Something You Should Know - What Colors Do To You & Recycling: Does It Really Help?

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, does it really matter which shampoo you use or are they pretty much all the same? Then color. Why is color so important? And do you see the same colors I see? I think if you could put your brain in my skull, but see something with my eyes, then it seems probably true that you would go, oh, you were calling that red. That's wild. That's not how I think of red if I think of my

Starting point is 00:00:56 own idealized red. Also, what just might be in your basement or attic that could be worth money. And what you probably don't know about recycling, including what cannot be recycled. So for a plastic carryout bag, those shouldn't be in your curbside bins. They tend to clog the recycling machinery, get wrapped around other valuable items, and the facilities have to pay to shut down the line and cut out all the plastic films. All this today on Something You Should Know. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Shop now in-store or online at bestbuy.ca exclusions apply something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should I'm going to start today with something I've been thinking about lately. Every time I get in the shower and I see there, we have multiple bottles of shampoo in the shower, and I wonder, is there really any difference? Because some of those bottles cost a lot more than some of those other bottles. So I looked into it, and the answer as to whether or not all shampoos are the same

Starting point is 00:02:27 is it depends on what you want from your shampoo. If, like me, all you want is clean hair, then it turns out it doesn't really matter much which shampoo you do, according to a study. In the study, samples of unwashed hair were collected and tested by washing them in a range of shampoos and then looking at them under a microscope to look at the surface of the hair and see if any dirt or oil remained.

Starting point is 00:02:56 And the study found that all the hair samples, regardless of which shampoo was used or how much it cost, were equally clean after washing. However, some people like a thicker shampoo. Interestingly, thicker products do not work any better than the thinner brands, yet the general belief is that there is a connection between the thickness of the shampoo and the quality of the shampoo, and that encourages the shampoo industry to thicken their products. Well, those thickening compounds cost money,

Starting point is 00:03:29 and that increases the price of the shampoo. In general, though, if what you want is clean hair, pretty much shampoo is shampoo, and getting a cheap one can save you quite a bit of money over the long run. And that is something you should know. Color is a big deal to people. We agonize over what color to paint a room or what color carpet to put down on the floor. We notice people's eye color, hair color, a beautiful blue sky, a pretty red dress, autumn in New England. The world is full of color and we notice it and interact with those colors all the time.

Starting point is 00:04:13 But why? Why is color so important? And do you see the same colors I see? How do colors affect people? Are there colors in front of us that we simply cannot see, but other creatures can? Adam Rogers has taken a look at color and our relationship to it. Adam is senior correspondent at Wired and author of a book called Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. Hey, Adam, welcome. Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me. So why is color so important to people? Why do we notice it? Why do we incorporate it into all areas of our life, from, you know, the color on the walls, to the flowers in the garden, to everything? I mean, color is a big deal. Why? Yeah, that's fascinating, isn't it? Some of it is

Starting point is 00:05:06 straight-ahead aesthetics, of course, where we attach meanings to colors that, you know, that are completely culturally dependent. Different colors mean different things to different people, and they mean things to individuals. They have colors that are our favorites for some reason that have to do with our personal experiences and what we liked as a child and what we saw as a kid. But also, I think it's something much deeper than that. All living things use color as information, as well as something aesthetic. We learn things about our environment from it. And, you know, it's really easy when you get into evolutionary neuroscience to tell yourself just so stories about like, oh, you know, color vision evolved so that our primate ancestors could see red fruit against the green background of trees or something.

Starting point is 00:05:48 It's probably not true because primates don't actually see color that well. Ours is our color vision is kind of a fluke. But the point I'm trying to make is that color has what a lot of different fields will use this word and they'll mean a lot of different things by it has salience. It has importance. We glean information about our environment around us from it. And so you can imagine that there's kind of some inbuilt process in our minds and our cognition that make color a way that we infer meaning about the world. Is color really that individual or are there colors that pretty much everyone likes or everyone

Starting point is 00:06:23 dislikes? So there's a ton wrapped up in that question. Some of it is, what colors do people, a lot of people like? So even if you do surveys of like favorite colors, favorite in terms of the things that we find most pleasing, that we would, as you say, have the cars painted that color. It's hard to know how much of those are revealed preferences and how much of those are marketed. Color has been so heavily marketed and been such an important piece of the way the stuff that human beings consume and buy, especially starting with the kind of late 19th century and into the 20th and 21st. As marketers became more and more sophisticated about trying to get people to buy new consumables, when the technology behind those consumables doesn't change that often? How do you try to convince somebody that something is new?

