Stuff You Should Know - Recycling Update: How’s It Going?

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

It’s been about a decade since Josh and Chuck last checked in on recycling and since then a lot has changed. A global commodities market dealing in recyclables has developed and recently crashed. Jump back into the fascinating world of recycling.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Again, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chaz Bryant.

There's Jerry Jerome Rowland over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Again. Why you saying again? Well, so before we recorded, I wanna tell all of you, Chuck confided in me a tad bit of concern, right? Can we reveal all this or is this gonna get edited out?

No, we'll reveal, sure. So we have done an episode on recycling again, or before. Yes. This is again. This is again. Before it was, from my understanding, it was the premise was, is what you're recycling actually getting recycled, right?

That was the basis of it. That was kind of everything. And then we just kind of went over recycling here there. Yeah, I mean, it was year two of the show. Okay. It's about a half an hour in length. That was long for back then. And probably eight minutes of that

covered the garbage patch. Which we went on to do in an episode just on that. Did we? Yeah, for sure. We talked about the eight minutes of the garbage patch. Something, yeah. I mean, the name of the episode was recycling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Did we combine those two into one? I don't know. I think I'm having some sort of weird like flashback or... Yeah, so here's the deal though, folks. We're redoing recycling. Updating is what it's called. We're updating with new information and there may be some of the same stuff,

but I listened to that episode and we weren't very good at what we did back then. I thought, I thought we... I'm almost positive we did a separate episode on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We may have. But all of this to say is don't freak out and say you guys are repeating yourselves.

Oh, we know. Are we already there? Because no, we're not. No, no, this is an update. This is so important and things have changed enough since what, 2010? It may have even been nine. Wow, yes.

Quite a bit has changed since back then. As a matter of fact, we've gotten better at recycling. We've gotten worse at recycling simultaneously. Recycling's turned into a huge business. We understand it more and then there's been major colossal changes just this year to the global recyclable material commodities market that is going to change everyone's life one way or another

if you care at all about recycling. Because of China. Yeah, and you know what? We'll get to that, but I'm just gonna come out and say it, good for China. All right, put a pin in that one. Right. We've been putting pins all over the place.

I'm afraid that we have just pins everywhere. No, we've been going back. I don't think we've left a single pin in place, which is unusual for us because we do that a lot. And I also wanted to say that it's nice that we're all three together again. Yeah, Jerry is back again. She keeps leaving.

I know, but she's back and she has a summer cold, which is the worst. That to me is like, that is a clear indication that you have been working too hard if you go on vacation and get sick. Cause you're like work, work, work, and then you relax on vacation and your immune system goes down.

Interesting. You gotta take it easy. You need like a step down vacay, like a work and then staycation and then vacation, Jerry. Jerry gave a thumbs up. Sickly thumb. It's a little pale green. So Chuck.

Yes. I think also we agreed that you're going to participate even more and I'm gonna participate less than in the last one, right? It was pretty funny to listen to. You should give it a listen. Oh well. Let's see if you notice.

Oh, I've noticed before. Like sometimes I'm just like cringing and pinching the bridge of my nose. Like shut up, Josh. So that is the last we will speak of that episode and let's just pretend like we're starting anew. Or updating. Recycling.

What is it? So let's talk about recycling. Yeah. One of the third best of the three R's. That's your favorite one? Or it's your least favorite of them? Well, it's not least favorite. It's, it should be the third option as a green human.

Right. You should try and reduce and reuse first. Yes. And that's why they put them in that order. Cause recycling is the last line of defense. Yeah, I thought it just kind of flowed off the tongue a little more. I didn't realize that they had them in order of preference.

Well, that's cool. Okay. So you, it is best to reduce, reuse. And then when all else fails, recycle. That's an ideal world, right? Yeah. Cause if you go to a website and you look up like, can I recycle my toilet paper tubes in the recycling bin?

Can you? Sure. But if you go to like, you know, tree hugger and all these other sites are like, well you can, but what you should really do is this. And then it's, they first find a way to not use toilet paper at all. And so you don't have those.

Right. So that would be the reduce. Turn it into the stand for like a pipe cleaner tree. Well, that's everything else. That's the reuse is there, they're like, there are so many crafty things you can do with toilet paper too. You can use it as a telescope,

which will eventually end up in the trash. Right. You can use it as a harmonica maybe. Yeah. I can do this all day. We should. So actually, I don't think we should. So when you recycle that toilet paper too,

when you drop it into a bin out front, you may notice that you're also dropping in like glass, like your old like Captain Morgan's bottle. Or it took you eight years to drink. Sure. You drinking the rum these days? Oh, I love rum. Okay.

I'm not big on Captain Morgan, but I love rum. All right. It's one of my surprise favorites. So I'm like, wow, I really like rum. I say that every time I take a sip of rum, is just look at my glass and go, wow, I really love rum. And Yumi's like, God, everyone in the house knows you. Like, rum.

Just be quiet. Please shut up. Momo rolls her little eyes. Big eyes. So you dump all this stuff together in a single bin and you may stop and be like, wait, wait, this is crazy. How am I dumping all this stuff into a single bin? Didn't we used to have to separate?

Yes, we did. But thanks to the advent of single stream recycling, people recycle a lot more stuff than they ever did before. Recycling participation is up. You may have noticed like back in the 90s, early 2000s, they gave you like a little tiny bin. Now you get like a big old garbage can with wheels on it

so you can put even more stuff in it. Hopefully. That's how much recycling participation is up. Programs all over the country, everybody's recycling. So on the one hand, it's really good that we have single stream recycling because it makes people more likely to recycle. On the other hand, it also makes us more likely

to recycle stuff that we really shouldn't be recycling. Or using as much up to begin with. Right, but even if it's stuff that like, even if you're reducing and reusing, people still have a tendency to throw stuff in that recycling bin, even though it can't be recycled. Yeah, with that one article you sent called it aspirational recycling.

