99% Invisible - 341- National Sword

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

Where does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). From there, much of it is shipped off to mills, where bales of paper, glass, aluminum, and plastic are pulped or melted into raw materials. Some of these mills are here in the U.S. And once upon a time, many of them were in China. Since 2001, China was one of the biggest buyers of American recycling.  That is, until last year, when China pulled a move that no one saw coming: they stopped buying. National Sword

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here, let me give you these. Oh, thank you. These are your plugs. Let me take you back, back to a simpler time. The year 2016. What is this? So this is Recycling Plant. This is the large recycling plant. Where we sort all the materials from the blue bin, the bottles, the cans, the paper.

In 2016, producer Avery Trouffman was working on a story about garbage and recycling pickup systems its episode 2.13. But don't worry, this is not a rerun. This story is different. Back then, for that story in 2016, I took a tour of the plant that sorts all of San Francisco's recycling. We do 600 tons a day here. That's Robert Reed, the representative

for San Francisco Recology, which is the company that is responsible for San Francisco's recycling program. They're trucks round up all the recycling around the city and bring it to a murf. Murf, MRF, a materials recovery facility. At the murf, the trucks dump all the recycling into a big mountain, and then the wild part begins. This particular Murph in San Francisco

has all this elaborate machinery that looks like it's out of a Miyazaki movie. You see a recycling superstructure. It's three stories high. Pretty shortly, the conveyor belts start up. We're going to sort all this material here into 16 different types of material. This three story tall superstructure and the 173 people that were working on it were separating and cleaning the recycling, sorting it into glass, paper, plastic, etc.

You can separate through a combination of hand sorting and modern recycling equipment. Modern recycling equipment like the optical sorter that can automatically separate different color plastics. Right here the scanner is looking at the materials as they come by and when it sees a clear plastic like a clear plastic water bottle it hits it with a puff of air and you can hear it. It's expensive, it costs $3 million for this machine and it came from the Netherlands. And at the time, in 2016, when I was younger and things were simpler, I didn't quite grasp the simple fact. They weren't actually recycling anything.

They were not churning the paper into pulp or melting down the plastic into pellets. The mirth was simply sorting and cleaning all the materials. They were loading bales of clean recycling onto shipping containers, so they could sell them to mills who would then pulp the paper and melt the plastic. And I was just like, okay, cool. And left well enough alone. I just figured all those mills and plants would always be there wherever they were, waiting to accept our stuff.

How could I have known that in the new future, this global recycling system would go off the rails? It happened right under our noses, and most people, including me, until very recently, had no idea. The industry has been using the phrase the end of recycling as we know it. Kate O'Neill is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, and she kind of freaked me out. Yeah, you know, I would say for a lot of stuff that we threw into the recycling, it's not happening. A lot of recycling is no longer actually getting recycled.

The list of accepted materials are shrinking in some cities. Depending on where you live, certain types of plastic aren't being collected anymore, maybe certain kinds of paper or cardboard. In many communities, local governments to stop picking up recycling? Oh, just, just stopped. Yeah, goes in the general trash. Even if they do collect it,

they've had a hard time finding places to ship it. Instead of making money, selling recycling, recycling companies are losing money on it. Now they are paying someone to take it. To just store it. Yes. Because they lost their biggest buyer, the place America, and much of Australia and Europe and Canada,

sent a huge amount of our recycling. This magical land where your empty plastic bottles and old soup cans went to be reincarnated was China. They were taking most of the world scrap. China had been taking most of the world's scrap since about 2001, which is around the time China joined the World Trade Organization. That's when they really ramped up selling goods all over the world in

massive shipping containers. And rather than send the containers back empty, we sent them back filled with recycling, which was actually really cost effective. That's cheap, but to ship scrap from California to China, then California to even Arizona potentially. And this system seemed to work well. Cities could subsidize their recycling pickup programs from the money they made, selling these materials to China. And then they didn't need to process the materials themselves.

