SciShow Tangents - Garbage

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Trash, rubbish, waste, refuse...we have a lot of words for the gunk that goes on the truck, because whether we like it or not, humans make a lot of garbage. Get comfy with some grossness as we root around in garbage's past, present, and future. We're all on a path, you guys!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreenGarbage[The Scientific Definition]Neptune ballsLaser broomWishcycling[Trivia Question]Eugene Poubelle garbage can ordinance in Francehttps://www.connexionfrance.com/article/Mag/French-Facts/Dustbins-are-named-after-French-recycling-innovatorhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poubellehttps://doodles.google/doodle/eugene-poubelles-190th-birthday/[Fact Off]Sulfur-crested cockatoos opening garbage cans because of social learninghttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe7808https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/963482https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01285-4Hermit crabs are using plastic trash as shellshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723075885https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hermit-crabs-using-trash-as-shells-across-the-world-scientists-find-180983701/[Ask the Science Couch]Waste-to-energy methods: power plants/incineration, gasification, landfill gas, anaerobic digestionhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652617317316?via%3Dihubhttps://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.phphttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780857090119500090https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5530419https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gashttps://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2804https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work[Butt One More Thing]Poop composition of gull flocks that eat garbage from landfillshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004313541730489X?via%3Dihubhttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/558545  

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary Sari Riley. Hello. And our resident everyman Sam Schultz. Hello. You guys have an important question and it is the only the kind of question that a resident everyman and education luminary can answer. If you were a bean what kind of bean would you be and do not give me a basic answer. Uh oh That last part was scary. What does that mean? Yeah, what is a basic bean? I just don't want to hear coffee.

I don't want to hear coffee bean. I wouldn't have said that. That was nowhere. That wasn't even in my top 10. I think it was a little black bean, you know? Do you think it'd be? That's a pretty basic answer. I know, but I love black beans so much.

And also, there's something about a black bean that just looks so brave to me. They're just like, here I am. I'm going to try my best to make you have a delicious dinner. That's great. I love that. Terry, top that one. Okay. Top black bean.

My first thought was that I'm a chickpea. That's the type of bean, right? It's a garbanzo bean. Yeah, garbanzo bean. Like kind of lumpy. Make good hummus. Got weird skin. Got weird skin.

A classic party. A little off-putting maybe. Can we take back the part where I said Sari had weird skin? I mean, it's true. A little off-putting, maybe. Can we take back the part where I said Sarah had weird skin? I mean, it's true. I got weird skin. I can't figure it out. We all got weird skin. It's just like constantly our cells are dying to make a membrane that coats our body and protects us from the outside.

Keeps the weather. We also, as humans, put stuff on our skin all the time. We got to protect our pasty skin from the sun. We got to moisturize all these things. We do that to garbanzo beans, too. Yeah. We keep them moisturized in that strange goo. The strange goo seems like you could put it on your face and it would make you look younger.

Yeah, garbanzo goo. Well, all the beans have goo, but I feel like garbanzo goo is a little slimier. Our new skincare line, Bean Goo. Bean. Put it on your face. Actually, that's a great brand name. I don't know what Bean Goo is, but I know it should exist. Hank, what kind of bean are you?

I mean, I want to be like a barbecue baked bean, but I know that that's not like a kind of bean. What kind of bean is that in there? Is it like a navy bean? White beans? They're not pinto. They're not black. I knew you were going to say that, there? Is it like a navy bean? White beans? They're not pinto. They're not black. I knew you were going to say that, and I think that's a perfectly acceptable answer. I think you can be a barbecue

baked bean. Is that your barbecue baked bean? That is the most basic answer, because you predicted it. You have a Furby that looks like it's made out of barbecue baked beans. I do. He's right here. I looked it up. The barbecue baked beans are made out of a kind of

bean called faciolis vulgaris which is literally called the white common bean okay that's the most basic bean it is i mean if there's anything you can say about me it's that i'm white and common the white common but which is you're just about me, it's that I'm white and common. The white common bean. You're just a little bit weird. And that's where the barbecue baked part comes in. Yeah, yeah. But like with some spice thrown in. But not too much spice.