Yes. I don't really know if this can go in there, but I'm gonna do it because it makes me feel good. Right, I hope so, I hope it can be recycled. So that doesn't sound like that bad of a deal. If you're like, okay, well it can't be recycled so it doesn't get recycled, who cares? It just disintegrates into nothingness magically, right?

It's actually not what happens. That stuff ends up at the landfill, right? So you're basically saying, here recycling company, throw this away for me, will you? Yeah, and if you listen to our show on landfills, which was a good one, we sort of had glowing praise for landfills, and that was, I think, in terms of, in the context of, hey, if you're gonna have a landfill,

they really have made leaps and bounds from the old days. Yeah, for sure. But obviously, we want to do this instead of the landfill. Yeah, the ideal situation would be for us to basically close the loop on all of our materials, on our metals, on our plastics, on our paper, and figure out a way to reuse them, and now, there's enough of everything,

and we never have to cut down another tree, we never have to dig up another piece of bauxite, we never have to do anything, we've got enough, and then we just have these perfect, like reusing, reprocessing techniques, and we just got a closed loop of these materials. That would be ideal, we're pretty far from that, right? But it is a good step in the right direction

that we are recycling, right? For sure. So when you recycle, when you put that stuff in that bin, we're gonna get to all this really great stuff. I just tease something that you don't even know what I'm talking about yet, dear listener. What, bauxite? That was one thing, but the aspirational recycling

comes into play later on. So when you recycle, you put it out on the bin, and then some people come up, and what looks like an old garbage truck, or a modified garbage truck, except it's usually much cleaner, maybe a pleasant blue or a pleasant green color, and there's no juice usually

dripping out of the back, garbage juice. Oh, sure. And they pick it up, and they cart it off, and that begins the plastic bottle or the toilet paper tubes journey. Yeah, and this is a Grabster article. It's nice to work from one of those again. Ed points out, though, that when things are recycled,

it's pretty rare that you get the same thing as the original material. So that soda can, that beer can, may not end up a beer can. Right. Does that make you sad, that person out there listening? Well, that's what I was saying. Like, in an ideal world,

it would become another beer can, right? Yeah. But we're not there yet, because when we recycle stuff, it degrades. Yeah, and that's why you can't recycle paper and think that it's going to be the next thing that you print something on. It's not gonna come back like clean lily white

as printer paper. No, and that's called downstream recycling, where that office paper you printed on that you recycled ends up becoming like a coffee clutch for your coffee, and then you recycle that, and it becomes low grade like napkin. And after that, it just basically ends up in landfill because it can't be recycled in front of it.

Now then it becomes airport toilet paper. It's just the lowest form of paper. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Like it's just, you can see right through it. Yes. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't do anything. It just provides a false sense of security,

and then your fingers go right through. Ah, upcycling is a little different, and that's pretty rare, but that's when something is made more valuable than the original product. Yeah, and I like the example that Ed gives. You can take a hubcap and turn it into a decorative bird bath.

Yeah, that counts. Good job, Ed. Hey, I'm all about that found art. Like those people do a valuable service. Yeah, we should redo that episode, remember that one? Found art? Mm-hmm. Didn't we do that, did we?

Yeah, we did. No. I swear. I think you're joshing. No, really? I promise. All right, I'm gonna have to look that one up. Okay.

Let's talk about the history a bit though, because Ed makes great pains to point out that it's interesting that most people probably think, like man in the 70s and the 60s, that's when it all started. But recycling actually kind of started because of the industrial revolution. Yeah.

And it wasn't like necessarily, it didn't have green intent. Well, no, it was more like, do you remember when we did the extinct job titles one, and we talked about armors, and you can't find a pseudo armor from the 13th or 14th or 15th centuries, because they reused that stuff?

Yeah. That was just par for the course back then. Yeah. And if you were just too valuable to throw away, you just found a way to reuse it. And that was pretty much the way people lived for many, many years, until basically the post-war economic boom

led to this consumer society that we live in today, where it's just very, very cheap to produce stuff, including like packaging and materials, and we use it out the yin yang, and we just throw it away typically. And it wasn't until I think the first Earth Day that recycling came back again. Yeah, and that's when it definitely had

a more of a green tint on it, for sure, which is good. Ed points out too that there were some linears here and there. I think recycling in the United States really had its heyday in the 90s. That's when I first remember it becoming like, this thing is a thing now. Yeah, and I've got a couple of stats here. It peaked in, actually it peaked in recent years,

and this is, I believe, how many tons are diverted from the landfill? Right. So if you're going by that stat, it peaked in 2011 at 34.7, what is that, million tons? Yeah. So 34.7%, I would think. Oh yeah, yeah, 34.7% of the hundred and whatever,

what do we send today, about 150 million tons? I saw, so I saw different things, like I think that's from the EPA, right? Yeah, yeah, actually in the 80s it was about 150, now we're down to about 100, I think. That's going to the landfill. 100 million tons. That's going to the landfill.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. But our recycling is up, but our, I think our actual waste production overall is up too. Yeah, and more people, of course, more stuff. Yeah, exactly, but that's actually a thing that we'll talk about, that recycling masks, like we're throwing away way more stuff,

and luckily we're recycling more than ever, so we're actually putting less than ever in the landfill, but if we would do that first thing, reduce, and then the second thing, reuse, we could really have a significant impact on it, without recycling, or recycling as much. What would be your guess as to the number one thing recycled in the United States?

My guess would be aluminum cans. That is all the way down to number eight. What? I'm going to say rubber chickens, then. Well, yeah, you nailed it. Lead acid batteries, batteries are the number one thing. What multiverse did you come from today? I think people understand that they seem to have

an understanding that you just don't throw batteries away anymore. What do you do with them? You recycle them? Yeah. Where do you recycle them? Seriously, you throw batteries away? I just throw them in the closest body of water I can find.

Well, they are known to float. Where do you recycle these, like in your recycling bin? Well, no, I mean, you have to take them somewhere. Where do you take them, like a recycling place? Yeah, like there are places that accept batteries. Are you talking about little batteries, or are you talking about car batteries? Car batteries.