Starting point is 00:07:10 The thing that they arrived at in the early 20th century was you could make it in a different color. So there's some marketing push there. The most popular color, for example, for cars, if you just go by what color cars bought the most, is white. And it has been for years. And I find that really surprising, but I also think it's possible

Starting point is 00:07:30 that's because a lot of them go to fleets. So it's hard to know whether that's because people really like white cars or it's because fleets buy white cars because they're cheaper or easier to clean or easier to hose off or whatever, right? So it's hard to know which ones are more popular for people than others.

Starting point is 00:07:48 And of course, those change over time. Every year, Pantone names the color of the year, you know, and that's supposed to tell us something about what the national mood is or something. But I'm not sure that it really does as much as it says something about just trends. And, you know, when somebody says, oh, websites, the color for your app should be blue, because people find that trustworthy. Is that true? Is Is blue trustworthy or is it cold? I don't know. But I do think that the deeper question there too is whether when we talk about those colors, whether if I say blue and you say blue, if we're talking about the same blue. So it may well be that even if we both have a color that we'd identify in our heads as something that we find aesthetically pleasing, that we're both referring to kind of a different thing. And in fact the the the way the mind builds color and

Starting point is 00:08:29 then creates a language around those colors is so complicated and so hard to understand that entire chunks of the fields of linguistics and neuroscience have been built to try to both use color as a tool to understand the brain and then also understand the brain better to try to figure out how color works. Yeah, well, I imagine too that it makes a difference what the color is for. You might want a color on your wall, but that doesn't mean that that's a great color for your car. I mean, it really depends on the application. That's such a key insight because when researchers who understand color and understand information theory and understand neuroscience go and, for example, interview people in their own languages and try to figure out which colors they have names for and which colors they don't.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Just as a side example, in English, there's only one basic color term for blue. A basic color term is a word that only means the color. In English, we talk about blue, but in Russian, they have two words, two basic color terms for blue, one referring to what an English speaker would call light blue and another one referring to what an English speaker would call dark blue. Why do they have different words for those colors? What level of information do they get from having those different words and why do they need different amounts of information to talk about color? Something I've always wondered, and I think everybody has wondered, is are there colors that we just don't see? That other creatures, other species can see colors that we can't even imagine? There are a lot of living things out there that can see way more colors than we do.

Starting point is 00:10:03 We're actually pretty terrible at seeing colors in a lot of living things out there that can see way more colors than we do. We're actually pretty terrible at seeing colors in a lot of respects. Insects and birds tend to see into the ultraviolet, and they see those as colors, things that are totally invisible to us. And a lot of reptiles can perceive infrared, a wavelength that we mostly just perceive as heat, but they see it as a color. But their experience of the colored world is totally different than ours, which I think is super exciting. How do we know that? How do we know that they can see colors that we can't see? If we can't see them, how would we know anybody else can see them? Yeah, isn't that frustrating? One of the ways is that you can figure out what their photoreceptors are, what peak wavelengths their photoreceptors are tuned to. So for example, honeybees, you can you can dissect their eyes. You can figure out that they actually see a lot less of the things that we would call reds.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And they see a lot more of the into the ultraviolet and spend more time in kind of the blue green part of the universe. I talked to a researcher who studies butterflies, who spends a lot of time because the butterfly eye is a super weird eye and they see colors that we don't. Which which you can imagine because butterfly wings have all those different colors too. It's got to be doing something for them. And you can, you can put out like test strips of colors that they'll respond differently to, even though the human eye can't perceive the differences in them. I've always wondered if the red I see is the red you see, that if I were looking at a red rose, but looked at it through your eye, would I see something entirely different than what I think of as a red rose?

Starting point is 00:11:34 Isn't that enraging, that problem? In some respects, there's no chance that the reds could be the same, because the meat that you think with is different than the meat that I think with and see with. And so they'd have to be different. And what we've just agreed to do, you and I both agreed to say, like, yeah, that's red, right? You think that's red. I think that's red. Okay, cool. Whatever you're seeing there is red. Whatever I'm seeing there is red.