And by spice, I mostly mean sugar. A lot of gooey sugar, yeah. I'm a gooey bean, though. Like one thing I know about me as a bean, I'm absolutely dripping. None of us really pick dry beans. I don't know if people really eat dry beans, though. Yeah, you do. You got to make them wet first.

I think. I don't think there's any, like, beans you just crunch. Yeah, they got to be cooked first. And then you can probably buy, like, soybean, like, like edamame that have been puffed up, freeze dried. That's not wet necessarily. You're eating that one just straight up. I guess they're, yeah. Well, you can only eat fresh beans.

Yeah. You know, like what's, how can we do a thing where we eat like fresh black beans? Is that possible? Where the hell do they come from? A bush? They all grow in pods. They all grow in pods! Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science

facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory! And they're also playing for some imaginary unit of currency that is entirely made up and we mostly don't mention. But when you have more of them, you do win the game. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

One man's waste is another man's leisure. One man's gross is another man's pleasure. But a lot of times trash is just trash. A bunch of atoms that had a use once, but now it seems no one wants. Maybe somewhere someone would take it, inspired to make something with it and make it, but that person cannot be found. We're out of luck, it's in the truck, and we'll bury it in the ground. Unless, perhaps, we can close the loop, work together as a group, and melt down the metal, the glass and plastic and make something new and fantastic. But maybe that's too complex.

We're out of luck. It's in the truck, especially when that costs less. Garbage. The topic for the day is garbage. Cute, but extremely grim poem. It's not that grim.

Look, I, I, I feel like, and maybe we'll get into this in this episode, but like the environmental problem that we over-focus on the most is that we bury a lot of trash in the ground. I once read that you could bury all of the world's trash in a landfill the size of London, which is big, but like not as big as I would have guessed.

That's wild. Yeah. Like I'm often struck by the horror of how many Coke bottles humanity has thrown away throughout all of human history. It's like an infinite, impossible amount. But I guess I'm not worried about it anymore. Burying them in the ground is by far the preferable solution to letting them just sort of float around and end up in the rivers and oceans and land. Sari, though, what's garbage? So the stuff that ends up in the truck is generally,

the fancy word for that is called municipal solid waste, which is colloquially known as trash or garbage, which is just like anything that humans use and then throw away. Anything from, I don't know the the box that your bean furby came in to grass clippings to like food scraps or old newspapers or used batteries or whatever that comes from yes any building that we're in you can throw these batteries in the trash are you not supposed to do that it depends on the battery i don't know i shouldn't have mentioned it because that's a separate can of worms don't know i think a lot of batteries can be

recycled but a lot of batteries also need to be disposed of more properly like you don't want to put a lithium-ion battery in a garbage trash compactor right because it might burn the trash in there and so that's where it gets kind of the definition gets a little tricky because then there's electronic waste or like liquid or gaseous wastes or like bodily waste products. Oh, well, my my is not garbage. Thank you very much. But one weird thing that I found, I think I think most people in modern day English agree that garbage and trash and rubbish and refuse and waste are all kind of interchangeable. But those used to be kind of separate terms where the word garbage originally was a cooking word. So it used to mean giblets or like the waste part of a chicken specifically as you cleaned it.

What? The head or the feet that's very specific and a garbager in uh anglo-norman dialects uh in middle english was a kitchen servant who would pluck and clean poultry and so the garbager would get rid of the garbage would the garbager maybe have like a special use for the garbage like the garbage would would be like, thanks. Thanks. I threw all of these away, but actually is taking them home to make a special soup.

Making some soup. I think maybe. I definitely, if I was a middle English servant, I would totally boil some chicken feet. Yeah. Get some gravy going. Yeah, they probably did. And there was probably a recipe for garbage at some point where it was like, take all the. Take all the garbage. Awful or awful that no one else i was in when i was in rochester new york

there was a dish called the garbage plate specifically and i had it and correct i mean i'm not saying that it's trash but i'm saying like that's the right name for what i got it was delicious but it was definitely a garbage plate. It was mostly unidentifiable, I think probably ground beef, with a set of seasonings that were far outside of my experience. Wow. Says the barbecue baked bean. Yeah. So was trash a specific thing too? so what's weird about this is once you