Lead acid batteries. Is that a car battery? Actually, I don't know. I think that's a car battery. Okay, yeah, yeah, I know you recycle car batteries. Well, that makes sense because you get a little juice. Sure. When you buy your new battery.

Yeah. If you plunk down your old one. Yeah, that would make sense. But still, you would think aluminum cans is number eight. Yeah, number two was corrugated at boxes. Okay. Number three steel, number four is newspaper. Mm-hmm.

And then all the way down to numbers eight and nine are soda and beer cans and bottles. That is really bizarre. Yeah, but that, you know. How do they say Berenstain? I don't know. I'm not sure. But at any rate, we've been bouncing around over the last decade

somewhere in the 32 to 35% range. So peaked is a percentage of waste diverted. Like you can't say peaked then. Like it's been inching downward. I predict it's going to continue to inch downward and then it's going to start going up again more than the recent peak. Yeah.

In the next 10 to 15 years. That's my prediction. That'd be great. And America, if you wanted to know, is number five in the world behind Austria, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. As far as recycling participation or something? Yeah, diverting the most tonnage away from landfills.

Number what? Number five. That's not good. Yeah, it's okay. And numbers three through six are virtually tied. I got you. It's really Austria and Germany are like 10%, 12% more. Those guys will recycle anything.

And then America's only city on the list. Take a guess there. I bet you know that one. I'm going to say Portland. Good guess. Seattle. Closer or further away. Somewhere in Wyoming.

San Francisco. Is the number one city of recycling? It's the only American city to make like the all-star recycling list. Oh, wow. So I think that means we're done, right? That's it. I'll bet we didn't mention that before in the last episode. No.

Oh yeah, we're not mentioning that. Should we take a break though? Let's take a break, man. All right. A little bit more about landfills and all kinds of recycling stuff. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. I mean, even in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, I think this is going very well so far. Great. So, let's get back to that process we kicked off and then abandoned, and now we're getting back to it. When you drop something in your recycling bin and the people come and pick it up, and it begins this beautiful journey of discovery, coming of age, maybe, of really coming to understand oneself for the, say, plastic water bottle that you sent off.

And when it's collected, depending on where you are, it may be either collected by a city worker or a worker for like a private company, and it will be taken somewhere along this chain. This is a big picture, and this is something I didn't quite understand fully before until this time around researching this article. Like that water bottle or that beer can or that toilet paper roll you just threw out, that you just recycled. You just threw it away as trash.

It's just, it's being put into a different trash stream, the recycled stream, right? So when you do that, it becomes, you are saying, here, this actually has value. I don't want anything in return for it. I just want the peace of mind that it's going to have another life. It's going to stay away from the landfill. You do whatever you want with it. And it enters with that exchange into a global commodities market where it goes from a sorting facility to a place where it's put together with other stuff similar to its kind, put

into bails, and then sold on the commodities market to be reprocessed back into raw materials and then sold to manufacturers who use those raw materials to make new stuff that you then buy that then you hopefully, ideally, recycle and the whole process continues again. That's what happens when you drop it in a bin and it goes off. That's ideally. Yeah. And China, like we mentioned, is a big, I think like the number one buyer of US garbage. They were.

Until like late 2017-ish when they said no on certain things. So here's why I said, good for China. China said that they did not want to be the world's garbage dump any longer. And one of the reasons why recycling rates kind of started to climb in the 80s and 90s is because there was a market for this stuff. If there had never been a market for it, it just would not have been viable. It would have cost too much to pay somebody to reprocess it. But the fact that you could sell it to somebody who could then reprocess it and then sell

it as raw materials to manufacturers, that meant it had value to it. So, okay, now we've got like something going here. And the way that this was able to go, the reason why there was value to it is because China said, you know what, we're going to become manufacturers to the world. Give us all materials you can send us. And one of the things they got into was reprocessing things like paper and plastic. And so countries around the world, especially in the West and the developed West, started sending all of their trash, but their recyclable trash to China and China would reprocess it,

take it into like little plastic toys or paper goods or whatever, and then sell it to the world. And because of that, recycling was able to take off. Well, China finally said, you know what, this is not working any longer. We're actually on our feet economically more than we were before. And you guys have been sliding in a lot of your trash with these recyclable materials. And we don't want it anymore. Well, and China has not historically done a great job with their own trash, like they

hadn't even sorted that out, much less to be able to take on all this trash from all over the world. And we're talking hundreds of millions of tons of recyclable materials. And I saw something like 10% of that weight was just straight up trash that was slipped in with this stuff. Yeah, it says here, an estimated 1.3 to 3.5 million metric tons enters the oceans from China's coastline. Right, because it just was falling out of the recycling stream, right?

Yeah, unbelievable. And into the oceans. That was how many tons? 1.3 to 3.5 million metric tons. So that's out of like 12 million metric tons worldwide. So about a quarter of the plastic entering the ocean was going into it from China. That's a huge amount, right? So China finally said, this is not okay.

This is not sustainable. We're just, we're stopping. Like we're not going to accept this any longer. We're not going to accept that any longer. And the stuff we do accept can't be any less than 1% to half of a percent impure. Right. Meaning, like if we're buying a bale, a giant bale of plastic bottles, no more than half of a percent of that bale, bale's total weight, can be anything but the plastic bottles that

we're buying. So this is a big deal because the world's market since the 90s, as far as like recyclable materials has been sent to China. Like a third of the world's recyclable materials goes to China and China was buying it. And they said, we're done. We're not doing that anymore. And so the market just came to a screeching halt. And so what happened?

All that stuff that you were recycling that was originally going to China is now just being diverted to landfills because America's recyclers, the UK's recyclers, Europe's recyclers, don't know what to do with it. The market just stopped. And so they're just sending it to landfills now. So the stuff you're recycling, a lot of people, not all of it, and not everything that everybody's recycling, but a significant amount has been going to landfills so far in 2018. Yeah, and this is not the old school argument where people, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago

were like, oh, they don't even take it to recycling anyway. They just throw it in the trash. I know if you believe that, then now you're saying, see there, I told you, this is something new because of a new policy within the last year. So this is not like that old line. I just want to make that clear. And again, the reason why that argument didn't hold before is because China was there to buy this stuff.

