Stuff You Should Know - We Need More Sustainable Packaging, Like, Yesterday

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Since the advent of single-use plastics, we’ve become awash in waste. Barrels of petroleum are extracted, turned into plastics that contain products, which are then opened and the containers thrown away. It’s a bonehead process start to finish.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're just a couple of dudes yakking it up about packaging waste because this is Stuff You Should Know. Let's go. Yeah. It's always fun, even after all these years, to just sort of not know what's going to come out of your mouth at the beginning of an episode.

Same here. Oh, like as yourself. I think this is a nice little addendum, or not addendum, but just in the same bucket as our recent bottled water episode. And we did one on Littering and the Ultra Process Foods episode, I'll touch on this too. Yeah. We did a lot of fresh recycling in landfills and I love at the end of our whole career, we're going to have these lovely buckets of content and this is one I'm most proud of,

our sort of environmental bucket. Yeah, it's good stuff. What about our civics lessons bucket? Sure, those are great. Like how to do a will and stuff like that? No, no, no. Like why gerrymandering is horrible. Oh, sure.

Yeah, those are great too. Yeah, but these recycling ones are great. And true crime? We'll forget about it because you know we're basically a true crime podcast. Who doesn't love that? So we're talking today about packaging waste and if you are alive today in 2022, or the future if you're listening to this in the future, hello future. You are probably pretty well aware that we have a lot of packaging.

We use a lot of packaging to put stuff in. Like I remember buying a bottle of Crown Royal years and years ago at the liquor store and they put it in a paper bag. Yeah, when you thought it was the fanciest liquor. Totally. And you would leave with the paper bag and take it home and you would pull the box of Crown Royal out of the paper bag. You'd pull the velvet bag that the Crown Royal was in out of the box and then you'd

pull the bottle out of the velvet bag and then finally after you unscrewed the cap, you could get to what you were after all along, which was the delicious Crown Royal. Right and you would put your bag of weed in the velvet bag and you would go to the Motley Crew concert. That's right. With your little 90s bowl, the little brass bowl. That's right. And hey, this is not to disparage Crown Royal because they have been friendly enough to

send us their delicious rye. Oh yeah, over and over again. They really took care of us. They gave us those bags that were monogrammed. That's right. So, yeah, no, not anything to disparage on Crown Royal, but it always struck me even back then like this is a lot of packaging and how necessary is this? And we finally reached the point where the rest of society is caught up to me and are

asking these questions now and the answer that we seem to be coming up with is a lot of this stuff is totally unnecessary and the stuff that is necessary, we have to learn to make better and reuse better because we are awash in garbage. And here in America, it's kind of tough to see unless you drive past the landfill because we don't litter like we used to, but what we do is we dump our stuff either in landfills or else we export it to other less developed countries to use them as our landfills, which is really morally uncool, you know? Oh, absolutely.

And it's funny. I just noticed the other day, the very popular Binax now COVID at home COVID tests, COVID came through our house again. We all got it, everybody. We're all great. We're all fine. Good. But PSA, it's still out there.

Be careful. But long and short of it is we were taking a lot of these tests over the course of two weeks and they are smaller now. I had to order some more and they are now, I don't know if you've used these, they're not in that giant long box and I thought, oh, is there only one in there now? And no, they just didn't need that big box. It's like the old CD long box. I was going to say the same thing.

Yeah. And they came in the mail, it's like, oh, well, good. This thing is probably not half the size, but probably close to it because there was no reason for those two COVID tests just to be flopping around with all that real estate. Yeah. So good for them. Yeah. Good for you, Binax.

Did you get them in the mail because Joe Biden sent them to you? Joe Biden? I did send off for the free one from the government, but I also had to, you know, we just keep a stock in the house because we like to just make sure we're keeping everyone safe. Definitely. And you have a bowl full of condoms by your front door too. Exactly. Except ours is like, give a penny, take a penny.

You take a condom, you got to leave a condom of equal or lesser size. What are they saying? What am I doing? They call them like Coney Island white fishes, remember? That's right. Use condoms in New York. Oh, God. Man, you need to clean that bowl out, Chuck.

