Stuff You Should Know - Recycling and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Episode Date: January 20, 2009

Recycling has come a long way since its debut -- and so have landfills. In this twofer HowStuffWorks podcast, discover the realities of modern recycling and find out why the world's largest landfill might be more aptly described as an "oceanfill." Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. This episode is sponsored by GoDaddy.com, the world's largest web host and domain name registrar. With domains as low as $1.99 and hosting for less than $5 a month. Enter promo code STUFF10 at checkout and save 10%

off your entire order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com. To be rescued from a couple of our listeners. Yeah, on our Facebook page, I think I said that we're not allowed to leave, but I got a pretty good response. You should ask for pizza or cash. Oh, it's coming. I'm buttering them up. Or shrimp cocktail, your favorite. Exactly, I can finally get the shrimp cocktail. Chuck, do you remember back in the 90s, maybe a haze for you? No. You don't remember the 90s? No, it's not a haze. I do remember. Oh, that was a weird response. No, I was in college. I was studying and such. Oh, okay. So, so you do remember the 90s? Yeah. Okay, so Chuck, you are a child of the recycling generation.

Oh, yes. Do you remember when that thing just blew up? It came out of nowhere. I do. My brother and I were talking about this the other day with the initial, yeah, we were with the crying Indian in the 70s, which was just about littering. Right. When the good old days, when you would just throw trash out of your car. I know, like in Anchorman, they're walking through the park, everybody just threw it in the 70s. It's so nuts. Do you ever see anybody in their car just throwing something out? Occasionally, and it's just, yeah. It's just boil your blood. It's like, what are you doing? How can you be that unaware, you know? I hit them with my car. Okay, so you're talking about the

Amerindian who is crying because of the trash? Right. And then later on, recycling became like newspapers, kind of where I remember it starting. It did. As a matter of fact, the first curbside newspaper recycling program started in 1973. Right. In University City, Missouri, I believe. Or Missouri, as my mom would say. Yeah. But it took a little while for it to take off. Right. From 1973 to the 90s. But in the 90s, it really gained traction and gained ground. It did. And if you'll remember correctly, you used to have to have all these different bins for this colored glass or this kind of plastic or paper. And then all of a sudden, it just went away. They're like, no, just throw it all in one bin. And because recycling seemed so

important, I know I always wondered, is this stuff really getting recycled? Right. And then when they went to this whole, you know, just single bin hodgepodge of everything, I was like, well, that's it. I mean, they're not even trying to keep up the pretense that they're not dumping this stuff. Right. So it turns out that they actually are. That you can pretty much guarantee that almost all of what you are putting in your recycling bin is getting recycled. Correct. That thing that threw us off where all of a sudden we're just throwing everything in one bin is called single stream recycling. That's a result of recycling technology, which is awesome because it made it a lot easier for people that maybe wouldn't be prone to recycle because they

didn't want to separate everything. Yeah. So yeah, it was awesome. It was a pain. It was definitely pain. And I just throw it all in one bin. They come and get it. And back in the day, there used to be a lot of human contact with your garbage that was being recycled. Right. Right. But these technological advances, so imagine this, okay, there's like a, this conveyor belt that your recyclables are dumped onto. And they go through this weird gauntlet where there's like magnets that attract like tin cans. Sure. And then drop them into into bins. Right. Lasers. Lasers, always, you know, a personal favorite of mine. They're infrared lasers that are used to scan the wavelength that's emitted by different types of plastic. Right. And they're

appropriately taken off the conveyor belt. That's awesome. So crazy. And then there's others that have puffs of air that can only get like, like cardboard, like a toilet paper or paper towel roll. Right. Just puffs it off. Right. So all your stuff's going through this is being assaulted. And you know, the way it reacts to these assaults, they're going to end up in the right kind of bin. So you need very little human contact or much less than you did before. Right. So that should put the single stream fear to rest. Right. Sure. I've heard people. Do you feel calmer now? Well, I never really doubted it too much, but I do know people that think it's a liberal conspiracy and that nothing is being recycled. So. Well, actually, there's a, there was an economist.