You're right. So why would you throw, it'd be like throwing away money. So that was a stupid argument. Now it's not even an argument. It's just a fact. Like they're having to divert some of this. And they're stockpiling. These people who are basically recyclable material distributors are actually stockpiling

the stuff in warehouses, hoping that the market will come back. And there are countries taking up the slack, I think like Malaysia, India, Indonesia, they're starting to buy more of this than they were before. But China accepted so much of it, bought so much of it that you just can't fill that void. It's going to take a little while. And then hopefully one of the ways that we will handle this is countries like America or like the UK will say, maybe we should start getting into the reprocessing business more than we were before and start handling our own recyclables.

Close that loop. Yeah. I'm all for it. So let's talk about that loop. Let's talk about, let's give an idea of what happens to your recyclables when they're carted away. And let's say it just stays in country. Okay?

Okay. All right. So let's, I guess we can start with paper because that's one that is widely recycled. And there's a bit of a, not a misnomer, but trees are grown to be used for paper. And there's a couple of misnumbers. It's not like people go out and cut down these great old, old forests to make the paper that you print on, they have, you know, they do this from pulpwood trees. However, a lot of times old growth forests are chopped down to create room to plant these

pulpwood trees. Right. It was just terrible. Yeah. So it is a bit of a thing. Like while they may not be making paper out of it, they are clearing area to plant the pulpwood trees to make the paper. Right.

So it's a pretty big waste of those old growth trees to just turn them into paper when you could make like furniture and stuff out of them. Probably so. But they are cutting them down for this paper stuff. But once that happens, it's not like they're growing the old, old growth forests back again. Right? No. Right.

Okay. So then that paper is sorted and you're going to hear a lot of the word sort a lot because that's what happens at a sorting facility. How heavy it is, what color, apparently like really brightly colored paper isn't good to recycle. Yeah. At all. Or good to look at.

Yeah. Like construction paper. Sure. Like neon green flyers. Oh, good Lord. They'll get your attention, but they're bad for the environment. They're bad for the environment. A hot chemical in water bath can reduce the stuff and that's really what you want to do

is to make this slurry, the soupy mix of fibrous, you know, what was once paper. Then they have like, if you always wonder, should I take my paper clips and staples off? If you got a minute, it's probably not a bad idea, but they do have magnets and things and filters to get out the glues and the staples and all that stuff. Yeah. They basically have a lot of different things along this line or this stream that can handle your laziness. Yeah.

I mean, from paper clips to a little bit of mayonnaise left in the jar. A little bit. A little bit. They can handle that. Yeah. But I was going to say, like I said in the previous episode, I'll just say it again. That stuff stinks in your kitchen anyway, so that's why you should clean it out. Right.

Or it stinks next to your house like, who wants a gross dirty mayonnaise jar? Nobody. Beside their house. Certainly not your local recycler. No. So they're going to get the staples and all that stuff out generally with the magnets, but if you want to do it yourself, that's great too. They remove the ink a lot of times chemically, or sometimes this is really interesting.

They'll blow it to the surface and skim it off, bleach that pulp, and you've got this pulpy slurry where they can then spray it and roll it into a sheet, press it and dry it, and it becomes paper again. Remember, we talked about making paper in our toilet paper episode. That one, how it's made, that hypnotic how it's made episode. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So that, what you just described, probably doesn't take place in like your local town or something like that.

That's gone from your curb to your town's sorting facility to like a material recovery facility. Yeah. A mirf is what that's called. And then probably what you just described is done it like someone who specializes in paper reprocessing. Yeah. Right?

That's how they make their money. Right, exactly. But along the way, your town made money by not sending something to landfill because most towns have to pay for landfill stuff. So by diverting this from the landfill, the town just saved money. And if it's a big enough town, it could save millions, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. And then once it entered that mirf, then they started to sort it for resale to reprocessors

and the money started to come in right about then. Yeah. Right. All right. So what about glass? Glass is like similar to paper in that they'll usually sort it. And again, so sorting can be done by machines in a lot of cases, but there are a lot of human beings who are employed in this process whose job it is to say brown bottle goes here,

green bottle goes here, clear bottle goes here. I really like Rome. Right, exactly. Captain Morgan. And they drop them down these different chutes and it's a conveyor belt going past them. And they're like kind of, I love Lucy's style, like just grabbing the stuff and mixing it around and putting it, sorting it themselves, right? Yeah.

And glass is significant because you've also heard people say that, you know, you burn just, and there have been people that have taken great pains to try and prove that recycling actually uses more energy than just making new stuff and throwing it away. And Ed is very fair about it. He points out that it really depends on your material. As a whole, recycling, I think without question, uses less energy. As a whole from what I understand, yeah. But if you want to break it down to the individual things, some of them are a little tougher

to get, you know, your money back out of or your energy usage. The glass is one of those that has a significant energy cost savings. Right. And in some cases, glass recycling basically is just the intact bottle is being washed and sterilized and then reused again. Sometimes. So when you drink out of like a glass Coke bottle or something, that may have been used. Because it's 1965.

Right. Yeah. And you're at the soda jerk. But I mean, if you think about it, like that's, if you could buy just glass bottles, you probably, it's probably better off as far as recycling is concerned, because they probably are just reusing the bottle. As long as you don't smash it on the ground and sweep it up and put it in the recycling bin.

Well, that's another thing that can be done with glass, right? They might reuse it, like, wash it out, burn the label off, have it go through the whole process again. So it's basically like new. Or they may smash it up into pieces and those pieces will get melted down and turned into glass again, which is another reason why the glass gets sorted. Because if you have a bunch of different colored glass mixed together, when you melt it down, it has like kind of a model color that nobody would want.