go further back than middle english we have no idea where any of these words came from they're all like origin uncertain origin disputed but somewhere around middle english we just had all these different words for different things so so garbage was like food, food, trash. Rubbish was like dry stuff, whether it's like building rubble or boxes or bottles or tin cans or whatnot. And again, in this mystery, people are like, maybe rubbish is related to rubble, but that word also has an uncertain origin. So i don't know they could just refer to the same thing trash there is one obscure uh possible origin there is a text from 1763 where trash refers to an old worn out shoe what like he he had worn his shoes into trashes. Oh. But we don't know where it came from. From the 16th

century onward, someone just started using the word trash. And everybody else said, yeah, that's right, that's right. It's trash. And then waste goes back a little bit further, but more in the sense of wastelands, like desolate regions. And so

waste meaning to damage or destroy or to be empty or desolate. Waste is the most serious trash word of all of them. That's the scary one. The other ones can be a little cute, but waste, toxic waste. Rubbish I think is specifically very like, Hmm.

Hmm. Yeah. I feel like it's British too. Definitely. All British trash is rubbish for sure. Yeah. I feel like it's British, too. Definitely. All British trash is rubbish, for sure. Yeah. Rubbish. In the bin.

Just put it in the rubbish bin. We're in America. We got all our slop. Trash. And garbage. Put it in the trash. In the garbage bin. In the garbage bin.

Yeah. Trash can is way, way worse than a rubbish bin. Rubbish bin is adorable. Trash can is where monsters live. I'm the trash man. Yeah, it sounds vaguely threatening when you say it that way. I'm the trash man.

They're all really fun words to say though. Garbage, trash. Garbage, waste, refuse, dregs. That's a good one. Well, now we know so much about trash. And we all, I feel like, had a fairly good idea. Look, we've got two types of garbage. We've got the type that you can turn into something useful.

And you've got the type that you can't. And those are... We don't have time to think about chicken necks anymore. We've got the wet garbage and the dry garbage. That means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. Packed into our garbage is the full breadth of human experience. So it only makes sense that as we dive into the weird world of garbage, we'll find a whole array of strange words. So today, in honor of our trash vocabulary, we're going to play the scientific definition.

I will present you with some kind of word associated with trash. And then you have to come up with an idea of what you think that word actually represents. And whoever comes closest, according to my judgment, will win a point or a Hank buck or whatever it is that we've got. A Hank cent. You guys are playing for Hank cents today. Inflations run wild. We've got hyper. Maybe it's deflation. Now a whole Hank cent is worth a Hank buck.

Hey, we're in the money. We're 100 times richer than we were before. I've heard that deflation is very bad, though. So whatever else is going on in the Sideshow Tangents economy is terrible. But this is good. That bubble's going to pop. That's, I feel like, what people say all the time about economies the psychotangents bubble is ready to pop and by pop i mean tell your friends about us

the first word that you have to tell me what it means uh is neptune balls that could be anything that could be it sounds like Orbeez but I'll tell you that it has something to do with trash it does sound like Orbeez I mean could like something that comes out of a fish be trash Neptune balls are something that comes out of a shark that just gloops it just gloops onto the beach

and it's no good for anybody to look at yeah yeah yeah like it's a pearl made from when a shark eats plastic and it's like it forms in the shark's belly and then they puke it out and in the middle there's a rubber duck but all around it it's just like shark goo. Yeah, it's shark poo. A Neptune ball.

That's what it is. Yeah. That's Neptune's problem, not a land god. I'm gonna say it's like when Walt Disney was coming up with the future zone of the park. Love this. I feel like in the way that Epcot was supposed to be the future technology, he was trying to invent the next stage of trash can

and came up with a spherical vessel called the Neptune Ball. And it was really functionally no different. Maybe it had a pneumatic tube or something like that. But it was just a vessel. Yeah. It had a pneumatic tube for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Disney and his Neptune Balls. What an insane guess that was. Both of your guesses were top tier and unhinged. And I loved it. And Sam's is by far closer. All right. Incredible. So that you get one Hank scent. Neptune balls are bundles of seagrass that trap plastic in the Mediterranean Sea.

Oh, no. The species Poseidonia oceana has long leaves and they can form meadows. But the shed leaves can bundle together with dead rhizomes of the plant. And those bundles end up washing ashore as Neptune balls. Between 2018 and 2019, researchers did a bunch of research on Neptune balls and loose leaves of this plant. They found 600 bits of plastic per kilogram in the loose leaf balls, and the Neptune balls had around 1,500 bits per kilogram. So seagrasses might be providing a way to take plastic garbage out of the Mediterranean Sea.