I can't remember his name, but he went to the trouble of proving that recycling is actually more harmful than good. Really? Yeah. As far as like an environmental cost benefit, it's actually more harmful because I think he took into account like all the gas that the trucks burn and that kind of thing and the electricity used in the recycling plants. And he came to the conclusion that it's actually more harmful than good. I don't necessarily subscribe to that. Right. I'm sure he was contradicted by more than one person. Yeah. But he was a respected economist. He wasn't just, you know, some crackpot or Joe Schmo. Right. No fly by night economist. No. Right. Exactly. But he may have very well been a conservative economist because, as you said, recycling is a

big liberal conspiracy. Right. And some people size. Exactly. Few, I would say. Probably. A lot of people are on board now in the 2000s. Exactly. But I was having a conversation with my father the other day and he is the herbal Elvis. Exactly. He was down. Actually, he was he was kind of, you know, at the equilibrium point, which is good. So he's very lucid. And he he and I were talking. He said that the people at his recycling center, they don't have curbside pickup where he lives out in the sticks. They take their their stuff to the center and they were told by one of the employees that works there that they're they don't recycle anymore. They just take all the stuff to the dump. Really? Yes. And I told him that the man at the recycling center was a total

idiot. Right. And basically, dad wanted to know why, as is his want. And I told him that that's just an awful business model. Right. So think about this. There's this thing called a tipping fee. Chuck. And in 2008, the tipping fee is what you pay to dump your stuff at a landfill. Right. And it's usually per ton. In the US in 2008, it was about 42 bucks on average for per ton per ton of everything. Anything you want to come dump, they weigh it by ton. And then you pay 42 bucks ton on average. Have you ever been to a landfill? Yeah. I know they're they're actually have been to some that are kind of tranquil. Quite nice. Yeah, they have like ponds and stuff. So you would never ever want to swim in. But yeah, there's like rolling hills filled with garbage, but it's grass

over it. The smell though. I've been to somewhere they're actually going to the effort to make it look decent. But yeah, right. And then you turn around, there's like some rusty refrigerator with like a corpse in it or something. Yeah. So they can be depressing places. Yeah, they stink. Okay. But there's there's that tipping fee, right? So you drive up and there's a scale that's embedded into the ground. It weighs you and you pay appropriately. Some states are more than others. I think Vermont's tipping fee, the average tipping fee in the States 96 bucks a ton. Wow. And then I think Oklahoma is on the low end. It's like 14 or 17 bucks a ton. Right. So clearly, the more you charge in tipping fees, the more people are going to recycle. Exactly. But the point is,

is that they're because you have to pay to dump this stuff. Sure. And you're not charging anybody money to come drop off their recyclables. Right. All you're doing is throwing your money out the window. Yeah. You might as well empty out your bank account into a dump truck and back it into a landfill. Right. Did you explain this to your father? I did. Yes. This is actually, you don't know this, but you are trapped right in the middle of a recreation of this conversation we had. So that's number one. The other thing is that you can actually get money from recyclables. They're commodity. Yeah. So I mean, what happens when you take your recyclables to a recycling center and they're diverted from the dump, thank God, to a recycling plant? What happens? I mean,

what do they get turned into? Well, they get turned eventually back into the original raw material, which is a commodity. It's worth money, like you said. So they have every incentive to recycle. So like that mixed office paper is being turned into cardboard, maybe your old newspapers actually are really very commonly used for cardboard, stuff like that. Right. Or, you know, plastic bottles are being turned into like a fleece jacket. Did you know that? Yeah. And actually, there's a plastic bottle you want to avoid. If you ever tip it upside down and you look, that's where you're going to find your recycling symbol. Right. And the number, correct? Yes. So if you see a triangular recycling symbol with a three inside, right, you should actually do this while