So it's very important to have your green glass over here and your clear glass over here and your brown glass over there. Yeah. And I think I said on the show, they announced in our county or maybe city that they were not doing glass anymore. And so they set up the big bins at like in certain places around the county. That's where you and your whino friends congregate, right? Absolutely.

What a great bottle that was. So, hey, you know something, you can reuse a wine bottle by putting a candle in it. Yeah. Make it into a candle holder. Or make it a water feeder for your plants. Oh, that's a good... I've tried that before. I've never gotten it to work.

What does it... What does it do? Well, you fill it up and then you plunge it into the soil. And I guess like the... I don't think it's ever come out. It's either stuck in there or it's just poured out. I don't remember, but I was like, I don't think this is working. Interesting.

As it worked for you. Yeah. You know, it comes out very slowly. Like it's not like you're going to see it go glug glug glug glug. Because then you might as well just pour the water on it. No, I know. I think I left it in there for a good week or two and I was like, oh, this plant's dead now.

Let's them work. Huh. I don't know. You sure it was water? I'm pretty sure. You're like, oh, no way to put grain alcohol in the bottle. That was weird. So is that good on glass?

They ground it up into colored? Yeah. That's like the ground stuff that they eventually melt down. Yeah. One of the neat reuses of glass or recycle. One of the neat things that glass can be recycled into is fiberglass. Oh. It can be extruded into fiber, aka fiberglass, meaning that's glass.

It may have been your Coke bottle at one time and now it's keeping your house. Sure. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. That's insulation. It's like the pink panther. Right. Yeah.

What about steel? Steel's a big one. It's usually recycled. At least 25% of American steel is made of recycled steel. That's the law. From what I couldn't find that anywhere but in this article. Yeah. I trust Ed.

Yeah. He's smart. But the reason why is, number one, it's just useful to recycle steel, but also apparently it's very easy. Yeah. You can put that stuff down and reuse it. Yeah. And Ed mentions the giant machines that shred cars.

Did you see these videos? I've seen it before. It's about the best thing ever to watch is to see a minivan just get sucked into a tooth machine. Yeah. It's really amazing. Yeah. It feels like there's nothing that can clog this thing.

No. I mean, a minivan can't clog it. Yeah. Nothing can. I could have watched that stuff for hours. And steel too. So they don't just do minivans, Chuck. They do buildings, old buildings.

Oh yeah. They do, there's something called ship breaking where like, you know, those old huge ships? Sure. Well, they get torn apart and recycled eventually. Wow. That's actually one that's not necessarily very good for the environment because there's so many like toxic metals and like old diesel and stuff like that that gets like leached out into the environment.

I bet an old ship is probably one of the worst like environmental disasters. It's pretty bad. Yeah. But what are you going to do? Just like sink it? Well, maybe. You got to do something with it. Yeah.

So that's steel. Another one, this one stuck out to me is plastic water bottles, right? Yeah. So with plastics in general, it's tricky because if you ever get into an argument with somebody who's just hell bent on proving that recycling is actually not green, because they like to reign on people's parade or whatever, they will point to plastic and they are absolutely right. Like you just can't argue.

It's cheaper and probably less polluting to produce plastic new than it is to recycle plastic. It's just, that's how cheap making plastic is. We've got to do an episode on plastics. It's just like we live in a plastic age, right? So that is true. It's more costly both environmentally and I think economically to recycle plastic than to just make it new.

But that's not to say that you just shouldn't recycle plastic. So if you do recycle like a plastic water bottle, one thing that I ran across that I didn't know before is screw that cap on tightly. And if you'll notice that plastic cap is a different type of plastic than your plastic water bottle. But if you throw the cap away separately, it'll just end up in the landfill. Even if it's in your recycling bin. If you screw it on the way that the plastics reprocessors are set up these days is that

whole bottle goes through and the plastic is separated by density. So the stuff in the cap I believe floats and the stuff in the bottle sinks in like whatever liquid bath they create for it and melt it and then they separate it like that. But if it's just your caps or whatever, it's not going to make it through the machine. The machines are set up to separate them connected with your cap connected to the water bottle still. Screwed on. Well, there's a commonly argued point that we now have given you the answer to.

Yeah. And now I think back I'm like, how many times I've been like, well, I've got to unscrew the cap and throw it in separately. Had no idea. Now I know. Yeah. I won't be doing that again. I can assure you, Chuck.

I'll tick through these recycling symbols real quickly for plastic instead of going into great detail. There is one through seven that you will see stamped on the bottom usually of whatever or sometimes on the side of your plastic. Number one is P-E-T-E or P-E-T. Number two is H-D-P-E. Number three is V or P-V-C final. Four is L-D-P-E.

Number five is P-P. And these all have, you know, longer scientific names. Number five is like your yogurt container from what I've seen. Yogurt containers, ketchup bottles, syrup bottles, medicine bottles, although most pharmacies ask you to bring back your script bottles. Yeah. I am so green. I just go and like make a little basket out of my hands.

Just put the pills in here. Just dump it into my hand. Number six is polystyrene. That's styrofoam. And then number seven is other and miscellaneous is where everything else goes. So every single one of those plastics can be recycled. This is like one of the big things about recycling. We can recycle about 75% of the stuff that we throw away.

Can be recycled. We recycle about 35% of it. And the reason why is in large part because there's no money in recycling some of those other ones. Like styrofoam. We recycle styrofoam, but the process for recycling styrofoam is so difficult and expensive that it costs money to recycle styrofoam, therefore no one recycles styrofoam. And when you step back and think about all the styrofoam packaging out there, the styrofoam

peanuts and all that stuff, it's not getting recycled. You put it in with your, even though it has the recycling symbol, it's saying this can be recycled. In theory, there's no one out there, almost no one out there that recycles it. So it's just going straight to the landfill. The problem is even worse than that though. And this is something I was talking about before, Chuck, at the very beginning. You put that styrofoam in there, you put enough styrofoam in there, then you might do what's

called contaminating the batch where the recycle sorting center, the MRF, might say, it's not even worth paying human beings to sort through this stuff. There's so much styrofoam in here. Just send that whole batch to the landfill, including the stuff that can be recycled. So that's another big deal. Why we're not recycling a lot of stuff is because we're mixing stuff that can't be recycled or won't be recycled in with the stuff that can and should be recycled. And it's diverting the whole batch off to the landfill, which is a big problem, which

is the best way to address that is for people like you and me to go onto our local recycling website and say, what can I actually recycle in my area? And they'll tell you, and then the stuff that can't be, it feels terrible to throw it away, but throw it away. Like I can tell you, with experience, it's not a good feeling to throw a big piece of styrofoam away into a dumpster that's going to the landfill, but you can take solace in the fact that it's not going to spoil the batch of recycling that actually is going to the recycling center.