Capitalism at work. We basically outsourced we gave up on even trying to improve infrastructure here because we could chip it to China. And it seemed like a logical system, as long as China kept wanting to buy our recycling. But then, China pulled a move that no one saw coming. Operation National Sword. A pretty aggressive name for a piece of recycling legislation. Basically, National Sword is China's ban on the import of foreign recyclables. It started in 2018, and the list of banned items has steadily grown. It has the potential of banning all recyclable materials by 2020. But we don't know if that will happen or not.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly why China got fed up with this system all of a sudden. There are a number of factors you can point to, but a lot of experts think it's because of a movie. This Chinese documentary called Plastic China by director Wang Ji-long. It focuses on this insanely cute little girl whose family works at a plastic recycling facility. She never gets sent to school because she's helping her parents watch her younger siblings and sort through mountains of shredded plastic. They're cutting up plastic, melting it, soaking it, and turning it into a sludge, and then

turning that into hardened pellets. The little girl washes her face in the gray plastic-y water and eats fish that have choked on plastic. This family lives with the shredding machine. They eat and sleep near it. Enhaling the dust, the micro particles that come off during the shredding process, and the fumes from the melting process. There's a lot of bad stuff there. And all the plastic. It's all clearly from Western countries.

The little girl longingly cuts out shoes from a discarded European catalog, and gleefully plays with dirty old figurines of Mickey Mouse. It is absolutely heartbreaking. And it broke a lot of hearts on the International Film Festival Circuit. And then it was also shown in China for a while, I think it got on the internet there, but the government certain yanked it from Chinese internet. And while I we can't keep doing this. This movie did really make a difference. Yes, yes, I believe it did.

Causing or correlation, it was after this documentary that China instituted Operation National Sword. China realized that they needed to crack down on these informal recycling plants and build safe, efficient recycling systems. They want to improve their own domestic recycling rates and their cities and towns. They have a lot of work to do.

And they have more than enough stuff to recycle without taking on more from other countries. So they decided to stop accepting our recyclables. Which I mean, fair enough. It's a good move for them. I think China was no longer interested in being what never really wanted to be, but felt like it was being seen as the garbage dump of the world. You know, it's not its responsibility to take in all of our trash. It's got a point. And so now here we are, Blinking, into the cold harsh light of 2019.

National sword has been in action for about a year now. Some people call it a crisis or there's no like the word crisis, but that's where we are. Although I feel like it got a little buried in the news cycle, that is, unless you are a dedicated reader of Wasteive. Wasteive is a trade publication. We cover the waste recycling industry, just generally the future of what happens to the materials we buy and throw away.

Cole Rosengren is the senior editor. And reading Wasteive, it's like reading the news from the upside down. It's a parallel world where the things we do in the realm of the shiny and new are perfectly reflected in the grimy and used. Because Waste Systems are affected by so many factors, local resources, global policy,

packaging and product trends, new material technology, on and on. It's a whole complex system, especially in the US. Ah, super complicated, so more complicated than it ought to be. In the United States, recycling programs vary depending on individual cities, counties, and states. We don't have a national recycling policy. Other countries do in a variety of ways. Here in the US, we do not.

So in the wake of national sword, it's been up to each individual recycling program to find new buyers wherever they can. Some have started selling their recyclables to Southeast Asia, countries like Vietnam and Malaysia and Thailand. Others are finding domestic markets, at least for certain materials. Others are finding domestic markets, at least for certain materials.

With aluminum and with plastic and paper mills, there are places in the US to send this that will bind this material to make new products with it. And so with that in mind, areas of the country that have an end market in reasonable distance, they're doing okay. And now there's a big push to invest more in domestic recycling infrastructure, which

is good. There's over a dozen announcements of either new or expanded paper mills happening in the US. But here's the thing. All these new plastic glass and paper mills will not save us, because now they are getting so inundated with recyclables that they're increasingly putting their own restrictions on what kinds of materials they're willing to accept.