Oh, can we talk about packaging waste? Yes. Let's talk about this because get this in the United States, 28% of municipal solid waste. That's everything. That includes old washing machines for Pete's sake. 28% of municipal solid waste is packaging, containers, stuff that the stuff we're actually buying comes in or is shipped in or is transported to the store in, 28%, right? So if we can do something about that, if we can reduce the amount of packaging or make

the packaging we use more recyclable, that would have an enormous impact on our landfill footprint just out of the gate. Right. And we do a decent, I don't even know, decent is such a term that it's all over the place according to who you are, so I don't even want to use it. But we have put a dent in this packaging waste with our recycling, at least, compared to the past. Maybe that's the safest way to say it.

Yeah, we've definitely gotten better. Because in 1960, about a tenth of packaging waste was recycled, 2018 was the most recent year we have, we're up to 54% of packaging waste being recycled, but that still means that they're, let me see here, plastic, 10 million, what is this, tons? Yes. 10 million tons of plastic still end up in the landfills. Out of 15 million total. Yeah, 7 million out of 12 million of wood, aluminum, you would think that's the easiest

thing to recycle. Everyone throws their aluminum cans in recycling, right? Not true. About half, 1 million aluminum cans end up in landfills with 2 million total. Yeah, that's unconscionable. Yeah. Aluminum, as I've seen it described, is infinitely recyclable. You can just keep making the same aluminum can over and over again if you'll just recycle

it rather than divert it to landfill. That's pretty bad, 1 million landfill out of 2 million. On the other end, cardboard, we're really, really good at recycling cardboard. People recycle it, it's also easy to recycle, so it gets recycled. Out of 42 million tons of paper and cardboard that was generated for packaging alone, just packaging everybody. I'm not including construction paper from elementary schools, none of that, this is all just packaging. In 2018 in the US alone, out of 42 million, only 5 million of that, 5 million tons ended

up in the landfill, so that's really, really good. The cardboard's not the problem as far as like packaging and shipping and all of that stuff goes, because a lot of it, most of it gets recycled. The big problem isn't even aluminum cans. The problem, Chuck, is plastic. Yeah, plastic's a big problem, and a lot of this, again, overlaps with our bottle water app, and we'll talk about plastic all throughout this episode. Yeah, and when you think plastic, that's usually, especially when you're talking about plastic

packaging waste. You think bottled waters or something like that, or water bottles, but it can be any kind of single-use plastic where it can be like a Dorito wrapper, that's made of plastic. Styrofoam packing peanuts, that's a kind of plastic too, it's a polystyrene. Plastic shows up in all sorts of other ways and other places, especially with packaging, and the other thing that you have to remember is this. Think about how light plastic is. Okay, 10 million tons of plastic.

That is so much plastic in real terms, in real life terms, out there in landfills or in the environment even worse, that we're throwing away every year, every single year. Yeah, it's really unnerving when you get a product that is shrink-wrapped in plastic that doesn't need to be. It's, you know? Yeah, I blame the Tylenol Poisoner for that. Yeah, but really? Remember, they were the ones who triggered tamper-proof packaging and putting everything

in shrink-wrapped and stuff. Yeah, but is a tape measure, is it going to be tampered with? I was in. But I think that that's an extension of that impulse that was originally created by the Tylenol Poisoner, that tamper-proof packaging got extended to everything. Yeah, I guess so. And I know some of it is to protect the thing, but let's say you go out and get a screwdriver set.

Sure. They're not going to sell you eight screwdrivers in a little vinyl bag. They sell you eight screwdrivers in one of those huge square molded plastic things that are, A, impossible to open, so they're annoying. But it just drives me crazy. It drives me crazy. Have you tried practicing opening them? Before you need the screwdriver?

Sure. You got to get a carpet knife. What brand do you use? Carpet knife? No, but I mean, you're a screwdriver. When you're buying that big box of screwdrivers, what brand are you buying? I feel like I'm being set up for something that I don't understand, so I'm just going to go ahead and say, craftsman?