Oh, good. Okay. That's actually good news. I take back my... You can just take it and put it in, bury it deep in the ground. Throw it in the trash can. Number two. Can you tell me what a laser broom is?

Well, isn't that obvious? Yeah, maybe. A laser broom cleans the big old circle that we shoot the atoms through. Pow, pow, pow. What is that thing? The thing under France. The Large Hadron Collider.

Okay, okay, okay. A laser broom. They shoot it through, sweep out all the dust. The Large Hadron Collider. Okay, okay, okay. They shoot it through, sweep out all the dust. Particles. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, that is in the same vein. I think it's something that's on the International Space Station or something.

And you got asteroids, but the tiny ones, the little rubble. And sometimes you just need that to be gone so your sensors are clear and you got laser brooms for that yeah yeah sari that's definitely closer as you get a hankson the laser broom is an idea uh to clear out space debris using lasers uh it's been explored since at least the 1990s and various proposals have been put out there to advance the idea. Relatively simple, shoot lasers at space debris so that the debris won't collide with satellites. Now, the laser isn't meant to vaporize the debris entirely. That might actually just create smaller bits of debris that would cause even more problems. might actually just create smaller bits of debris that would cause even more problems.

Instead, the goal is to hit a little bit of the debris so that a little bit vaporizes and it does it enough to like give it some drag so that it can fly through these Earth's atmosphere and then burn up. So you have to like hit it in the right spot so that it's vaporization will like shoot it in the right direction. That sounds hard. Decelerate it. How do you know where to shoot it? Well, there's a lot of challenges.

Like, for example, figuring out how to deploy the lasers. So basing them on Earth would be cheap, but it's hard to target things up in space with ground-based lasers. That's not great when you're trying to make sure you don't hit things with lasers. And there's a fear that a laser broom could then

be, once you got it up there, used as a weapon. It's just like, no, we're just putting lasers in space for cleanup. It's just space lasers for good. And then it's like, actually, space lasers! It's boring science stuff. You wouldn't understand. Don't worry about it.

It's called a broom, guys. It's just a broom. Have you ever seen anyone hurt someone else with a broom? And then flash forward to Scythe Show Tangents in like 2,000 years. And Sari in 2,000 years is like, well, brooms used to be the word we used for things that swept the floor. But then in the 2020s. It converted and now it's what we call our most devastating weapon. All right. Your final word

is wish cycling. That's nice. That sounds like it's going to really be dark to me for some reason. It involves the corpses of very small bugs somehow. In what way? What do they do?

They fall in a hole. Okay. Then? Then some more. Then little baby bugs are laid on their corpses. That's the wish part.

So there's a big hole full of dead bugs yeah then with eggs on maybe bugs are born there yeah wish cycling i was hoping that that extra time to think would get me something good i wish cycling is when you have um a piece of trash that you love so much like it's like one of those things it's one of those objects that you love so much. It's one of those things, it's one of those objects that you don't want to get rid of and that your dad probably would be like, no, it's still good. It'll have a use again in 30 years. Except this was in the Victorian age. It was like a swap meet

of really old people who had their garbage stored up the hoarders of the Victorian era who then did a swap meet where they were like, I love this. It's going to be good someday. And they'll trade it. Yeah. And they just like looked at each other's trash and they were like,

actually that's trash. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's a great idea to just like bring your stuff that you can't let go of to other people who will say, I'll keep this forever. And then you all just take each other's stuff and throw it in the garbage. Yes. Smart.

Well, I'd say that Sari was closer on that one. Neither of you got it particularly close, but it does at least involve trash and wishing. Okay. Okay. Okay. We're cycling is a tendency for people to put things in the recycling bin in the hopes that it would get recycled and that it's recyclable without actually knowing if it is, or even like thinking it probably isn't recyclable.