Starting point is 00:11:55 So in that respect, it doesn't matter because we've linguistically agreed to call that red. It's only a problem. And this gets to be a problem. You see this as a problem with any, let's say, any couple of people who live in a house together trying to choose what color to paint the living room walls, as you've said, is one of them will say, well, that's more of a blue-green. And the other one will say, I don't know, I think that's more of a greenish-blue. And that's such a subtle distinction. I think about that a lot because there were two Crayola crayons in that 64 pack that we

Starting point is 00:12:26 grew up with that there was a blue green and a green blue. And I used to try to puzzle over like what made one a blue green and one a green blue. And there is a difference. And you might even be able, you and I might be able to look at those two paint swatches or whatever and say, yeah, those are different colors. And in fact, like before this book, I wrote a book about, about booze and some of the science of alcohol. And one of the differences between a master sommelier and a schmo like me who likes a glass of wine, but, but isn't a, isn't a pro at tasting notes is that the sommelier knows a lot more words to describe different

Starting point is 00:13:00 tastes. And that's a really hard problem too. It's the same object metaphor problem that colors have where the words are trying, well, you know, that tastes like strawberries. What does a strawberry taste like? Well, it tastes like strawberries. It's hard to, you can tell you what the molecule is that's strawberry tasting, but the only way that you know what that molecule is, is that it tastes like strawberries. And similarly with colors, if you and I are both talking about red, and if I say, well, what color is that though? It's like, well, it's red, it's reddish. Are they different reds? Maybe, but we're going to just agree for the sake of argument, I suppose, that we'll both call it red

Starting point is 00:13:32 and move on. I think if you saw them, if we could somehow like, you could put your brain in my skull, but see something with my eyes, then it seems probably true that you would go, oh, you were calling that red. That's wild. That's not how I think of red if I think of my own idealized red. Yeah, but would I say that's my blue, or would I say, geez, I've never seen that before? You probably don't say that's my blue. That range of difference isn't really there. I will say, if you do a test where you shine a colored light into a person's eye, and you give them controls of the knobs for what light that is, and you tell them to choose the perfect yellow, so you say, okay, tune the knobs, so not greenish and not bluish, but yellow, just yellow, a perfect yellow.

Starting point is 00:14:26 People, and you do that with hundreds of different people, you give them a chance to do that, they'll all choose about the same yellow. But if you ask them to do the same thing with a green, so not yellowish and not bluish, but green, getting into that grue region of space again, their answers vary. It's a huge variation. So even right there, you can see that some colors maybe we'd have more agreement on than other colors. And that's due to just quirks of the system. Color is the topic on the table. And my guest is Adam Rogers, senior correspondent at Wired and author of the book Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal

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Starting point is 00:15:49 because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug. The play is pretend. The skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. So, Adam, we hear things like, you know, this is a calming color this is an anxiety provoking color as if colors generally have an effect on people do they or you know there was that thing about you know if you paint prisons pink that um you know that calms prisoners down what about that

Starting point is 00:16:23 yeah that's all sometimes that's all. Sometimes that's described as chromotherapy as well, although they'll try to use it for therapeutic reasons. I will say my read of that science is that no, it's probably not true. But I will say like a thing that maybe would make you at least intuitively figure that's probably not right are the different cultural uses for colors, the different cultural symbolisms? And just as a straight example, like the color white in some Asian cultures is much more associated with funerals and grief than it is with the sort of purity and virginity that it often is in Western cultures, right? So totally different color meanings. Even in North American culture until the sort of late 1800s, all the symbolism about pink was masculine and very macho. And then it sort of transitioned in the late 19th and into a room that is earth tone, that that's a more

Starting point is 00:17:26 calming, natural environment, as opposed to walking into a room that's painted bright pink, which is going to be more shocking and alarming, that humans, because we are of this earth, earth tones calm us down. And is that all gobbledygook you used a couple of interesting words there you're talking about sort of earth tones and being being sort of darker and more subtle and then a bright pink um but but brightness and saturation um and and kind of value of color that is how how much color is there and how bright is it are actually different phenomena of color than the hue itself, than the wavelength of the color. It's harder to imagine a bright earth tone, I guess. So it may well be that it's sort of the amount of light and the amount of saturation that we're talking about

Starting point is 00:18:16 rather than the color itself. I think probably you and I would agree that if you and I walked into a room that was all painted in many, many very bright shades of pink, we would find that much more unsettling than if we were in a room that was painted with earth tones. But I also think that that's because of our acculturation to what we think the meanings of colors are. And that in fact, even within my lifetime, a room painted in avocado green and orange would have been seen as a very calming and fashionable and relaxing living space, whereas if I walked into it now, I would find it kind of aggressively ugly. It does seem that humans have a unique relationship with color in the sense that we value color. We attach value to certain colors. We want to be surrounded by certain colors. We admire other there. And that has been