Okay. No, that's all right. It was a rhetorical question. There's no wrong answer. I don't have a problem opening and closing the plastic box with DeWalt brand tools. Well, I got a lot of DeWalt stuff. I love DeWalt. I do too.

In fact, most of my major power tools are DeWalt, but I'm just remembering, I shouldn't have said screwdrivers. I should have said like wrenches because the wrenches I bought, the wrench set came like that. I actually found a screwdriver set where it had 12 screwdrivers in, and it was plastic, but it was in one little plastic screw lid container. Nice. And it seemed a lot better than the other alternative at least.

Yeah. The next best step after that is there's just some dude who hangs out at the store that carries him home in his arms and dumps him onto your floor and then leaves like that kind of packaging. Yeah. He opens his overcoat and all the screwdrivers are hanging there. You just take your pick. Let's talk a little bit about the history before we break, I think, because I always

think of Emily's grandparents, Charlie, who has left us, and then Mary, who was still chugging along at 101 years old, believe it or not. They didn't have garbage collection for almost their entire lives in rural Ohio. They didn't want to pay for it, and they didn't need it because they reused, recycled, and when I say reused, they really reused. They composted, they did all the old things because they're that old school depression era generation to where you appreciate things like that and you don't want to waste. And that's the way that used to just be the norm.

People would buy and ship things and barrels and wooden boxes, and they would reuse those and glass bottles that they would reuse. They would wrap up cheese and meats and things and cloth forever that you would reuse and then eventually butcher paper, and that was just, they didn't even have regular garbage pick up until about the mid-1800s here. Right, because again, they didn't need it. Yeah, somebody sent you something in a wooden crate, you'd build an addition on your house. Right.

Exactly. It was like that. They would use glass bottles, and then if the glass bottle broke, they would fix it. And I was like, how would they fix it? And apparently, there's something called water glass. It's sodium silicate, and it's a spreadable kind of glass where if you heat it up, it basically fills in all the cracks and it's good as new. I wonder if that's how they do, should I ask Emily's dad, the window chips?

Oh, I wonder too. Emily used to do that for a little while because her dad has a Seneca glass if you're in near Akron, Ohio. Nice. That's the place to get your windows replaced. Sure. But Emily did that for a summer. She fixed glass chips.

Yeah, you should definitely ask her that. So we didn't have garbage pickup because we didn't need it because everybody was reusing stuff. Food waste, like you said, they were composting it, or they would just throw it out for the livestock, the hogs, the chickens, whatever. They would eat the whatever food waste, and I would guess that they had much less food waste than we have today. But again, there wasn't much need for garbage collection.

That's not to say there wasn't garbage. I saw in the 18th century in New York, they built a pier in the East River, purpose built to dump garbage into the East River. That's the downside. Not like they weren't doing it, but it was just so minuscule compared to the amount of waste that we generate today that is essentially negligible. Yeah, absolutely. 1856 is kind of a fun little fact to keep in your pocket.

Corrigated paper, what would become corrugated cardboard was invented in 1856 in England because of those big tall hats to keep those things stiff. Pretty cool. I think so too. It became a thing. Well, yeah, this slowly started replacing the wooden crates for shipping, so you couldn't build an addition on your house anymore. That's right.

But it was a lot lighter. It was a lot easier. It used up a lot less coal on the ship to move across the sea. It was kind of a step up for sure. And then Nabisco was the first one to start selling single-serve individual packaged foods. All the way back in 1890. It makes sense in one way, but if you start caring about the environment, it makes zero sense whatsoever.

But they were the ones who kicked all that off. Yeah. I found that kids, and I remember this about myself, are very into those things. I think just because they're small, I remember being obsessed with the kids who could afford the little individual Pringles. Not the ones they sell in the store now, but they used to sell these little plastic peel-away top Pringle servings. Oh, yeah.