So you, you toss it in there being like, I'm a good person, I guess, but it's actually a problem. So Rebecca Allman tried to trace the origins of wish cycling. And the first occasion she could find was a 2015 article, The Word by Eric Roper about the recycling industry where wish cycling was creating a strain on recycling programs. The term started out as a way to refer

to a consumer behavior, but Altman found that over time, wish cycling also became a way to refer to a systems level issue where even items that are labeled as recyclable will not end up being recycled because the systems are not there and there's not demand for that product. So we say recyclable, but it's not recyclable. This is the case with a lot of plastics. It's very hard, it turns out, to recycle plastic. And plastic isn't one thing. I think it's easy in the paper, metal, plastic. I think metals look different enough, or we have more shared vocabulary around copper versus lead versus other things. But plastic, we call everything plastic and it all looks like plastic it's very hard to tell the difference chemically

yeah but like on a molecular level you can't recycle some because of the way that it formed or because of the way those bonds break and reform with various levels of stability and i think that's harder to get across in a sciencey communication way whereas aluminum you just heat it up and all the plastic and paint that's on the aluminum just burns off and then you get the metal back well what the hell are we gonna do i don't know man i think probably use less single-use plastics uh i would that's like the seems to be the thing to do i think that the problem is not that we aren't recycling it effectively. I think the problem is that it is too easy to use it once.

See, it was dark. I knew it was going to be dark. You were right that it was dark, but you did not get the point for that one anyway. Because it wasn't so dark as to be a grave of gnats with a bunch of bug eggs in it. A bug hole. Yeah, actually, there is a word for that. It's bunch of bug eggs in it. A bug hole. A bug hole. Yeah, actually, there is a word for that. It's called a bug hole, Sam.

As you well know. Shoot. All right. Sari's got two to Sam's one. Next up, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them. An award Hank, since any way I see fit.

To decide who goes first, though, I got a trivia question. The French word for garbage is, as far as I can tell, poo bell. That's your best accent yet. that's your best accent yet uh i'm gonna guess that it's not pronounced exactly like that the name refers to eugene an administrator in paris who decided that landlords in paris were required to install receptacles for their tenants trash in. In what year did this ordinance go into effect? It's named after a guy.

That sucks. He's the trash man. Mr. Poopel. He's the trash man. They probably didn't want it. Mr. Poopel. Gosh, I don't even know. 18-10.

I don't know. I don't know either. I know either i was gonna guess like 1915 like late okay uh i think sari is closer it was 1883 which definitely that seems late. It is hard to remember that we're all on a path and Okay. And a hundred years before I was born they didn't have trash cans in the French

language. That is a little weird. There wasn't a word for trash can trash cans in the French language. That's a little weird. There wasn't a word for trash can because they were like, where do you put the trash? Not in the trash can. You put it outside. You put it in the ravine. You put it in the

river. We're all on a path, you guys. I'm happy to be as far down the path as we are on down the path and we will continue getting further down the path sari you get to go first so humans throw away a lot of food waste into our poo bells and everything so i think there are probably anecdotes across all kinds of communities from all kinds of people about some local critter digging through and eating garbage. And sometimes scientists decide to do research on it.

From what I could tell from a press release, Dr. Barbara Klump, who's a behavioral ecologist, saw a video of a sulfur-crested cockatoo opening up a plastic garbage bin in an Australian suburb. Like one of those gray rectangular ones with a flip top lid so it can be picked up and dumped into a truck. And she was like, that's weird. Or more precisely, I thought it was such an interesting and unique behavior, which is press release code for that's weird. That's weird. And started collecting data from people who live near Sydney or Wollongong, Australia.

So this team used an online survey over 2018 and 2019 to ask if anyone had seen these cockatoos in action. And after going through almost 1400 reports across almost 500 suburbs, they honed in on 338 reports from 44 suburbs that described the specific garbage bin opening behavior they were looking for. And after mapping these accounts and doing some statistical analyses, they think it's likely that this behavior spread via social learning from around three suburbs before 2018 to 44 total reported by late 2019. So in other words, these cockatoos are social creatures. So they think that these birds are teaching each other and or their offspring how to get the good garbage bread.