Starting point is 00:19:25 true of human beings since we turned into human beings, since we became those humans. And you see that on the coast of South Africa in a cave called Blombos, where there've been a lot of really tremendous archaeological finds, finding an abalone shell. So this would be tens of thousands of years old, an abalone shell. And inside the shell, they also found signs of both ochre and trabecular bone, which is the kind of bloody, fatty bone, like you might spongy stuff like inside the spine. And the hypothesis here is that this was a workshop. They were making ochre into a pigment, into a paint, essentially, that you could color a cave wall with or even your own body, a person's body with. So that, you know, that predates almost every other technology, trying to be able to make natural stuff into a color that we can use and change. There's been an argument in kind of aesthetic circles and philosophical circles for

Starting point is 00:20:17 since the Greeks really started this argument about which was in some way, respect more important form or color whether one of those things whether the shape of things and the patterns of them were somehow more true or more authentic gave you a better perspective of what something was in the world or what the world looked like than colors it's like truth and beauty like that that old philosophical question too you form without color you get meaning from it for sure i mean everybody has has watched a black and white movie and understood the emotions and the story that was conveying um and color without form you can you get feelings and that

Starting point is 00:20:56 almost an almost psychedelic vibe of of colors changing and that will make your brain do stuff you'll you'll feel like you're present somewhere but But it's the two together, in form, colored, in color form, that give you a more a room that's painted all black, you have a reaction to that. That's a human reaction. And I think you'd have the same reaction 40 years ago or 100 years ago as you would today. There's something about the color, that color of a room, and maybe therefore other colors of rooms,

Starting point is 00:21:44 that does affect your mind? Well, let me suggest that you and I have both walked into rooms that were painted all black, but also were full of people dressed very elegantly, some of them ordering $20 cocktails, and the music was playing with a very fast beat. And both of us thought that room was super awesome. And we were very excited to be there. And it was going to be a lot of fun because our friends were there. And similarly, we've both seen images of rooms that were all black and thought, oh, the serial killer is about to jump out from behind that closet wall. The person who I'm watching should probably leave that room.

Starting point is 00:22:19 So I would say there's some contextual information that you probably want in that all black room. Also, I find it interesting that you chose black there. Because when you were talking about earth tones and pink, that becomes a complicated subject. But as soon as we start talking about black and white, we're talking about another axis in that color space. We're talking about an absence of light and a presence of light as well. So being in darkness versus being in light, I think, does have a different cultural significance and a different feeling for us if you can't see versus if you can. And in fact, it's a whole different neural pathway in the brain processing how much light there is and how much light there isn't that then gets reintegrated with what color that

Starting point is 00:22:56 light is somewhere in the back of the head. In all the research you did about color, is there something about one story or something that really hit you that you think we should hear? I will admit I'm now super annoying about all this stuff and I'll go on forever. But I will tell one story that I'm just fascinated by. I love this. The painter Mark Rothko, who famously did these fields of color. You may know this art. They would often look like just a big panel of one color over another.

Starting point is 00:23:27 The painting often had a certain luminosity to them. He mixed his own pigments and paints and would do interesting stuff with varnishes, too, or not use a varnish. To make the paintings give you an emotional feeling when you look at them, as you say. There'd be a big difference between looking at a Rothko that was gray and black like a moonscape versus one that was red and green or something like that and they were really huge they're iconic modern art and Rothko did a series of rooms three walls would have a big giant paintings on them and you're supposed to sit and just sort of experience them and he did one of these for Harvard in this kind of dining room meeting room that they had and then the Harvard started to use the room as much more of a regularly used dining room. They opened the windows and the sun would stream right in.

Starting point is 00:24:08 The paintings got damaged because the ultraviolet light coming in damaged the pigment. It turned out he used some pigments that were particularly vulnerable to damage from ultraviolet light. Some of the paintings got ripped because people would bump into them. So these are super valuable Mark Rothko paintings. They got super messed up. Harvard finally put them in storage. And then a few years ago, they decided to try to restore them. Usually what you would do when you're going to do a restoration like that is you would take off the varnish and put on a new varnish. But these didn't have any varnish on them at all.

Starting point is 00:24:34 And in restoration of paintings, the rule is you want to do as little as possible to the original. You don't want to just go repaint it because that messes it up. So when they tried to show the paintings again, they had this problem. They didn't know what to do about it because they couldn't fix the paintings, but they also didn't look the way they used to. So what the researchers who were working on it did is they decided to use digitally projected light. What they were going to do is shine light onto the painting so that they would look like they used to.