And there's a good reason why all these places started turning away our recycling. The stuff we've been sending them is too dirty. So much of what we throw into the recycling bin is filthy, contaminated with liquids or food waste or oil. And this kind of contamination just ruins the material. So if you're the anal one in your house who is rinsing the yogurt out of the yogurt containers before you throw them out, you are right. You are doing it right. But most people haven't been doing

it right. The contamination rates have been pretty high and they've risen in the past 10 years or so. As a result, a lot of the stuff we were throwing into the recycling bin was never truly recyclable material in the first place. It was just trash. And a lot of time, it just ended up in landfill or in-saneration. Operation National Sword didn't create these problems. It just revealed them, and then threw them back at us. Well, mostly threw them at the Murphs. They're the ones with the heaps and heaps of useless recycling piling up, and wondering where to put it. It's been a minute since we spoke last,

and things have happened. So I checked back in with Robert Reed, the representative of San Francisco Recology, who showed me around their plant back in the good old days of 2016. Let's be going on since I saw you last. A lot of things, if you lose your biggest customer, it really upsets the Apple cart. Reed explained that now, in this new buyer's market, mills are only accepting the most easily recyclable items, which means the items that are almost perfectly pure and clean. There's efforts underway to reduce liquids and any food scraps in recycling bins.

And so, ecology has been investing more and more in sorting and cleaning technology to make sure they can keep selling, which means they bought more optical sorters. As we speak, we're installing state-of-the-art optical sorters in our plant that came from France. They now have seven high-speed computer-controlled optical sorters. These big elaborate machines that do the work that we don't want to do. But also, the nerfs want us, the consumers, to send them cleaner recycling, which would make recycling less expensive and more efficient for everyone.

We're doing things to encourage the public to help us make cleaner bales of recycling. And so we've launched a new initiative in October called Better at the Bin. The key to success is all of us doing a better job at sorting our recyclables. We call this initiative better at the bin. Recology is posting these high production value videos on their social media and on better at thebin.com. To try to convince everyone to take these little steps to be better recyclers. If one half-null bottle or can gets tossed in the recycling bin, the liquids can ruin the

whole lot. Remember, reduce, reuse, recycle? Well, somewhere along the way, we totally lost track of reduce and reuse and focused too much on recycle. Refuse single use plastics, plastic straws, plastic bags, and plastic coffee couplies. Don't buy plastic water bottles, carry a metal water bottle. Replace plastic bottles. Yes, this is 100% true.

We definitely have got to get better about generating less waste and cleaning what we do recycle. But this alone is simplifying the real complexity of the problem. For example, at the end of the interview, Robert Reed pulled out a totally normal looking tube of toothpaste. You can't recycle this container. You still have the metal on the inside, the soft plastic on the outside, the hard plastic neck and cap, and your residual toothpaste on the inside, not to mention the printing.

There's four or five materials here, and they all go to landfills or incinerators. And then he pulled out the small aluminum case. And I'm opening it up and inside there's a cake of toothpaste. It's a dry cake and it lasts for 45 days. And at the end of those 45 days, you just drop another cake into the aluminum jar. I mean, can you buy them in the States? I haven't been able to find them in the States yet. This one was purchased

in France. This struck me as fairly ridiculous. How are we supposed to buy cakes of toothpaste from France that we don't know exist? And it's not like shipping toothpaste across the Atlantic is exactly environmentally friendly. Again, absolutely true. We need to get better at using less and cleaning our cycling and researching what our local systems will accept. Definitely. But like, we throw out a lot of junk because we are sold a lot of junk. So much of this problem is about the products we are sold and have access to. I just getting fed up with the way that we talk about our pollution problem.

Matt Wilkins is a biologist, and he wrote a piece for Scientific American about our current recycling mess. We should not have to fight as individuals against this constant onslaught of plastic. Take, for example, the term litter bug. You don't want to be a litter bug, right? You know, litter bugs are the problem. It's not the fact that we have this unfettered production of billions of containers

happening at all times and no infrastructure to reclaim those materials. In that nickname, litter bug, it was popularized in large part by a group called Keep America Beautiful. This lobbying group, Keep America Beautiful, founded by Pepsi and Coke and Philip Morris, among others. Keep America beautiful was formed in 1953. Around the same time Vermont was creating legislation way ahead of its time, it would have made it illegal

to bottle anything in a non-refillable container. And of course, the beverage industry was against it. They wanted to frame the problem of waste as something that should be dealt with not by companies, but by consumers. You know, litter box. Keep America Beautiful was essentially a lobbying group. But its masterstroke in consumer shaming came in 1971

when they rolled out a very persuasive advertising campaign. Yeah, the crying Indian ad was basically there's a Native American canoeing through like a pristine forest which is apparently right next to a highway. And he paddles right up to the bank of the highway and climbs out and then people are speeding by and then a motorist like basically hit some with a bag of trash and then the camera pans up and there's a tear rolling down his cheek. This ad which featured an Italian actor playing a Native American became iconic but its basic lesson wasn't exactly wrong. People start pollution, People can stop it.