Yeah. So our community has a styrofoam recycling day, like twice a year. That's great. I'm going to start bringing my styrofoam to your house. No, don't do that because we already have loads. And that stuff is recycled, but you got to look out for it. It's very specific programs that ask for your styrofoam, and they do recycle it. So it's sort of like electronics recycling.

It's really expensive. It's to do, it costs money. So our community, like twice a year again, in fact, I think it's at the same time, has electronics recycling, and you actually have to pay, and you go and pay them some money to donate your old whatever. You know, very ironically, I was going through stuff you should know selects, and I can't remember what episode it was, but in the listener mail, we'd basically read a PSA for something called Free IT Athens.

Do you remember that? Yes. And it's Frida, I think is what it's called, but I looked it up and they're still around, but you can give them, at least in Athens, Georgia, your old e-waste, your old electronics and specifically computer stuff, and they take it, refurbish it, and then donate it to people in need, and they're still doing it, and I guarantee that Athens, Georgia is not the only town in the country that has a program like this. So rather than paying somebody like a chump to recycle this, give it to somebody who can

refurbish it. Well, yeah, because a lot of times, like, this old Mac is just out of date. It works fine. Yeah. And just let me throw it in the trash. Yeah. Got an old computer monitor? You can trade that to an anarchist for their goods and services.

They love those things. So to quickly finishing up on these symbols, they say, avoid three, six, and seven. Look for two, four, and five. They're considered to be the safest. Oh, really? And number one is considered safe, but that's the one that's soda bottles, water bottles, salad dressing containers, mouthwash, peanut butter. It can be recycled, and it is safe, but they're just, I think they're on a mission to try

and keep people to use less of that stuff, especially when Ed points out one of the gripes against recycling. One of the few they actually agree with is people recycle, so they're like, I buy a case of water every two weeks, but it's fine because I recycle it. It encourages maybe for some people to think, because I'm doing this thing right, then I can just keep buying water bottles. Right. Precisely.

That's probably the biggest argument against recycling today is it allows for this consumer society to keep flourishing and thriving. Yeah. Let's take a break real quick and come back. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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you listen to podcasts. Okay Chuck. So all that stuff has been sorted and, um, depending on what it is, say like, um, aluminum cans or plastic bottles or something like that, it is put into these huge enormous bales and then sent off to the reprocessors who then do things like you described with the paper. They basically, um, clean it, burn off any impurities, scrape off any impurities, get to the raw material again, and then turn it into small little things like, um, if it's

aluminum ingots or if it's, um, glass, they turn it into kullet, um, or if it's, uh, plastics, they'll melt it down into, uh, nerdles, I can't remember what they're called. I like nerdles. But those are mermaids tears, remember, that's what they break down to and fish eat them and die. Um, and then those things go to manufacturers and they buy it. So that's, that's this, that's this current state of recycling right now. And that last part, the last two parts, the, um, where the, the reprocessors buy the stuff

and then the manufacturers buy the stuff from the reprocessors, that has been disrupted with China coming in and saying, we're not doing that anymore. Yeah. So there's a lot of things that can change as a result of this, right? If all of these, if these things that actually do have value start to build up as they are in all of these warehouses and facilities, um, so there, another market is going to develop because these things do have value because consumers do want to see like, oh, this thing I'm using was made with 90%, you know, post-consumer recycled material.

I feel good about that. I'm going to buy this package over that package. There's value to this stuff, right? So there will be a market that develops, but will it be this continued thing where we're like here developing country, you don't have like, um, regulatory and safety and environmental protections like we have in our country. So take this and we can feel good about ourselves because it's out of sight. Right.

That's, that's basically how the recycling commodities market developed in the nineties and up till 2018. It was just like here, you take our thing and we can feel good about things, but, but unwarranted and unwarranted feeling of, of feeling good about, um, about recycling. Yeah. So it's possible that the actual like real deal will develop and that will, will continue to recycle and feel good about things, but it'll be, you know, justified. That's what I'm hoping.

That's what I think is going to happen. I think that single stream recycling is going to go away. I think that we're going to have to start like being more conscientious and just know what we're doing more. Because if you put the average person who recycled in the nineties up against the average person who recycles today, do you remember back like in the nineties, like people knew what they were talking about with recycling. Yeah.

And way more sideburns. Sure. More, but like, I think of my dad, like he's still just a religious recycler now. He got like the bug in the nineties because there was such a good campaign, a good public campaign. And yes, fewer people recycled, but the quality of the stuff that was entering the recycling stream was way better than it is today. Good stuff in the nineties.

It was so great. You could get the good stuff. Primo. Uh, so depending on where you live in the country, in the United States and reckon all over the world, um, you might have different options for recycling. Uh, the APU center, uh, research study, um, found that 94% of the United States has something available to them, um, which is great. Yeah.

Sure. Uh, 30% has curbside only 21% drop off only and 43% had a mix of both and 93% of any town with a population over 125,000 have curbside pickup now in the US over 25,000 over 125,000. Oh, gotcha. Still. Yeah. A lot of America. Yeah.

So those are the general ways that you're going to recycle either at a recycling center, uh, like a drop off center, curbside pickup, which, you know, we love, um, buyback centers. You know, if you've ever seen the, the aluminum can machines where you can collect aluminum cans, throw them in there and make some money. Right. Uh, and then that's kind of part of the deposit refund program where, you know, in the good old days when you would, you would drink a soda that you actually, actually paid extra for that bottle.