And the kids in school that had those, I was so jealous of. The rich kids. The rich kids. Yeah. I had my Charles Chip's tin in my Tupperware. You had to make a basket out of your shirt and carry it around school till lunch. But Kellogg's, you mentioned, or maybe you didn't, but they were the first cereal box, obviously, in 1906.

And then beer cans were steel originally. They started in 1936. Thank you, Coors. And then they switched to aluminum in 1959, and this is very cool when you go look at an old, I think, Smoky and the Bandit even had these, where you had to use a can opener to open a beer back in the day. Very cool. Yeah.

They should bring that back. The pull tabs better, because you have to keep a can opener on you, you know? Well, and the pull tabs, even though they were bad for the environment, you could make an emergency phone call at a telephone booth if you were Matthew Broderick. You could use that as a fake coin, a slug? No, in war games, Matthew Broderick knew this trick, where he unscrewed the receiver, where you talk into it, and then like, I don't think it's true at all. I think they literally just made this up for the movie and used a pull tab to make it like

an electric connection and like kind of hot wire the phone, just give it a dial tone. I'm sure it was not true. I got you. But used to see those all over the place, the pull tabs, all over the place on the ground. Yeah. I was on an attic the other day, and there was an old pull tab, old Milwaukee can. It's funny. Look how old is this?

Yeah, it's funny when you find those these days. Well, now I know it doesn't go back any earlier than 1963. That's right. So like we said, they were using dumps in horrible places, like they would use wetlands back in the day to dump trash in. Apparently, Boston's back bay was a wetland that was originally a garbage dump, and if you've ever been into back bay, that's fairly ironic because it's one of the more well-heeled parts of Boston today.

It built up a real she-she area that has like an anthropology and everything on it. Yeah. And we should do an entire episode, I think, on fresh kills. That is basically what Staten Island used to be almost entirely, well, that's not true. But it was a 2,200 acre landfill on Staten Island after, I believe after World War II, yeah, 1948, and I just, it's such a rabbit hole, I started looking into fresh kills, and I had to stop. And I was like, we just need to make this an episode because it was a remarkably large,

it was the largest one in the world, largest landfill, and they're reclaiming it by 30, I'm sorry, by 2038. It's gonna be finished as a park, fresh kills park. I've seen some of the artists rendering of it, it's gonna look really neat, very peaceful. Yeah, it would be a good episode though, I think it's interesting history. Okay, deal. So those dumps that we started to generate, like every city starting in the 20th century, really started to need more and more dumps and more and more space for landfills.

And it grew because our single-use packaging grew. We just started throwing stuff away, and in our littering episode, I think we specifically said that the plastic garbage bag people basically got together and said, we need to teach everybody to start throwing things away, they keep reusing this plastic stuff. So they basically created a public information campaign to teach everybody to throw stuff in the trash and to take their trash out to the garbage can every night and to do this every single day. They taught America to throw stuff away, which is just so villainous, but that really kind

of was the beginning around the middle of the last century of our obsession with single-use packaging basically. Yeah, I think that glad bag first came around in the late 60s, and then just before that in the mid-60s, the grocery bag, the little light groceries bag that has been such a problem in the world, that came around in 65, but if you don't remember those when you were like our age and you were a kid in the 70s and 80s, it's because people still generally used paper sacks. They were really slow to catch on those plastic bags, but eventually in 1985, there was a conference

of the Society of Plastic Engineers, and someone stood up on a stage and said, hey, these things are $24 per thousand, paper bags are $30 per thousand, and that changed everything, $6. Yeah, they were really working at the Plastic Grocery Sack Council, that was the thing. In 1986, they got their hands on the LA Times and said, hey, make sure you tell everybody that we've concluded plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways. They said it can be used as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger's windbreaker, or a beach bag. I'm going to go on, I'll bet the other 14 are like, and a library bag, and a school bag,

and a school lunch bag, and a work lunch bag. You can sacrifice a child with them. Well actually, yeah, that was the thing, they had to teach Americans, these things are really dangerous. Yeah, don't put it over your head. Right, there's a famous photo of a plastics researcher with, I think, a dry cleaning bag over his head trying to take a breath, and it really got the point across for sure. Also though, not from the very beginning, but once they caught on in the mid-80s, people

did start kind of rallying against them in a lot of cases. There was a 500,000 member group called the General Federation of Women's Clubs who in 1986 said, no, these things are clearly not going to be good for the environment, so let's not use them. And that was 86 long time ago. It was, and they got absolutely nowhere, because I saw about a decade ago, they estimated that between 500 billion and 1.5 trillion plastic bags are consumed globally each year at a rate of more than a million a minute.

