(15:43):
produce each year all over the world is not United States,
about ten percent of that ends up in the ocean,
and a lot of that ends up on the floor
of the ocean. Well, not just a lot of it's
seventy of it ends up on the floor of the ocean.
So if every square mile has forty six thousand pieces floating,
that's thirty of what's actually in the ocean. The rest
is on the ocean floor, right, all right, So plastic
(16:05):
is it's well, it's plastic, right, It's super wonderful material.
It's so useful. But yes, it doesn't biodegrade. It does
break down, it photo degrades, but it doesn't break down
molecularly into simpler compounds that can be absorbed by nature.
It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of
the same thing, conveniently bite sized pieces, which is one
(16:26):
of the big problems. What they're called mermaids tears or nerdles. Yeah,
that's probably the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life.
It is. It's almost as bad as the American Indian crying. Yeah,
some mermaids here. Uh so yeah, what happens is the
stuff ends up in the ocean and filter feeders like
our friend the whale, shark and catfish they take the
(16:49):
stuff in because they think it's food. Uh, seagulls, albatross
they eat the stuff and uh it ends up you know,
killing a large chair. Yeah yeah, but wait, there's more
aside from the choking hazard or you know, any problems
digestive problems that can occur. Um. These little mermaids tears
actually have this added property of attracting toxins like a sponge.
(17:14):
So like the anything, any toxin it comes in contact
within the ocean, it can actually draw stuff to it.
It soaks it up, absorbs it, hangs onto it, and
then when it's eaten, little poison pills. Basically pretty much
shooting and sinking any ocean. And this is all over
the place, but there's actually there's this. There's a place
in the Pacific Ocean. This is startling to me. There's
(17:36):
a place in the Pacific in between Japan and California, right,
and it is called the North Pacific subtropic gyre okay um.
And basically a gyre is just it's a circulating area
of water. But this is this isn't like a funnel,
it's it's much more wide than that. Actually, one of
(17:58):
these gyres is twice the size of Texas. This this
subtropic gyre, the one in the North Pacific is actually
there's two, and they're connected by a six thousand long
subtropical convergent zone miles of basically trash and other things
making its way from one to the other. This is
where the garbage goes. This the the garbage that if
(18:20):
you have a cigarette lighter and it goes out or
it comes out of your pocket because you had it
in your bathing suit when you jumped in it, it
will likely end up in this huge garbage patch. There
is a garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that's twice
the size of Texas, and it's just kind of slowly
(18:40):
sitting there turning. There's actually there's there's two versions. There's
a western in the eastern right, and just one of
them is twice the exactly and that's they're connected by
the little trash trail on the six thousand mile trash trail.
And this is having you could say, something of an
impact on some of the Island, the island chains in
(19:00):
the area right Hawaiian Islands, some of the wine islands,
some of them are Some of them have beaches that
feature um five to ten feet of trash ten ft
deep and the plastic sand is what they call it. Yeah,
bads tears that that turned into these really tiny tiny
bits that you just can't do anything about. It comes
(19:21):
and mixed in with the beach. So it's bad news.
The the there is one heartening thing to all this,
to the great Pacific garbage pat It can be it
can be reduced. And the reason it can be reduced
is because I think eight percent of the trash and
the ocean it starts on land. This isn't like ocean
going vessels going out and dumping you know in this
(19:44):
jy or anything like. It's it's pulled there and it's
usually from land. That was good to hear. I mean,
it's sad in a way because it's coming from us,
but it's good to know that, you know, something can
change about that, right because it's everyday people who are
doing this. It's not you know, some faceless corporation. It's
not the people who are duping us into thinking that
where our stuff is being recycled and they're actually taking
(20:05):
it and dumping it in the Pacific. There's something you
can do, Like you can not UM use plastic grocery
bags anymore. It's a great ice very popular. UM. You
can recycle absolutely everything. UM. You can. You can if
you have eco anxiety, which we've talked about, you can follow.
You can walk up and down the street and pull
the aquafina water bottles out of the trash and you
(20:26):
can do theirself sure, or you could charter a helicopter
and have them fly you out to the gyre and
get to work. That's so that's just the tip of
the iceberg. On the on the on you know, recycling
in the World's Biggest landfill, which is the Great Pacific
garbage paths and it is UM and we've got a
couple of articles on them. Coincidentally, this is a dual podcast.
(20:48):
This is a bonus street It was Yeah, it's our
first time ever. We hope you liked it. UM. You
can read both of these articles by going to our
handy search bar and typing in world Biggest Landfill or
recycling reality and you can do that at how stuff
works dot com and Chuck we have a little listener
(21:09):
mail we do my favorite part of the show, mail time.
So today Josh, we have I'm gonna start off with
some corrections. Actually I'm gonna start off end end with corrections.
I have a few. We had a recent podcast on
body armor which was a special request from a soldier,
(21:30):
Donald Anderson and Iraq. And um. First correction is Donald
actually wrote us back because we didn't have his We
found out his rank as a sergeant and it's a
sergeant part of the fourth Squadron, third Armored Calvary Regiment,
and he works on the Age sixty f D turbine engine,
which I did a little googling, and that's in the
Apache helicopter. He's got a very cool job. And he
(21:54):
thanked us for the for the podcast. And um, some
people wrote in because we were talking about the spider
silk being made from the goat and we couldn't conceive
of how that would happen exactly. We thought of it
coming out of its dairy air or right right, what
was it? We said, let's listen, yealysis. Yeah, they've actually
(22:14):
genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk. That is, and
I take it maybe their hair grows like that. I
have no idea because I don't know where the silk
would come out of the poor goat, so we did
not know. We put the call out to our our listeners,
and because they're really smart and awesome, we had a
bunch of people right in. And it turns out that
(22:35):
the spider silk is actually created in their milk, the
goats milk, and uh, it's very strong and apparently it's
compatible with the human body, so it can also be
used for artificial limbs and stuff. Now, so I just
have a few names just to give people their due. Uh.
Nick McCracken of Waynesville, North Carolina. Kimberly Fletcher of Campbell, California.
(22:57):
Jeff Buell of the Earth Wow, not see where he
was from. II leaned forward whole stage from California. Michael
Barressitch h Matt Jensen of New York. Sean cash In
who just wrote in like literally ten minutes before we
went on the year, and one final person was unnamed
and he's my favorite because or she because the email
(23:19):
simply said the one so it may have been from
God himself. Wow. Well, thank you God and all the
rest of you for that. Correct and you've got some more. Well,
just one more small quick correction. We did have a viewer,
I'm sorry listener mail on a recent podcast, and we
butchered the name and ginger this person Costs cos said
(23:40):
something like Bitch Tall of Wisconsin. And it's actually a female.
I think we said Costs. Yeah, we're really sorry about that, Costs.
I don't know why we just automatically assumed you were mad.
And so it's actually, uh Coss Bates Stall and she's
a girl and we're very happy for him, and where
we apologize. Yeah, thanks in a snow pop and uh.
(24:01):
If you want to let us know how to pronounce
your name and tell us your gender, talk about goat's milk, whatever,
you can send us an email at stuff podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com.
H brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
(24:26):
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