And in addition to the citizen science, they had on the ground work, too. They identified four garbage bin opening hotspots is what they called them, where for like in summer-ish 2019, June through August, the researchers marked 486 cockatoos with dyes and took biological information like their sex, age, weight, and feather samples. And then during August 4th through 23rd, 2019, four teams of two researchers went to these hotspots on every garbage pickup day to try and film as many cockatoos as possible. And they got 160 full garbage bin opening clips, including some of these marked birds. And this allowed them to compare the garbage bin opening techniques between birds. So seeing if one bird would repeat its behavior or comparing between different birds across different areas. They broke all those behaviors down into what they called elements that formed a sequence. So an element is like holding their head upside down or using their foot and their bill at the same time. And it turns out that

geographically distant cockatoos had less similar opening sequences, basically indicating that there are garbage subcultures as they're teaching each other and they have different techniques spread by region. And this was published in Julyuly 2021 and then they published a september 2022 study about the ways that humans are trying to like thwart cockatoos uh from opening garbage bins and and the cockatoos are learning to like push off bricks uh but they're stuck by sticks or other things like that so this is just this research group's thing now and i love it it's very good let him eat garbage look at him they're trying so hard it looks so cute opening it i just can't help but think like if one could talk and we were like wow you can open a garbage can that's amazing it would be like uh

yeah whatever yeah my mom taught me yeah can they tell if the if the garbage flipping birds are happier and healthier than their non-garbage flipping counterparts? They usually are stronger because it's hard to flip a garbage lid. They're working out. Yeah, they're working out. They're more often like the males

and the more dominant males in the little bird society. So going out to your 9-5 flipping garbage lids it just looks so satisfying to be able to flip that big lid there's like a children's book story here somewhere like the first garbage flipping bird who was like i saw a person do that and i think my neck is that strong i think it's like ratatouille, but just garbage. Just garbage birds. And cockatoos.

That's not really that similar to Ratatouille. What they don't say is that actually the cockatoos are underneath the humans' hats and they're making them lift the lids themselves. All the garbage men start wearing big chef's hats. Everybody's like, why are you doing that? Really big though. Really that? Really big, though. Really tall. Really big. And only in one suburb, though, because it's got to be like one group of cockatoos that figured it out.

For now. Yeah. For now. Soon, the garbage men will be wearing giant chef's hats. The world's over. We're on a path. Started with the poo bells. Then it'll

be the cockatoos taking over. Trash problem's fixed, man. We just need more cockatoos. We need to train them to eat plastic. Sam, what do you got? Sometimes in life you pick the causes that you stand up for and sometimes those causes pick you. In my case,

somewhere along the way, I became inextricably linked with the plight of the hermit crab. I really only just mentioned them like one time in my whole entire life. No more than anybody mentions anything. But now just for some reason, every now and then it comes back up. I'm hermit crab guy. So I spent a few years trying to reject this responsibility that was placed upon my shoulders because frankly, I don't really think about hermit crabs all that often. But in the last few months, I've changed my tune. A few episodes back, I learned that microplastics can mess up the decision making skills of hermit crabs. And this week, I discovered another article

covering something equally as heartbreaking that has led me to decide that it is my fate to stand up for these little dudes i'm all in on the hermit crabs now so a 2024 study out of the university of warsaw has identified instances of members of 10 out of the 16 known species of terrestrial hermit crabs using plastic trash as shells instead of the traditional shell. So this doesn't mean that a majority of hermit crabs are doing this, but individuals in most of the species of hermit crabs that we know about spread all over the world have been seen using trash shells. So the team gathered this research using something that they called iEcology, which basically means that they combed through a few hundred pictures,

or maybe a few thousand pictures of hermit crabs uploaded to places like Google Images and YouTube and iNaturalist, and they found 386 pictures of crabs in trash cells and then determined the species of what those crabs were and where in the world they were. And though this wasn't traditional fieldwork, it really helped to shed some light on the scope of this problem. So previous scientific literature, at least according to these researchers, had turned up only two terrestrial species using trash cells and found examples of only 10 total crabs doing it. So they didn't look into the reason that hermit crabs are doing this too much, but they did provide some possible explanations.

Like hermit crabs with more novel shells have more success when finding a mate is one of them other research has found that plastic smells like food to hermit crabs which i think we've also talked about so hermit crabs might just want to live in a house you know it smells like a some tasty food all the time and another possibility is that there just aren't as many sea creatures that make the kind of shells that hermits hermit crabs need due to climate change, which is sad. But it's also possible that the hermit crabs are being very smart and not being victims of humans dumping trash in the ocean. So plastic is pretty strong and it doesn't weigh as much as a shell does. So it might be beneficial for them to pick a plastic shell.