Starting point is 00:25:01 But if you just shined a picture onto the painting, that wouldn't work, because that light would then interact with it, it would bounce off and be absorbed by whatever was left on those giant canvases, and so it would look totally different again. So what they had to do was take samples of what the paintings had used to look like. So what they had accessible to them was, Rothko had painted more than three and not put them all on display. He kept one. So they had an old one that they could look at the colors of the pigments that he had used and then essentially

Starting point is 00:25:31 restore digitally what the colors would have been. And so they went through all this process where they could figure out, okay, here's what color we're trying to get to. And then they could kind of subtract the color that was already on the canvases from the color that they wanted. And this is a process that your mind and your eye do all the time, is try to subtract the color of the illuminance, the light around something, from the thing that you're actually seeing so that you can infer essentially what color the thing actually is. And the best example I can give you for this, just in parentheses, is if I show you a picture of an egg under red light, that egg is going to look red.

Starting point is 00:26:04 But you're going to know, unless there's some cue that says it's Easter, probably because there's red everywhere else in the image, that that's actually a white egg. Because we know what color most eggs are, even though some eggs come in brown and speckled and all that stuff. I know all that. But basically your brain will do what a video camera would be white balancing, right? We'll say, like, okay, I get it. That's not a red egg. That's an egg. And the light is red.

Starting point is 00:26:22 So here they had to do that actively They had to say we're gonna shine a light on the paintings using a digital projector Mapped to all the different regions of the paintings because there was there were kind of figures in front There was like big purple gateways in front of big kind of dark red backgrounds. We're gonna shine light on it that will Change the way the painting looks so that it looks the way it used to when Rothko originally painted it and they put those on display they actually were able to figure out how to do it and shine the digital projectors on it and they the thing that was most popular about the display apparently because these are big big epic paintings you know they make the size of a room and when they finally showed them again people would arrive to be looking at the paintings at about

Starting point is 00:27:01 four o'clock when they would turn off the projectors. So they'd be able to see the difference. You'd be able to see this artificial recreation of what the Rothko's used to look like. And then they would turn it off and you'd be able to see what the Rothko's look like now, which is also not what the Rothko's used to look like. I just, I love that, the kind of obsession of detail of how color works and trying to understand

Starting point is 00:27:23 how the brain and the eye perceive color and then taking advantage of that to remake an artistic experience. Well, when you stop and think about how important color is on so many different levels, how important color is to people, it's really interesting to get some insight into why that is and how it all works. Adam Rogers has been my guest. He is a senior correspondent at Wired, and the book is called Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Adam. Thank you for being here.

Starting point is 00:28:01 Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines.

Starting point is 00:28:32 Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Recycling has become part of everyday life for most of us. You throw your trash away in one bin and you put your recyclables in another. And after the things that you recycle leave your house, what happens?

Starting point is 00:29:14 Is everything really recycled into something else? Or does a lot of it end up in a landfill right alongside your garbage? What things that you may be putting in your recyclable bin are not really recyclable? All these questions are important for all of us to understand, and here with some expert insight into how recycling really works is Jetty Romer. She is an attorney and leading expert on single-use plastics,

Starting point is 00:29:43 and she's author of a book called Can I Recycle This? A Guide to Better Recycling and How to Reduce Single-Use Plastics. Hi, Jenny. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Thanks for having me. So, I like to think that the things I put in my recycle bin are, in fact, recycled into something else, but I know they're not all. What percentage of plastic, for example, is actually recycled? Well, only about 9% of plastics ever produced have been recycled. So we have a major problem with plastics recycling in the U.S. And what about the other

Starting point is 00:30:19 things that we think we're recycling? The most valuable recyclables on the market right now tend to be certain plastics. So HDPE number two resin, which tends to be milk jugs and kind of shampoo bottles, followed by aluminum cans are very valuable and cardboard boxes. So there are things that there is a market for, meaning that there's a manufacturer who wants to buy those items after they've been collected and sorted and bailed. But for a whole lot of other plastics, there really isn't someone on the other end who wants to buy them most of the time. And so what I really get into is the logistics of how recycling machinery works. Once you put it in your bin and it goes to a

Starting point is 00:31:07 recycling facility, how it gets sorted out, what problems can happen there, and then whether there is an end buyer who wants to purchase those items. So really looking at recycling in a different way. Yeah, well, isn't it true that a lot of the market for recyclables is gone, that China used to take a lot of it and now they don't, and a lot of it just ends up in the landfill anyway, and in many ways we're kind of going through this exercise for not a whole lot of reason. I see it as a good thing that China has stopped taking a lot of our low-value plastics. Really, they put a contamination cap. They said we'll only take plastics if there's only point 5% contamination, which is kind of impossible in our current system. So essentially, they stopped taking all of our all of our low value plastics, and some places are