But the ad made it seem that so long as consumers stop littering, all of our garbage woes would be solved, which of course is not true. It let the corporations that were making all those disposable items off the hook. Although to be fair, this is not exactly their stance anymore. Only a few years after the crying Indian ad, keep America beautiful, change their tune. So they actively fought this legislation in a public way, I think up until the early 80s, and then they kind of switched tactics, and have basically since then just been kind of getting in on the Earth Day push and, you know, telling people to recycle and organizing cleanups and stuff.

Representatives from Keep America Beautiful told me that they now advocate recycling legislation and that their corporate partners want to do their part. These days, especially in the shadow of national sword, corporations and governments have had to acknowledge the scale of our recycling problem in a very public way. We're gathered here today to advance solutions to today's recycling challenges. That's the voice of Andrew Wheeler, former coal industry lobbyist and current acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. In November of 2018, the EPA convened a two-hour long panel discussion in an attempt to

attempt to deal with the fallout from National Sword. We cannot tackle these challenges alone, which is why we are thrilled to have representatives from nearly every aspect of the material's economy gathered here today. At this literal roundtable, we're all the biggest names in the recycling world, from waste management to Walmart. It's not every day that you get curic and Starbucks and Coca-Cola Pepsi and Dr. Pepper all in the same room together. And I'm really glad you're all here.

Keep America beautiful was there, and Cole Rosengren was also there in the room, covering it for Wasteive. Maybe the CPA summit went way to something? I hate to be so flippin' about that. I mean, maybe it does. That'd be cool. Basically, each representative had like less than one minute to speak, and everyone mentioned a million different problems with our recycling system. But there was this butterfly at the bottom of Pandora's box. This common refrain that companies, recyclers, and municipalities

alike all mentioned. Consumers looked for us to give them sustainable products. We need to think about what is the future of packaging. And we have to design the right way. Yes, dear listener, one of the most important solutions to our recycling woes might actually lay in design. At the EPA meeting, the representative from Proctor and Gamble talked about their award-winning container made out of plastic cleaned up from the beach.

What we do with the head and shoulders bottle was we took the iconic white bottle. We use plastic collected from beaches and it became gray, but we sold it that way in consumers' model. Okay, so this was a limited edition product, and I could you not, it was only available in France. Damn it, France! But, the point is, that kind of packaging is possible. These companies have the capacity and the technology. And we can ask for it. I think another thing that we can do is demand better design of everything with the end of life planned from the beginning.

Matt Wilkins, the biologist again, and better design can mean a couple of things. Yes, it can mean finding new ways to use recycled materials like that gray head and shoulders bottle, or at the very least it can be making products really easy and efficient to recycle. Everything should be able to break down into its composite materials and separate them in a way that doesn't introduce impurities so they can be used again. And designers can and should visit merfs and mills. They should know how their products and packaging sort or don't sort, whether they break down or don't break down. Designers can also use biodegradable materials or materials like aluminum that recycle more easily than plastic. But the ideal thing is to design products, or even parts of products that don't need to be thrown away at all.

It's down to product design, and that you design things that can be repaired. Like those toothbrushes with the touchable hands. Exactly. Yeah. And cell phones that you can swap components in and out of the Berkeley professor Cato Neal says yes, companies have to design greener products But then the next step is that these shouldn't just be specialty items that should be the norm I guess people have the label on it so people who are environmentally conscious will buy it

But it turns out it might mean that people who don't care won't buy it. Well, it seems like there's kind of paradox where we're saying like, you know, don't blame the consumer. There's a whole world of influences, but also like it's up to us to harness the power of capitalism and bend the market to our will as people who spend money. Yeah, which also seems like it's putting the honest kind of back on the consumer now. Well, sometimes I also think it's not just consumers, but how we act as citizens. So listen, in the course of researching this story, I've had various freakouts. At one point, I was defiantly tossing my aluminum cans in the trash, like, wake up, people, recycling isn't real!