Or because there's so, this one's kind of sad, because there's so much trash on the beaches all around the world it might even be the best camouflage is to just look like a piece of trash because a predator isn't going to pick up like a toothpaste cap and think oh there's going to be food in here they'll think that's a piece of trash but that is in my opinion i think sort of optimistic because i'd again like to mention that microplastics have been found to impact hermit crab decision-making. And there are pictures in this paper, and these guys don't look like they're making the best choices, in my opinion. They're just crammed.

They're really crammed in some pretty weird places. Yeah, I like to think, here's what I like to think. I like to think that before plastics, these hermit crabs would never find a shell. And so they're like the losers of the bunch. And but like otherwise, like in a normal world, they'd just die. But in this world, they get at least something. That really leads me nicely to my next little point, which is that even though these pictures are cute and kind of a sad way, beach trash does have a really negative impact on hermit crabs because a 2019 study of one specific island's hermit crab population found that half a million hermit

crabs just on this island got stuck and died inside of garbage every year so no okay so good for them take it all back so now we know it's a worldwide issue and the next step i think is what they were talking about was this worldwide census of hermit crab shells to figure out just you know how screwed these guys are so sorry again hermit crabs you guys figure out just, you know, how screwed these guys are. So sorry again, hermit crabs. You guys think that we could help them do a worldwide census of hermit crabs? Well, no, because we live in Montana. Sari maybe could. Well, no, I don't think that we would do it.

I think that we would ask people. We would help people be citizens, scientists for hermit crabs. And Sam Schultz, you could be like the main hermit crab influencer and you could take your mantle and you could get on a literal hermit crab sized horse or possibly a horse sized hermit crab ride into battle and be the champion for the

hermit crabs and get the citizen science going people are going to go to the beaches they're going to take the pictures they're going to upload them to hermitcrabsam.com we're going to fix this this is my life's calling we just figured it out live on the radio you're going to fix this. This is my life's calling. We just figured it out live on the radio.

You're going to be on like a parade float? Yeah. A parade float that's got a hermit crab not the size of a horse but the size of a horse that's the size of

a big elephant. Yeah. I don't know where we're going to find this. The size of a horse that's the size of an elephant. I think I got't know where we're going to find this. It's the size of a horse that's the size of an elephant. I think I got that one perfect the first try. I feel like you're really focusing on a strange part of this.

Things all about the mode of transportation. And then the rest is up to you, Sam. Okay, well, I like this. I think this is going to be my new life's purpose. so that should probably means i should probably win the the round the fact off huh pretty big day for me uh let's see i have to decide between our two facts we had sulfur crested cockatoos opening garbage cans because of social learning and we got hermit crabs using plastic trash as shells, and it's a little adorable, but also deeply sad. Sam,

I'm going to give it to you. I think we have to. Even though Sarah was ahead coming into it, I think we have to give it to Sam, because he is the true champion of the hermit crab. And now it's time to ask the science couch, where we ask a question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds.

Mooney Riot on Twitter asked, is there any environmentally friendly way to convert garbage into energy? And then Sid, just a guy on Discord, asked similarly, I've seen a great deal of positive information about using trash to generate power. Why does the public at large seem so opposed to this process? I mean, it's trickier than just burning fuel so like

methane is one chemical and so you can you know exactly what's going to come out of the smokestack you can scrub it you can you know you like it's it's a fairly clean burning fuel trash has a bunch of stuff trash got all those phosphorus and that nitrogen and all this stuff that's in food waste and trees and etc now the good thing is that it's carbon neutral so uh everything like most of the stuff that you're going to burn was like grown so like the flammable things are like banana peels and trees and yard waste and stuff so all that stuff took carbon out of the atmosphere and we're just putting it back in. It would get back in just by normal decay. But it

doesn't make it go away. And I think the people are opposed to it because it can add pollutants to the air nearby them. I think that's the big concern. And that is hard to avoid because it is a dirtier fuel. It's more chemicals, more atoms, more kinds of atoms all mixed together getting hot and creating compounds that are not the ones that you wanted to create.