Starting point is 00:31:57 still taking it. But those those other countries really don't even have the infrastructure that China had in the first place. And there were a lot of humanitarian and environmental concerns there. But I see it as a good thing that now we're kind of forced to talk about it. Because before those plastics were being accepted, and we weren't really talking about what happened next. So you've mentioned pretty much exclusively plastic. What about paper? What about newspapers and cardboard and stuff like that? a market for that, a little bit less because China was taking that as well. But we do have a domestic market for that. And cardboard is interesting because it really fluctuates quite a bit. And so there's even so much of a cardboard can be so valuable that there has been a problem with cardboard poaching because businesses would put cardboard out on the curb. And if the market value of cardboard was really high,

Starting point is 00:33:07 then we'd see people just renting trucks and going out and poaching cardboard. It's been a big problem. Even in New York City, there were charges brought for cardboard poaching. So some recyclables are very valuable and some aren't. So let's talk about what our responsibilities are when we put recyclables in the recycle bin. I mean, where I live, trash goes in one, recyclables go in the other. I imagine they're sorted out somewhere else, the plastic from the paper from the glass. But, you know, then I hear things like, well, pizza boxes are not recyclable because the grease

Starting point is 00:33:43 from the pizza basically ruins them and you shouldn't put those in the recycle bin. I have a little graphic in my book about kind of how dirty can your pizza box be. And one tip is a lot of the time the grease from the pizza box will just be on the bottom part of the box. So you can rip off the top part of the box and put that in your recycling bin and then either put the bottom part in compost if you have it or in the trash. So at least you're able to salvage some of the box. And so I think a question a lot of us have is like, how much good is this doing? I've heard people say that, you know, if all of the recyclables ended up in the trash, we barely notice. It's such a small amount that's actually going anywhere and being actually recycled into something else that, yeah, this feels good and it's very environmental and it makes us all feel good, but it isn't really doing very much.

Starting point is 00:34:42 One thing that I really look at is the economics of it. So some plastic is worth almost $1,000 a ton on the commodities market. Other plastic is worth negative $17, meaning you have to pay someone to take it away. And so having people go through all of the time and, you know, water usage to really wash out every little piece of plastic and put it in their bin. If we know it's a plastic that doesn't have a market that isn't eventually going to be turned into another product, no, that's not worth it. But for the plastics that are higher value, for the other materials that are higher value, like aluminum cans, that's definitely worth putting in the recycling bin.

Starting point is 00:35:26 I imagine there are a lot of things about the recycling business and how it works that probably we should know that we don't know. And since the name of this podcast is something you should know, what else should we know about how recycling does and doesn't work? Yeah, one thing I like to look out for is when you're in a public place and you see a recycling bin that's lined with black plastic, a lot of the time that means that it's not going to be recycled because most recyclers won't open an opaque bag. So I think a lot of the time people will put something in the recycling bin

Starting point is 00:36:11 and those are very unlikely to get recycled. I'd say almost never. But also when we're recycling, we're putting things into our bin, like you said, and if you put things in your bin, if you wish cycle something that isn't actually recyclable, it could cause a lot of problems there. So for a plastic carryout bag, those shouldn't be in your curbside bins. They tend to clog the recycling machinery, get wrapped around other valuable items. So they contaminate the source, they clog the machinery, and the facilities have to pay to shut down the line and kind of cut out all the plastic films. People also like to

Starting point is 00:36:52 recycle things like garden hoses and extension cords, and those are tanglers for the recycling facilities as well. And then a lot of the smaller things like really small bottle caps that aren't attached to bottles or forks and things like that, if you put them in their bin, they're really not going to make it through all that machinery. Well, wait a minute. You've just said a lot of things we need to go back and talk about. So the plastic bags from the takeout restaurant or maybe even the plastic bags from the supermarket, those are not recyclable? Well, if you look at the bottom of most of those bags, it'll have a little recycling symbol on it. But then next to it, it'll have what we call a qualified claim. So it'll say you must bring this back to a participating grocery store to recycle.

Starting point is 00:37:43 So there are some drop-off programs for plastic films, but most people aren't going to do that. A lot of people just try to put them in their curbside bins. And I'd say 97% of the communities in the U.S. do not accept plastic bags or plastic film for recycling. So like I said, they're tanglers. They clog up their machinery. No one ever told me that. Well, I'm happy that I'm here with you today. That's a big take home. But I bet if you asked 100 people, more than 90 of them would say, yeah, we put those bags in the recyclable because they're plastic and plastic is recyclable.