Right. You know, it's added on. I never realized that. Yeah. If it has like a five cent refund, it's called a refund for reasons because you paid an extra nickel to drink that coke out of the bottle, out of the bottle, but you can always go take it back, Sonny. And they'll give you your five cents back.

Then they take that bottle, wash it out, sterilize it, fill it with coke again. Yeah. I don't drink those. I don't drink coke at all, but there's something about that iconic bottle that I love, that green tinted. Green tinted. That's right. Ribbed.

No, no, no. The, the original coke bottle has that. Really? Faint green. It's not green green, like the sprite bottle. Sure. But um. I never noticed that.

Yeah. And it's got like, uh, that it's ribbed and it has that curve. It's ribbed for your pleasure. It's very sexy bottle, but no, they think about it and they wonder I loved it. He just went, should we talk about stuff you shouldn't recycle? Absolutely. Well, let's get to that, but let's talk about the criticisms. Okay.

One of the ones we talked about was that it gives you, and this is the one I think it sounds like we both fully agree with, is that recycling gives you a false sense of, um, like you're doing something for the environment. Yeah. Which you are, but not to the point where you can just be like, Hey, I'm just going to buy everything and, but I'm recycling it. Yeah. That's definitely true, but also you're not fully like it's amateur hour with recycling

these days where before you, you, there was less being recycled. Like only one to 3% of that stuff was being diverted to the landfill. Today there's like 50, a 50% increase in the amount of stuff that's being recycled. But up to like 20% of that is being diverted to the landfill. Yeah. Right. So you just keep that number up, the 50% increase over like the early 90s, and then decrease what's going to the landfill.

That'd be fantastic. Yeah. And you do that by teaching people what not to recycle. You should be the EPA chief. I am. You know? They're like my pen cost me 10 grand. You might actually want to protect the environment.

It's right there in the job title. We're going to get some email for that. You're going to shoot up about politics, I hurt you. This is one that we touched on a little bit, but that it's basically a zero sum game with the energy used to recycle. Okay. And like we said, it sort of very much depends on the product, but many of the most common things we recycle, it is not a zero sum game.

No, but even if Chuck, you took all of material manufacturing and all of material recycling, and it turned out that it was totally evened out. Right. Energy wise. Energy wise, pollution wise, you would still be, it's still be worthwhile to recycle because recycling has a demonstrably better impact on the economy. Like there are more jobs associated with it. There's more revenue associated with it.

There are more goods and services associated with it. It just has a greater economic impact than sending waste to the landfill does. Like there's money in sending waste to the landfill. It's true, but recycling actually has way more of a positive economic benefit. So even if pollution's the same, energy use is the same, it's just shown overall recycling's better money wise. Take the pin out of that one. There isn't a garbage problem to begin with.

There is no garbage crisis. Plenty of landfill space, so we don't need to sweat it. This one you just say, can you just lean forward a little bit and you kick them in the butt? Yeah, technically there is plenty of landfill space that does not mean that we should fill it as quickly as possible. That's probably the easiest way to debunk that, right? Yeah. I mean, just because there is space doesn't mean, all right, then fill it with trash.

Right. Exactly. Who thinks that? Do you look at the ocean and go, whoa, we could dump a lot of stuff in there? That's just dumb. I'm sorry, you're a dumb person if you think that. I don't say that very often, but when I do, I mean it. All right.

So I think now we can talk about things you're recycling wrong. Okay. So again, listen up everybody because if we can tell you what not to recycle or how to recycle things better and you can tell other people and everybody just kind of figures this out and actually becomes like Primo recyclers like we used to be in the 90s. This would have a significant and positive impact on at the very least the amount of stuff going to the landfill, which we can all agree is not a good thing. Correct.

Okay. So throw away that Starbucks cup. That's a sad one. It is. Because you want to, even if you wash it out with water and it's clean as a whistle, you cannot recycle that. And you're going to get stared at and people are going to shoot spitballs at you even though they don't have straws anymore.

You just say, stop, stop, I'm on your side. You don't understand. Yeah. Tell them Josh sent you is what you should say back. Don't mention Chuck. I'll take that flag. But yes, those disposable coffee cups have wax on them. It's a very fine film and you can tell by looking at them.

That's why your coffee doesn't leak out all over through the paper. That's right. Because yeah, it's either wax or plastic, I think, and the problem is it's very tough to separate from the paper when they start running it through that reprocessing process. Yes. And there was a group of people at Stand Earth who did a little experiment where they actually had tagged these Starbucks cups and where Denver, Colorado, that went to the recycling bin and then they traced them and they ended up in the landfill.

Yeah. With like electronic tags. Yeah. They were tracking. Yeah. They were like your child. So throw them away. I'm sorry.

Okay. But don't just throw the whole thing away. You feel dressed that thing, right? You pull the coffee clutch off. You pull the lid off. Both of those can be recycled and then you throw the cup away. Here's the even better thing to do. Buy one of those like 10 or $15 travel mugs and say, I would like my Starbucks in this

please. And they'll go, okay, great. Good for you buddy. So if you're sitting in there, I don't know if Starbucks does this, but every mom and pop coffee shop will serve you your coffee and a big delicious giant mug. Yeah. I think Starbucks does too if you ask for it. But that's the point, like reducing the number of paper cups that you have to throw away

so much the better. Yeah. And what I do is my germaphobes might think is creepy, but I take the little sleeve off. What do you call it? A clutch. A coffee clutch. To keep it from your hand from getting warm. I just stick that back in the thing with the other ones.

What do you mean? Well, I use it and I take it off and I put it back where I found it. Oh, I see. Smart. Just for the next person to use. So that's the second R. Yeah. Nice.

Reuse. Nice. Just as long as you keep your hands clean. Yeah. I'll try to poopy hand. We've talked about pizza boxes before, but it is definitely worth saying again. We've talked a lot about pizza boxes. I think even they say a little grease is okay.