But that's not quite true. Like, don't do what I did. Instead, ask around and find out what is happening to the recycling where you live. This is a system that has been kept deliberately invisible for the sake of our convenience. And we need to learn how to notice it and really think about how our stuff is

made and where it's going when we throw it away. Operation National Sword could be a wake-up call, but only if everyone can hear it. Okay, you might be skeptical that design can really make a difference in recycling, but I assured you it can, not just product design, but systems design. Take for example Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. They became one of the cleanest cities in the world in only a few years by using singing garbage trucks. That full story. After this. At the top of the show, I referenced an episode that Avery reported back in 2016, we called it

separation anxiety. People really loved it, so if you missed it back then, here it is now. Enjoy. If you can recognize any piece of classical music, I bet it's this one. This is Fure Elise, written by Ludwig Van Beethoven in 1810. Maybe it reminds you of piano lessons you took when you were a kid. In my town, it was also the song the ice cream truck used to play. That's producer Avery Trouffleman.

But if you live in Taiwan, and you hear a truck rumbling down the street playing Fear Elise, it doesn't mean it's time to buy a popsicle. It means it's time to take out your trash, because this is what a garbage truck in Taiwan sounds like. This garbage truck song isn't just supposed to be cute and fun, although it is also supposed to be cute and fun. The singing garbage trucks are all a part of a completely different way of thinking about waste disposal. Completely different that is from the way that we think about it in the United States.

In the late 1990s Taiwan recycled only 5% of its waste. Today Taiwan recycles well over half. The country is now among the world's top recyclers. In what changed in this period has a lot to do with the way that the trash is collected. Okay, Fureliis isn't the only song the trucks play. In Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the trucks also play this song. That's Amadens Prayer, my Polish composer, Tecla Barozuzka Barozka. And in Taipei City, the garbage trucks just alternate between these two songs.

The tech turns to play these two songs, two music, the in Taipei City. Even the elementary school kids can sing the song. So we have brainwashed. This is Dr. Jasmine Wan, and she grew up in Taipei. Since I was a child, I knew that every time when the garbage truck comes, we were here, no, no, no, no, no. Now the singing garbage trucks are such a part of life, it's hard to imagine a time before them, but that time actually wasn't too long ago.

We used to have a lot of big dumpsters, so they were a lot of rats, mosquitoes, and things like that, and it's not good for our health. Just a couple of decades ago, Taipei residents threw their trash into massive, smelly dumpsters on the streets. Garbage would end up in piles on the sidewalk and in parks. It would fester in the heat. It was just nasty. Then Taiwan's democratization accelerated in the mid-1980s

and created this desire to tidy up. Being a modern country means being a clean country. And when you have foreign visitors coming and visiting your capital, they shouldn't think, oh, this place is dirty. This is Mary Alice Hadad, chair of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. In Taiwan, the pro-democracy movement got fully entangled with the environmental movement.

And so as all those things moved together in the late 80s, early 90s, then the pro-democracy and pro-environment agendas got onto the public consciousness. Also, the environmental movement had a practical end. Taiwan was running out of space to actually put piles of trash because it's a small island, an extremely populous small island. There's not that much space where you're gonna stick

all your junk, whereas in the United States, there has been historically a sense of the untamed, untabbed, endless wilderness. And you could just throw your junk into the wilderness and it would go away and you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. Not true in Taipei. It's a big city, but it's really clean and the subways are clean and the stores are clean and the sidewalks are clean and it's really pleasant to be there.

You'd never know that the city used to have piles of garbage littering the streets. Taipei and a number of other Taiwanese cities reduce the amount of trash by changing the way the trash got collected. Take a look at my garbage. This is my friend Aaron Newport. She lives in Taipei where the garbage truck comes five nights a week evenings like after work. It comes Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday and Saturday. In Erin's neighborhood trucks come twice in the evening at 5 and at 7. Normally you take out the trash like once a week on one of the days.

Ah, yeah, usually once. I mean, it's kind of hard sometimes to find the time to always be home at 5 or 7. Erin has to gather her own garbage and recycling and bring it out to a designated street corner and wait for the big yellow truck to come with an ear perked for the sound of furilies or maintenance prayer coming down the block. Basically, this is a binless system or a garbage canless system. Your trash goes right from your house to the truck, ideally without ever touching the street. You just have to bring out your garbage in a special bag.