Starting point is 00:38:23 Yeah, exactly. And that's one thing I really want a big take home to be is that plastic isn't just one thing and a lot of it isn't recyclable. So getting back to what you said, you said that if you put your recyclables like in a public place in a thing that is lined with a black bag, it won't get recycled. Why? What's the significance of the black bag? Because at most facilities, if they see a black bag, they are not going to want to open it. Waste management, recycling is a dirty business. And they want to limit their liability a lot of the time to not have their employees open these mysterious black opaque bags at recycling facilities. Who knows what's in them?

Starting point is 00:39:10 So a lot of jurisdictions will require either a clear bag or a tinted blue bag. A lot of places won't even accept bags at all. Waste management, which is the biggest hauler in the U.S., has a new campaign where they aren't accepting bags. But sometimes if you live in a jurisdiction like New York where there really isn't room for garbage cans or what we call toters, like the garbage cans with wheels, and so sometimes putting it in a clear bag is the only option. And I would distinguish the recycling bags, the bigger bags versus the carryout bags. It's a lot of the time when if you have to use the bigger bags to put your recyclables in curbside, those will get opened up at the

Starting point is 00:40:00 beginning of the sorting line and those bags will probably just be thrown away. So most facilities are able to handle those. Those aren't actually being recycled most of the time, but they're being used to transport the recyclables. But a lot of the time, people will also kind of throw in all their carryout bags, thinking that those are going to get recycled, and they aren't. But not only are they not getting recycled, you say they, from what I understand you're saying, is they also just gum up the whole project. Yes, yes. They're tanglers.

Starting point is 00:40:32 They clog up all the machinery. They cost municipal recyclers money because they're having to pay people to take all of those little films out of the gears of the machinery. So one big take home is don't put those carry-out bags in your bins. And I know people, well, I've even sometimes done it where I have recyclables that maybe are wet or rinsed out and still have a little water on them. I'll put them in a kitchen trash bag and put that in the recyclable bin, but it sounds like that's not a good idea either.

Starting point is 00:41:09 No, whenever you can, have them just go into the bin without any bag. That's the most helpful thing that you can do. And you said, because every time we get takeout, if there's plastic forks, they go right in the recycle bin because, again, they're plastic, but you're saying they're too small to do any good. Yeah, there are two things with utensils. First is that they're small and kind of awkwardly shaped, and so they aren't going to make it through the facility. And then the second thing is that they're made out of a resin type of plastic that's probably number five or number six. And those really don't have a buyer that's going to want to purchase them at the other end.

Starting point is 00:41:51 So I would put my plastic utensils just straight into the trash and not have them take that kind of long roundabout way to the landfill. But I would say that I want people to follow the guidance from their local jurisdiction. So, you know, look at what your jurisdiction accepts or doesn't accept and follow that guidance. But the bigger thing should be to try to avoid those utensils in the first place, especially if you're ordering in and you're at home and have utensils. And that's one thing we're trying to work on with policy as well, is having a more clear way to be able to tell the restaurant that you're ordering from whether you want utensils

Starting point is 00:42:37 and if you want one fork, then being able to say that versus just getting a whole bag full of various things. You mentioned something a moment ago about, you know, whether do you put on a bottle, do you put the cap back on before you recycle it? And I've always wondered about that because if you're, those are two different materials, so you would think you would want them separated. If it's a plastic bottle with a plastic cap, then definitely keep the cap on. So if you have a water bottle and keep the cap on and put it in your bin, and then what will happen is that when it gets to the

Starting point is 00:43:12 facility, if it's a bottle, it should be able to make it through and be sorted and bailed. And then when it's sold to the manufacturer, what they will do is shred all of that plastic and then they will do a float sinksink test. So the caps are generally made from number five plastic, that's polypropylene, and that'll float to the top, and the body of the bottle is made from PET, number one plastic, and that'll sink. And so they'll be able to separate the two plastics that way. And one thing we haven't talked about that hasn't even come up in this conversation, but I remember when, you know, people talked a lot about recycling glass. Do we recycle glass?

Starting point is 00:44:02 Yes, we recycle glass. There's one issue with glass though, is that it's very heavy. So if you're recycling glass, you really need to have a buyer locally that is going to reprocess it. So that's one issue. So glass tends to have a little bit lower value on the commodities market just because of that transportation cost. But glass is inert. And so it's, you know, I encourage people to use glass, and I would also encourage taking advantage of any refill programs that are available in your area. So some places have refillable glass bottles for milk available. I wish I did in my area, but I don't right now. And that's one thing that glass is really great for.