A tiny amount. I think it's best to just cut out the grease spot and throw the rest in the recycling bin. Or usually there's only grease on one side, the side where the pizza's been sitting. The other side's fine. Just tear that off and throw the non-greasy side in the recycling, throw the greasy side in the trash. I am saying go the extra mile. And cut around the grease.

Because all those corners are recyclable. There you go. Okay. And here's the other thing. I said throw the greasy side in the trash. No. Throw it on fire. That can be composted.

Sure. The cardboard box almost always can be composted even if it has grease on it. So pizza boxes, no grease equals recycling. Right. And I already talked a little bit about food stuffs. A little bit of food stuffs is okay, but again I just recommend taking an extra 30 seconds and rinse out that mayonnaise jar. Right.

So if it has the oily sheen from the mayonnaise in it still, that's fine. The plastic reprocessor is set up to deal with that. If it has lumps of mayonnaise in it still, it's too dirty. Same with peanut butter is another one. If you have a to-go plastic food tray or something like that, get the crumbs out. Just get it. Don't sit there and scrub it. I think this is a New York Times article points out you'll actually be wasting water

at some point. Right. But you do want to kind of get it prepped. Don't just throw it in there like you would the trash. Yeah. Like because it's trash. And again, if there's enough stuff in this batch that's going to the recycling center, they're going to throw it away.

So don't throw stuff that shouldn't be recycled in with the recycling. Yeah. I get, we have a lot of guilt about takeout containers about ordering in. It's the one thing where just like, man, I love ordering in food. Love that Chinese delivery, but all that waste. Yeah. And like the Chinese delivery boxes, I mean, they're waterproof too for a reason. So they're not getting recycled either.

You got to just toss them. I saw something like, this is made up, but it's something like 70 or 80% of plastic trash is one time use food packaging. So like just some ridiculous amount where if, and this is the weird thing, what are you going to do? You're going to take like your own dishes to the Chinese food place or your own like Tupperware and say, put it in this, please. People do that.

Do they? Sure. But I mean, you are pretty hardcore if you're doing that. So there's got to be another way and Chuck, this is another, another thing we can do besides you and me being smarter and better at recycling, like just, just making that like a side thing. Is demanding that manufacturers who make packaging, make it with this end of life in mind, make it so it can be reused or make it so it can be very easily recycled or make it so it has a minimal design rather than a bunch of like styrofoam and wrapping and all this stuff.

Yeah. And if you, I mean just the smallest little things can help, like if you're picking up food to go and they're throwing in a bunch of utensils that you take home. Yeah. To say no. If you're picking up that stuff. No. If you're taking it home.

So what do you do? You probably throw it away or there's a drawer in your house. Yeah. With 40,000 of those things. Right. You know? Yeah. Plastic straws are a big deal right now too.

Like cities are banning them. Yeah. I think Starbucks just said they weren't going to use them anymore. That's great. That's a big one. And plastics, again, plastic bags are really bad, Ziploc bags, bubble wrap, none of that stuff should be in your recycling. None of it.

None of it. Yeah. They're going to throw a bag full of aluminum cans and throw the whole thing in there. Right. That bag is going to... That's no good. Like they're going to say, well, this whole bag is trash. Even though everything inside can be recycled, it's trash now because it's just not worth

their time to empty the bag out, the conveyor belt's going too fast. Yeah. Dirty diapers. Can't recycle those. That has human biohazardous waste in it. Yeah. Even if you're using the diapers that do have plastic in them, which not getting judgy, but I wouldn't use those either.

But the reason you might think you can recycle them is because, well, it's plastic. I can recycle plastic. You can't recycle like eight different kinds of plastic that are in the diapers. Right. Again, they melt them down. And then, yes, once you add the whole dimension of poop to it, it's bad news. From your child who has eaten plastic, and now it's plastic in the poop. I can't wait to do a plastic episode.

It's going to knock everybody's socks off, Chuck. So we're going to stop here, and we'll pick this up again in eight years. Okay? Yes. If you want to know more about recycling, go to your local recycling website and figure out what you can recycle and what you can't and do it. Yeah. Okay?

And since I said do it, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Zambardo follow up. Hey, guys, big fan of the show, and also a fellow movie crusher. Well, nice. Thank you, Alex. I was listening to the Stanford Prison Experiment and reminding me of my own discovery of Zambardo. In high school, I took a psychology class, and the teacher didn't really have a lesson plan for any day.

He would periodically just put on episodes of a PBS show called Discovering Psychology, hosted by some middle-aged guy who looked a bit like a Star Trek evil doppelganger. The episodes are pretty elementary. He seemed to be designed for student audience. The host would introduce himself, talk about something like perception or learning for a bit, and then do a reading rainbow-esque graphic cutaway to a famous experiment on the subject. Fast forward to this semester.

We were given some free time to research, and I was trying to pick something good, and I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment, and it was only then that I realized that Zambardo was the one hosting that PBS special that I had been watching for the past month. Frankly, guys, I'm a little surprised that the guy that had the lead role in one of the least ethical psychology experiments was given, well, let's be fair, it wasn't one of the least ethical ever. Things have gotten way worse, but for as big as it was, I just want to be clear there. Really put together.

I'm surprised he was given a hosting role for an educational TV show targeting students 20 years after. Okay, fair enough. That's Alex's point of view. That is from Alex Abramon. Alex. From Falls Church, Virginia. Nice town, buddy.

Nice area. Thanks for writing it. Oh, yeah. Have you ever been to... Oh, man, I can't remember the name of the place. They're famous for Peking duck there. Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, I can't remember. There's one specific amazing Chinese restaurant that has the best Peking duck you'll ever have. Wow. Try it. All right. Okay. Duck, but...

Oh, well, don't bother. The rest of the food's pretty good, too, but the Peking duck is knock your socks off. So if you want to know more about, oh, no, I already said that. If you want to get in touch with us, go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com. It has all of the links to all our social meds, and you can also send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.