you're at the store. They look at the bottle. And if you see a three, put it back. Right. Keep looking until you find, you know, the laundry detergent or whatever you're looking for that doesn't have a three and it has a one or a two or something like that. And then all of a sudden, that one with the three will go away eventually. Right. Like PVC. That's one of the big evils, because it's, is it impossible to recycle? It's not really hard. It's very, very, the ways you can recycle or the things you can recycle into are very, very limited. Right. Like maybe a plastic park bench or something like that. Right. Because all the additives, right? There's so many additives. And plus it's actually, there's whole websites and organizations dedicated to getting

rid of PVC. And there's number one, it's impossible to recycle. So that does generally end up in the dump unless you take it to a specialty recycling plant. And number two, it contains thalamites. And thalamites are, it depends on the plastic. Thalamites are like a softener to soften plastic. So like your vinyl shower curtain, it has thalamites in it. When you put it in and it starts smelling weird, that's the thalamites. And they're actually really harmful. Children's toys, like the kind of malleable ones that they chew on. Bad news. Right. PVC. Thalamites. Not good stuff. So if you start doing this at the store, if you start, if you stop buying things that are made in or delivered in PVC containers, right, PVC is going to go the way the dinosaur pretty

quick. Yeah. But okay. So you want to look, you want to look out for PVC, right? Right. Oh, I know what we're talking about. Raw materials. Back to raw materials. Back to raw materials. So recyclables are a commodity because they're broken back down into their original composition, basically, right? Exactly. Okay. And then they're sold for big dough. It can be big dough. Actually, I was reading an NPR article and the price per ton that wholesale purchasers of, of, recycled mixed office paper were paying in this, this past summer, it was like 90 bucks a ton. Really? Big money. And these are, these are companies that are buying hundreds of thousands of tons a month. Right. So it was big business to recycle. And by the fall, it had dropped to

nothing because even, you know, recycling is subject to inflation and gas fuel prices. Well, not just that, but the economy. People stopped buying goods. True. So less goods were manufactured. But it's also, because it's, it's, it's subject to economic whims, it's also subject to consumers, right? Right. So like if you, if you only buy products that are sold in recyclable or recycled materials that are made from recycled materials, exactly, right? You, the people who make these things are going to start buying more and more recycled stuff because that's what the consumers want. And if you stop buying stuff that's made with, you know, virgin raw materials, all of a sudden these trees are being saved or more plastic isn't being made. Right. And it's,

so it's kind of cool to know that you can have this. Yeah. Each person can have an effect. Yeah. You can also have an effect by making sure or doing your best to make sure that everything that you put in your recycling bin gets recycled. And one of the ways you can do that is by cleaning the stuff. I know that, I know you referenced Minnesota in the article and I believe it's the same here in Georgia about pizza boxes. I've heard that pizza boxes, they won't recycle because they have, you know, cheese and grease and stuff on it. Actually just throw mine away now. Do you? Yeah. Yeah. It's probably a good idea. Yeah. And I do a real good job about cleaning out all my glass products just because it stinks. Yeah. And you don't want, you know, the barbecue sauce

smelling after a few days. So that's the reason I do it, but it turns out it has a better chance of getting recycled. It does. And if you kind of look at it, like your, your bottle of barbecue sauce, if you look at it, you'll see that it's not just a bottle of barbecue sauce. There's several components to it. The lid. The lid. Maybe that little ring that held the lid in place. Right. The safety seal. Right. That's not just kind of dangling around the neck of the bottle. The label. Right. Paper label. If you break this thing down into its parts, you're increasing its chances of being recycled as well. Sure. Yeah. Because if you think about the label's paper, but the bottle's glass and the cap is plastic. True. So you separate it. You're making it easier for the people at

the recycling plant, or I should say the magnets and lasers at the recycling plant. Right. And it's, it's going to be likely or to be recycled. Right. It won't become a residual, which I believe this, what the refuse is called that they cannot recycle. Right. Right. And they want to, any, any recycling company would want to cut down on residual. Right. Yeah. Because that's just lost money. So they're going to do a lot to kind of make it, make, get as much money as possible by recycling as much stuff as possible, but you can definitely help. Right. Yeah. That's great. I agree. So does that take us to plastic and where that might end up? Yeah. You know, plastic is kind of a big problem. Right. Yeah. And not just PVC, but, you know, there's some plastic that's a lot easier to