So they got nowhere. But there have been some successes. McDonald's was the first, actually, to pioneer single-use packaging for food, and that meant that they didn't have to have dishwashers at their restaurants, they didn't have to have waiters to clear away plates. And within, I think, 40 years, they finally were like, okay, we'll give up our foam packaging, which I mean, there are a few things more nostalgic for me than looking at pictures of the old colored foam packaging that McDonald's received.

That blue, it's McDonald's foam packaging blue, there's no other way to describe it. Definitely. But the McDLT was the breaking point for everybody. They were like, this is too much. Hot side hot, cool side cool. That's right. So that was the end of that, but we still have a plastic problem. All right.

So let's take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about Amazon right after this. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb be her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. 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 or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it.

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Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by Amazon. Well, we got to talk about it because especially, I mean, Amazon has been shipping things for a long time. But especially, I think when COVID took over, people really, really, really started giving a lot of things delivered that they used to routinely go to stores for. And they have changed the way packaging works and the world and especially the United States.

There was a report by a group called Oceana that found that worldwide Amazon generated almost 600 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2020 and that almost 24 million pounds of that ended up in waterways and oceans. And Amazon said, oh, that's a miscalculation. They didn't show their math. So that's just waterways and oceans. That's not landfill stuff. And there's a significant amount of what's called plastic film used to make those puffy

air pillows that they use instead of styrofoam peanuts, which in a lot of ways are much preferable to styrofoam peanuts. But there's way better alternatives to even those shipping pillows too. Because it's made of plastic film, which is the same type of plastic that those plastic grocery bags are made from. And they're really hard to recycle. It takes a special facility. So if you ever get those plastic pillow like shippers in the mail from Amazon and you have

your plastic grocery bags from Publix or whatever grocery store you go to and you save those and you take them to your grocery store and put them in the plastic bag recycling thing, they will actually go take them and recycle them and turn them into useful things like composite decking for your house or something like that. That's a good tip. So it is. But just don't just throw it away and also don't use them to hold your recyclables and put them in your recycling container because that whole bag of recyclables will get thrown

out because those things will screw up the normal recycling process so badly. Another good tip. I got another good tip for you. Here in Atlanta, we have a place called Charm, the center for hard to recycle materials. And Charm is one of our favorite places to go to because you pull into Charm and there are all these people in this huge parking lot and all these various stations to help you recycle anything you can think of. It can be your shredded documents.

It can be car batteries. It can be paint cans. It can be your old computer desktop. They recycle almost anything you can think of. And I guarantee you there are places in every major city and probably even a lot of smaller towns that have a Charm-like place. And all you got to do is just save that stuff, throw it in your car, take it over there, and they'll take care of it for you.

It's great. So Amazon's easy to pick on because they're shipping so much stuff. They use up so much material for shipping and packaging and cushioning and all of that. But they're also easy to pick on because if you look at what they're doing in other countries, it shows like they could totally revise stuff. Whenever they're forced to, they find innovative ways to replace that stuff with more sustainable packaging. Yeah.

They don't just say, like India says, hey, you can't use this kind of tape anymore and these kinds of packing peanuts. They don't say, oh, well, I guess we're not going to ship to India anymore. They figure it out and they just don't implement those policies across the entire company, which is maddening. Yeah. Which we'll see. India has really taken maybe the world's leadership stance on single use plastics and

dealing with it as a country. Germany's following suit. So Amazon's saying, okay, well, we'll start doing the same thing in Germany. But rather than just being like, okay, it makes sense for us to just do it for every country if they're not making money doing that in other countries, they're going to hold out until they're legally forced to, or until enough countries require them to, that that's just what they use across the board because then it is cheaper than making two different kinds depending on where they're shipping to.