I pay my garbage bill by purchasing these blue Taipei City garbage bags. These official blue garbage bags say city of Taipei on them and each is emblazoned with a stamp. I buy them from the convenience store across the street. The official blue garbage bags come in a number of different sizes ranging from three liters to 120 liters, so the more garbage you throw away, the more it'll cost you. And although Taipei residents have to pay for their garbage by the bag, recycling and

compost are free. You don't need to buy bags for them at all. You can just take out your recycling in non-official plastic bags, and you can generate as much compost and recycling as you'd like. So residents are incentivized to recycle more and throw out less. I watched Aaron sort out all of her recyclables into perfect categories. These are the cans, cans and bottles, so we have a few tea bottles. So, when Taipei, every yellow garbage truck is followed by a small, white recycling truck,

which is basically a cart full of different bins. There's a bin for plastic bottles, one for glass bottles, different metals and cans, papers and cardboard, and a compost bucket for raw food waste, and a compost bucket for cooked food waste. Type residents have to sort their recycling into all these different categories themselves. Although in the white recycling trucks there are officials and volunteers who can help instruct you about which item goes where. So Erin, her housemates and I got all of her bags of trash and different kinds of recycling sorted out and then we walked about a block down the street to wait with the rest of her neighbors who were all clutching official blue garbage bags. I've heard a lot of people gather here today and say this is maybe larger than your average

crew. And then the moment we were waiting for. There was this mad dash of people swarming to the school bus yellow garbage truck and the white recycling truck. Okay, this one, yeah, people are tossing it in. Swiftly tossing their separate recyclables and the bins, tossing their blue bags and the garbage truck and running away. It was madness, like extremely well organized madness.

That was so chaotic. In this system, for all its chaos has been working. Taipei City used to produce 3,296 tons of trash a day. Today, the city produces about 1,000 tons a day. That is, according to Chen Wichu, one of 65 officials who supervise the garbage trucks and their routes. I met him at a garbage pickup site where Jasmine Wong acted as interpreter. Every radio is a Mr. Chen. Hi. And he is a supervisor. In his district, Chen oversees 20 garbage truck

routes and all those trucks have to make sure that citizens are sorting properly. If they find garbage in the recycling bag, the people here will tell them that you cannot do that one more time, otherwise you would get ticket. And how much is the ticket? 200 US dollars. But that's the maximum. And you might think this is such a drag. There must be some people who buck the system

by tossing their trash into public trash cans. Well, there are hardly any public trash cans in Taipei. They're only in train stations or at bus stops. And those are little that come up just below your knees. So in Taipei, for the most part, if you eat a candy or buy a coffee, you just take your empty coffee cup or your candy wrapper, put it in your pocket and bring it home. It's your trash that you put in your blue bag

and bring out to the truck yourself. It's hard to imagine a system like this working here in the US. Every city here has a different method of trash pickup, but across the board, the uniting factor is that our American trash pickup system strive to be invisible. The trucks make great efforts to come when we're working, or sleeping, or trying to sleep, keeping out of the way of traffic and not disturbing the flow of the city. We take our trash and recycling out to bins or down a chute or to a dumpster, and it's gone.

We don't have to think about it. According to the EPA, Americans are cycle and compost about 34% of their trash, which is less than most rich countries. But some American cities do a lot better. San Francisco has probably the most forward recycling program in North America. This is Robert Reed. He's the representative of Recology, the company that takes care of San Francisco's waste

recycling and compost. Unlike Taipei, which has a public trash pickup system, many waste pickup services in the U.S. are private companies, and we are the customers. That's how it works with ecology, which means they've got to keep their customers happy. Our number one focus is to provide superior customer service. And our next focus is to do as much recycling as possible

and to make recycling easy and convenient for customers. Rekology has set up similar incentives to the system in Taipei, where trash pick-up is way more expensive than recycling or compost pick-up. For example, in San Francisco, recycling and compost cost about $2 a month per bin. Trash is about $26 a month per bin. But above all, Recology's system is meant to be simple and stress-free. It has to be if you want people to keep paying for your service.