Starting point is 00:44:44 Is it true, though, that there has been kind of a fundamental shift here that, you know, in the early days of recycling and when China was taking our stuff that, you know, recycling was a business that could make money because people paid for that. And now, in a lot of cases, people are being paid to take it. Yeah. And so municipal recycling facilities are really getting more involved in policy now. So we've seen that for a very long time, municipal recycling facilities made, or we call them MRFs, made money by recycling. They would take all of our materials from the blue bins, sort them, and then sell them on the commodities market. And for plastics, for most materials, they could get something for it. And so there's been really a fundamental shift

Starting point is 00:45:38 from selling those commodities to having to pay to have them landfilled or incinerated or shipped for a much lower value. And so those facilities are starting to talk about policy and starting to talk about having producers, having manufacturers pay for the cost of recycling rather than having it just be paid for by taxpayers and rate payers, just because it isn't necessarily a money-making proposition anymore, particularly for low-value plastics. I remember hearing someone speak on this topic some years ago. I can't remember his name, but he was a pretty well-respected expert, and he said something to the effect of, as much as recycling is a good thing, what's really filling up our landfills is not recyclables so much as it is construction and demolition debris.

Starting point is 00:46:37 And that that is a problem that nobody's really tackling. Yeah, that's an issue. You know, I focus mostly on consumer side, what's put in the blue bins, but C&D, construction and demolition debris, is a huge deal, huge problem. And there are some places that are doing a really good job with it. San Francisco, city of San Francisco in particular, has a program that really looks at reuse of a lot of those materials. But that's a whole other issue within waste management that really needs a lot of attention as well.

Starting point is 00:47:15 So it sounds like what really has to happen to make this really work is that the stuff that gets recycled has to be made from the right stuff in the first place so that it can be recycled after the product has been used so that there is a market for it and then the cycle actually works and right now the cycle is kind of broken. Exactly. So starting with those more sustainable, more recyclable materials in the first place is a huge part of the solution. So having consumers when they are at the market knowing kind of what's recyclable and what's not is helpful, but that's not going to solve everything. Not everyone has the time or the energy to really pay attention to that.

Starting point is 00:48:03 And we don't have a lot of choices right now when we're at the market. So having corporations, having the manufacturers be responsible for developing more sustainable packaging is really where we need to go. So the plastic that we recycle or anything that we recycle, generally, if it does get recycled, it gets recycled into what? Bottles can be made into other bottles. And otherwise, things kind of tend to be down-cycled. So bottles can be made into other types of containers. Plastic bottles can be made into fleece sweaters or carpet. But we really want to see recycling rather than downcycling. So being able to have that circular

Starting point is 00:48:55 system where a bottle is made back into another bottle rather than downcycled into something that can't be recycled again. But one other thing that we've been working on are post-consumer recycled content mandates. So in California, they passed a law last year that required that beverage containers have a certain amount of post-consumer recycled content, meaning a certain amount of bottles that have been put into a curbside bin and then made into a new bottle. And so that really creates end market demand for that material. Well, this has been really informative. I mean, I like to think of myself as somebody who's kind of in the know.

Starting point is 00:49:39 I know what's going on, but there's a lot of things you've said that I had no idea about what to do and not do when it comes to recycling. So this has been great. My guest has been Jenny Romer. She's an attorney and expert on single-use plastics and author of the book, Can I Recycle This? A Guide to Better Recycling and How to Reduce Single-Use Plastics. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Jenny.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Thanks so much for having me. You never know what could be tucked away in your attic or basement that could be worth some money. So you might want to check. And here are some things to check for. According to Brian Kathanis, co-author of the book, Betcha Didn't Know That. Any coin dated before 1965. a quarter, a dime, or a half dollar, or a dollar coin. Those coins are made of almost all silver, and in today's market they are worth several times more than their face value. Anything military, old documents,

Starting point is 00:50:41 medals, Civil War discharge papers, or souvenirs brought back from a war. People collect these and they could bring in some decent cash. Historical autographs. If you have signatures from someone in history, they could be quite a find. The rarest historical autograph in U.S. history is from a guy named Button Gwinnett. Button Gwinnett signed the Declaration of Independence, but he died shortly after that in a duel. All of his papers were burned in a fire, and so his signature is very rare. So rare that someone paid $100,000 for it at auction. And that is something you should know. Word of mouth is how our audience

Starting point is 00:51:26 grows and you can help us out by telling someone you know about this podcast. Give them the link and tell them to listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed i had danielle

Starting point is 00:52:06 and megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions i asked danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched and hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures you got this no i didn't don't believe that about a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Puntwine,

Starting point is 00:52:47 erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available.

Something You Should Know - What Colors Do To You & Recycling: Does It Really Help?

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