Those meal kit services that everyone loves so much. This is a bit of a mixed bag because on the surface you look at their packaging and the fact that some of these boxes have up to two dozen individual packages of things. And then you're talking about the packaging, the big box that it comes in and the smaller foam box to insulate it. And then these ice packs that a lot of times have chemicals that are very hard to recycle. But I did some digging in and there are a lot of companies doing a lot better job. One thing that they do tout, which I think is true, is that they really reduce a lot

of food waste. And so what you want to do is look at the entire environmental footprint of an operation versus just buying groceries at a grocery store. And it kind of comes out even in some cases, some companies are better than others. I did see that Blue Apron has about 85% recyclable packaging and drain safe ice packs that you can just drain yourself and then recycle that package. So some are better than others, but if you care about that kind of thing and you like meal kits, I would encourage you to investigate the services that speak to you environmentally.

Yeah. One 2019 study found that Blue Apron specifically had 33% less emissions from the same meal that you would buy at a grocery store. Yeah. And they haven't sponsored us in a long time. No, no. This is not bail. So there's actually a pretty big widespread push to innovate new packaging materials that

are easier to recycle, that are made from more recycled materials, that are made from sustainable materials, that are easily composted. And there's some competitors are better than others. Some are already proving themselves as probably not the way we want to go, but some other ones are like, wow, it's a really good idea and we should figure it out. Yeah. So we can take corn and quite a bit in the bottled water up because they can take corn, they can make it into a plastic, it's called PLA, polylactic acid, right?

Sure. And it's a plastic resin. It is not petroleum based. It can be composted, but, and I think we said this in the bottle water one too, it's not compostable as in like, great, I'll just buy corn bottles and throw them in my compost bin, you can't do that in your backyard, it's got to be like industrial composting, which is still good, but you have to take it to a industrial composting facility or be involved in a program that will do that for you because there are those out there too.

Yeah. And then anything made with corn, they also have corn based packing peanuts, which really they should figure out how to make them from peanuts, don't you think, just to make it fully appropriate? Or just put in popcorn. That's spongy. And then everyone could just have a snack. You can eat it.

You can be like, this popcorn is not very good, but it's sustainable. I'll reuse it. The problem is, is anything you're making from corn, whether it's plastic or those packing peanuts is you're growing corn and you're diverting it from the food system to other purposes. And I remember we were all about ethanol back in the day, corn based ethanol, and it just, for the same reason, it didn't pan out because we should be using food cropland for growing food, not for growing plastic.

Right. Mushrooms is a really interesting alternative, mycelium based packaging. It's been around for a little bit since about the mid 2000s. And it seems like there's almost nothing mushrooms can't do and fungi except get me to eat them. But there's a really cool documentary about mushrooms that Emily and I are going to watch soon that a couple of friends have told us about. It's sort of a wonder, not product, but species.

Yeah. Food. No. Thing. I think it's a kingdom. Okay. A wonder kingdom. That's even better.

Yeah, it totally is. I like that a lot. I could see that on a cape. But they have found that they can use it as an alternative to styrofoam and even other plastics is for like cushioning things. Yeah, and what's cool is you can grow fungi sustainably on like agricultural refuse, right? That's being composted. You could grow your fungi into exactly the shape that you want.

That's amazing. Yeah. Like our friend, Anderson Rex, who runs Wine Spies. When you get a box from him, have you ever noticed like, how is this cushioning exactly the right size for this large bottle and then next to it is this small bottle? And I'm not quite sure, but it's possible. It's mycelium packaging material and you can grow it like that. The only thing that I saw that would be problematic, it seems like at this point is a scalability

and then lead time to produce because I saw it can take like seven days to grow a container. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I'll have to ask Addison. I owe him a phone call. I tried to ask him and he hasn't texted me back yet. That's what I said. Forget that phone call.