How does that align with reality, Sari? Yeah, I think so. So waste to energy plants are what they're generally called are the places where we burn municipal solid wastes and different countries do it a different amount. But yeah, for basically for that reason, you can have various amounts of sorting before you burn it. You can have various amounts of post processing afterwards to make it safer, like the ash and the smoke and whatnot that you then have to dispose of somewhere. And I don't know about public opinion, but I think it's such a thorny issue because it's the intersection of so many different things of governmental policy and taxes and the available space you have. So the US has a lot of landfills because we have a lot of available space. And so it's cheaper and easier to like prep a giant hole in the ground with aligning to prevent the garbage juice uh which is called leachate from seeping into the groundwater forgot

about garbage juice that's an important part too so so dealing with the garbage juice by sealing it in and then monitoring the gases that come off of it and either using them like that's another way to do it is like harnessing that landfill gas which is usually a combination of methane and carbon dioxide and turning that into fuel as opposed to just like letting it leak into the atmosphere but in the u.s we have a lot of space for landfills and so countries where there isn't that space to build big pits and do processing that way, then it's cheaper or more incentivized to figure out other ways to turn waste into energy. So it's like no matter what country system you look at, it's based on all these various pressures. It's based on all these various pressures. And anything that we're looking at for, I guess, a more environmentally friendly way,

there's gasification that people are getting more interested in, which is instead of combustion. So burning the fuel, which is in this case garbage, turns it into ash. And it provides heat which um heats water into steam and then that steam turns a turbine which is like fairly common to how we we generate electricity but the gasification heats up the the waste product and then turns it into a combustible gas so then the gas produced is the fuel itself and then like some solid off product. But the problem with that is it hasn't been done a lot. And so people are nervous to invest in that technology. It also takes a lot of energy to heat something up without setting it on fire and to like have chemical reagents that allow those everything that's in garbage to be broken down into this like new fuel. everything that's in garbage to be broken down into this like new fuel um and so it's just like i think the energy into energy out ratios where you you like ideally want to put less energy in than you're getting out to make it a favorable process makes it tricky but it's just like it's a very like complicated issue is the is why it's hard to get people behind it yeah it's not it's

not easy but i think in a lot of situations, it just ends up being maybe more trouble than it's worth. I, again, I'm not super worried about the burying of the trash. So maybe I should be more worried about it because the trash has a bunch of bad stuff in it that you don't want leaching into the groundwater.

But at the same time, you don't want to burn that stuff because then it's going to be in the atmosphere. So you only burn the trash that's not going to be toxic to burn. Can't win with this stuff, huh? You know, we got solar panels. We got wind turbines. Maybe we're going to get some good geothermal.

I love the Earth's energy. It's got so much of it. And it's right below our feet. By right below, I mean pretty far down. But it's there. The way you're wiggling your fingers is very supervillain-esque, don't know what what are you gonna do with all this energy we're gonna drill down into the earth we're just gonna make a volcano we're gonna put a big thing on top of the volcano and we're gonna use it to power our space laser and we're just gonna call it a broom. It's going to be the most powerful weapon. I'm going to carve my name

into the moon. Well, that's nice. They'll stop calling it the moon. They'll call it Hank. Because it'll say Hank on it. It's a full Hank tonight. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter and on threads at SciShowTangents

where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at CodySmileyLAT on Twitter, the Space A on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your question for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that.

First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents. Become a patron. You get access to things like our Discord and our bonus episodes. Shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stemfert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bazaio.

Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunemenish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, a mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Gulls are notoriously not picky about what they eat. And a 2017 study used citizen science data to estimate that 1.4 million gulls are chowing down in landf phosphorus and 240,000 kilograms of nitrogen where they roost, which are important nutrients.

But an overload of them in one place can cause algal blooms that harm animal life. On the other hand, these gulls also prevent about a teragram of methane emissions from landfills each year because of all the carbon in the garbage that they eat. So for better or for worse, human garbage dumps are a big part of the nutrient cycle and we're just starting to quantify how that's fascinating we need more seagulls and birds birds are the answer to all of this yeah we don't you don't the the seagulls are like why cockatoos take a break just come over here yeah these are they dump them out it's already open over here yeah they don't stay locked forever I bet Australian landfills do have a bunch of cockatoos at them

yeah they probably do