recycle than others. But it doesn't always get recycled. And when it doesn't get recycled, it can end up in some really screwed up places. Right. Most specifically the ocean. Yes. A lot, a lot of this stuff ends up in the ocean. Yes, it does. And I have a stat for you. If you're into that, you know, I'm into your stats, Chuck. The, the UN did a little study, their environmental program. And they said in 2006, every square mile, the ocean has 46,000 pieces of floating plastic in it. That awful 46,000 pieces per square mile. And of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic that we produce each year all over the world. This is not United States. About 10% of that ends up in the ocean. And a lot of that ends up on the floor of the ocean. Well, not just a lot of it,

70% of it ends up on the floor of the ocean. Yeah. So if every square mile has 46,000 pieces floating, sure, that's 30% of what's actually in the ocean. Right. The rest is on the ocean floor. Right. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talk about walking into the devil's den. The car kills. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything

but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh, no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for Murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered

there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Megs was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare, and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so plastic is, well, it's plastic, right? It's super wonderful material. It's so useful. But yes, it doesn't biodegrade. It does break down. It photo degrades, but it doesn't break down molecularly into

simpler compounds that can be absorbed by nature. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of the same thing. Conveniently bite-sized pieces, which is one of the big problems. They're called mermaids, tears, or nerdles. Yeah, mermaids, tears, that's probably the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life. It is. It's almost as bad as the American Indian crying. Yeah, it's a mermaid tear. So yeah, what happens is this stuff ends up in the ocean and filter feeders like our friend the whale shark and small catfish, they take this stuff in because they think it's food. Seagulls, albatross, they eat this stuff and it ends up killing a large share. Yeah, but wait, there's more. Aside from the choking hazard or any problems, digestive problems

that can occur, these little mermaids, tears actually have this added property of attracting toxins like a sponge. This one freaked me out. So like the anything, any toxin it comes in contact with in the ocean, it can actually draw stuff to it. It soaks it up, absorbs it, hangs on to it, and then when it's eaten. Right. Little poison pills basically. Pretty much. Floating and sinking in the ocean. And this is all over the place, but there's actually, there's a place in the Pacific Ocean. This is startling to me. It is. There's a place in the Pacific in between Japan and California, right? Right. And it is called the North Pacific Subtropic Gyre. Right. Okay. And basically a gyre is just, it's a circulating area of water. Yeah. But this isn't

like a funnel. It's much more wide than that. Actually, one of these gyres is twice the size of Texas. I know. This, this subtropic gyre, the one in the North Pacific is actually, there's two, and they're connected by a 6,000 long subtropical convergent zone. Right. 6,000 miles of basically trash and other things just making its way from one to the other. This is where the garbage goes. This, the garbage that if you have a cigarette lighter and it goes out or it comes out of your pocket because you had it in your bathing suit when you jumped in, right? It, it, it will likely end up in this huge garbage patch. There is a garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that's twice the size of Texas. And it's just kind of slowly sitting there turning. That's amazing. Well,

there's two, actually. There's, there's two versions. There's the Western and the Eastern. Right. And just one of them is twice the size. Exactly. And that's, they're connected by the little trash trail, the 6,000 mile trash trail. And this is having, you could say something of an impact on some of the island, the island chains in the area. Right. Hawaiian islands, some of the Hawaiian islands. Some of them are, some of them have beaches that feature five to 10 feet of trash. I know. Five to 10 feet deep. And the plastic sand is what they call it. Yeah. The little mermaid's tears. I know. That, that turn into these really tiny, tiny bits that, that you just can't do anything about when it becomes mixed in with the beach. I know. So sad. It's bad news. The,

the, there is one heartening thing to all this, the, to the great Pacific garbage patch. Yeah, let's hear the silver lining. It can be, it can be reduced. And the reason it can be reduced is because I think 80% of the trash in the ocean, it starts on land. Right. This isn't like ocean going vessels, going out and dumping, right, you know, in this gyre or anything. Like it's, it's pulled there and it's usually from land. That was good to hear. I mean, it's sad in a way because it's coming from us, but it is good to know that, you know, something can change about that. Right. Because it's everyday people who are doing this. It's not, you know, some faceless corporation. It's not the people who are duping us into thinking that we're, our stuff is being