People have a lot of demands in their lives, we understand that. You know, recycling might not be the very first thing. They've got to make their boss happy, they've got to pay their mortgage. Garbage recycling and composting might not always be at the top of the list. We understand that. Basically, instead of putting the onus on the citizens to separate the different kinds

of compost and recycling for themselves, Recology does the brunt of the work, sorting, so we don't have to. San Francisco, like a lot of other American cities that collect recycling, uses one catch all recycling bin. So you throw your cans, your bottles, your cardboard, all in the same place. And then all those different materials end up in a facility like Recycle Central. So this is Recycle Central.

This is the large recycling plant on Pier 96, where we sort all the materials from the blue bin, the bottles, the cans, the paper. We're gonna go inside now. The facility is massive, and it's where ecology processes most of San Francisco's recycling. You can see this great big pile of recycling. This is from this morning. This is from one day, and we're going to get this sorted out because we've got another

big pile coming in tomorrow. So we do 600 tons a day here. That 600 ton pile will wind its way up a huge surreal web of conveyor belts, where some of the 173 people on staff will separate the recyclables into 16 categories of materials, with the help of some modern recycling equipment. materials, with the help of some modern recycling equipment. So we've got magnets and we have fish ladders that separate bottles and cans from paper. They're on an angle and they temporarily suspend gravity. And to make sure everything gets precisely sorted, there's some real state-of-the-art technology,

like this apparatus that separates clear plastic from color plastic with optic sensors. Right here, the scanner is looking at the materials as they come by and when it sees a clear plastic, like a clear plastic water bottle, it hits it with a puff of air. And you can hear it. It's expensive. It costs $3 million for this machine, and it came from the Netherlands. So this system, with all its worrying, twirling conveyors and magnets and machinery and 173 employees,

it's dazzling. It makes less trash by doing more recycling. And recycling creates 10 times more jobs than landfilling or incineration. Of course, it also takes all the direct sorting out of the hands of the people who actually create the waste and charges them for the service instead. As a result, recycling in the US can be expensive. I guess that's part of the problem, like to the extent that there's pushback in recycling,

which I've seen some of in the United States now, it's often about the cost of it, and now it's very costly. of it in the United States now is often about the cost of it and that's true if you're using these single-stream processes function and it's less true if the household does the separating. That's Professor Mary Alice Hadad again. If your community wants to recycle, all that stuff needs to be separated and sorted, somehow. Whether you use a $3 million machine from the Netherlands or compel an entire sweet potato-shaped island of people to stand on the corner at night. The Taipei system is cheap and efficient because the city has conscripted their citizens as workers, and it's been successful. Taipei is a great example

of a big major global metropolitan area that did not have a good garbage collection system not that long ago and they have completely transformed and it could be an example for us all. Which is not to say we should necessarily copy Taipei's system. What's worked for them might not work for the US. But consider the American garbage truck, creeping around at dawn or during work hours, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, trying to keep trash out of sight and out of mind. You don't really pay attention to it, but everyone should pay a lot of attention. If we had to watch our garbage pile up in our homes without taking it out to the bin

and had to set aside time in our days to catch the garbage and recycling trucks coming down the street, I bet we'd produce less junk. But I also think if I had to hear this song twice a night five days a week, I would murder everybody. everybody. If you like that story, there are like 300 more episodes just like it in the archives. Even if you read the description of the title and you think, well, I'm not really into

that. Download it and listen to it anyway, because this show is about making everyday things interesting, so take the leap and go for it. 99% of visible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman, mix in tech production by Sheree Fusef, music by Sean Rihau. Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstade is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, and it fits Gerald, Taren Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Zoe Heller, the policy director of Cal recycle, Noah Omen and Randy Hartman, keep America beautiful, Lee Uwa, Greenpeace, and to Hillary Prattgo, for sounding the alarm about the problem we talked about in the first

part of this episode by sending us herzine atlasoforngarpage, we'll have a link on the website. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI at work, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too.

But if you're in that great episode from 2016, made you think, I really gotta go back and listen to more of the older shows. Well, that's good thinking. And we got you cover. All the episodes are at 99PI.org. Radio til the end. From PRX.