recycled and they're actually taking it and dumping it in the Pacific. Right. There's something you can do. Like you can not use plastic grocery bags anymore. Sure. It's a great idea. It's very popular nowadays. You can recycle absolutely everything. You can, you can, if you have eco-anxiety, which we've talked about, you can follow, you can walk up and down the street and pull the aquafina water bottles out of the trash and recycle yourself. You can do that. Sure. Or you could charter a helicopter and have them fly you out to the gyre and get to work. Yeah, that's true. So that's just the tip of the iceberg. Right. On the, on the, on, you know, recycling and, and the world's biggest landfill, which is the Great Pacific garbage pack. It's sad. It is. And we've

got a couple of articles on them. Coincidentally. This was a dual podcast. This is a bonus treat. It was. Yeah. Yeah. It's our first time ever. We hope you liked it. You can read both of these articles by going to our handy search bar and typing in world's biggest landfill or recycling reality. And you can do that at howstuffworks.com. And Chuck, we have a little listener mail. We do. My favorite part of the show. So today, Josh, we have, I'm going to start off with some corrections. Actually, I'm going to start off and end with corrections. Great. I have a few. We had a recent podcast on body armor, which was a special request from a soldier, Donald Anderson in Iraq. And first correction is Donald actually wrote his back

because we didn't have his, we found out his rank. Yeah. He's a sergeant, right? He's a sergeant. Part of the fourth squadron, third armored Calvary Regiment. And he works on the AH 64 D turbine engine, which I did a little Googling and that's in the Apache helicopter. Sweet. He's got a very cool job. Yeah. And he thanked us for the, for the podcast. And some people wrote in because we were talking about the spider silk being made from a goat. And we couldn't conceive of how that would happen. Exactly. We thought of it coming out of its derriere. Wait, wait. What was it we said? Let's listen. Yeah, let's listen. Yeah. They've actually genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk.

That is, I have no idea. And I take it, maybe their hair grows like that. I have no idea. Because I don't know where the silk would come out of the poor goat. So we did not know. We put the call out to our listeners. And because they're really smart and awesome, we had a bunch of people right in. And it turns out that the spider silk is actually created in their milk. And the goat's milk. That is so weird. And it's very strong. And apparently it's compatible with the human body. So it can also be used for artificial limbs and stuff like that. Sweet. So I just have a few names just to give people their due. Nick McCracken of Wainsville, North Carolina. Kimberly Fletcher of Campbell, California.

Jeff Beul of the Earth. Wow. Not say where he was from. Eileen Ford Holstedge from California. Michael Bericic. Matt Jensen of New York. Sean Cashin, who just wrote in like literally 10 minutes before we went on the air. Yeah. And one final person was unnamed. And he's my favorite because or she because the email simply said the one. So it may have been from God himself. Wow. Well, thank you, God. And all the rest of you for that correction. You got some more. Well, just one more small quick correction. We did have a viewer or I'm sorry, listener mail on a recent podcast. And we butchered the name and gender of this person. Kos. Kos. I said something like Bytes tall of Wisconsin. And it's actually a female. I think

we said Kos. Yeah, we're really sorry about that. Kos. I don't know why we just automatically assumed your name. Right. And so it's actually Kos Bates tall. And she's a girl. And we're very happy for her. Okay. And we apologize. Yeah. Thanks for letting us know. And if you want to let us know how to pronounce your name and tell us your gender or talk about goat's milk, whatever, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you the war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off the cops. Are they just like looting? They just like

pillaging. They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Bridgewater, the hit fiction podcast is back. A supernatural thriller presented in immersive 3D by neural audio. The Bridgewater Triangle. There is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. There's something beyond our understanding going on here. Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzi and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Aaron Mankey. Listen to Bridgewater on the iHeart radio app or

wherever you get your podcast.