That's right. Thank you for sticking up for me, Chip. Algae is another interesting alternative. There was a contest just this year that offered over a million bucks for developing plastic alternatives and five of the eight finalists were algae or seaweed based. Yeah. By the way, that contest was created by Tom Ford. The fashion designer?

Yeah. Really? I love that guy, man. Does he make algae clothes? I guess he's going to from now on. Interesting. It was straight up for, you know, to find an alternative of plastic, but it was a Tom Ford prize.

What did you say, five of the eight finalists, seaweed or algae? I was looking at one of them. There's a company from Berkeley, I think, called Sway. They basically grow seaweed, so automatically you're not using terrestrial cropland. It's also supposedly really restorative to grow seaweed off of the coast for ecosystems and things like that. Then also, when you grow and make plastic out of algae, it's really easy to biodegrade and in some cases, you can actually eat it after you're done.

Like that, my popcorn peanut idea. Exactly. This is remarkable. It depends on how far the algae is broken down into the chemicals that make it up, but some of them, if they want to engineer this, could even retain some like antimicrobial properties in the packaging itself, all natural. The future is in fungi and algae. I feel like it wouldn't algae or seaweed like a fuel source too?

Yes. Yeah. They have not figured it out yet, but yes, it's some sort of byproduct. You can raise algae that will create some sort of fuel, a biofuel. I don't remember much about it. Very interesting. So there's another way to make all this work, and it seems to be figuring out how to make stuff more recyclable, how to make packages more sustainable on a big scale.

And a lot of people have concluded that that is not going to happen until countries and states and cities start requiring that be the case from manufacturers. And I say we take a break and then come back and talk about that. How about that? Let's do it. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. 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, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, 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. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for

it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you said that there is a better way forward. But as we can tell from the practices of some large-scale shipping companies, unless they are forced to, then they're not going to make those changes because it costs them a little bit of money.

Right. So basically, we could talk all day about going back in time and doing things like we used to as far as reusing things. And there are some companies that are doing some cool stuff. I know that there are a couple of cleaning product, home cleaning product companies where you buy the glass bottle with the spray tops and you mix your own countertop spray and stuff like toilet spray and you get these little packets and you keep your glass bottles. And there are companies out there doing things like this, but that is not likely to catch

on country-wide because people love just grabbing the thing off the grocery shelf and buying their plastic bottle spray. So what it takes and what you teased before we broke was it's going to take either people demanding it or more probably the law saying you have to do it. Yeah. You want to say that just consumers demanding it like you're saying would make a change, but there's not enough people doing that. Right?

You want to instead turn that ire to your elected officials and say, hey, you need to do something about this and it's happened in some places and it's all based on something called the polluter pays principle, which dates all the way back to 1972 and basically says if you're the one who's manufacturing this plastic bag that gets thrown away in a river, it should be up to you to deal with that. Like you should have to factor that into your production costs. And it's not to punish anybody, but it's to do what's called internalizing the negative externalities.

So negative externalities, you know, that plastic bag we all pay because of that pollution that breaks down the environment and affects the food chain. That's a negative externality that's not included in the production cost of that plastic bag. And what this kind of polluter pays principle says is we need to figure out how to include that in the cost so that the people who are creating this waste are the ones who are actually paying for it in the end rather than the rest of society. Right. And that became the basis for what's called extended producer responsibility, EPR, which

means you ship something to a person and you don't just go, well, no, that thing that you package is still your responsibility as a company across the entire life cycle of that product and when it came in is the manufacturer should be responsible for, for whatever it is that they're putting out into the world. There's something called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, that was established, I think in 72. And they put out a report that said that 10 OECD governments have some kind of legislation in place for extended producer responsibility and the U.S. is not one of those, correct?

No, it wasn't. And that was back in 96 that they released that report. So that's pretty impressive, but we actually are familiar with them to some extent. If you've ever taken your paint to a special center or your oil, your used car oil, you took it back to like the auto parts store or something like that, you were probably engaging in some sort of extended producer responsibility where the company that made that oil is responsible for making sure that it gets recycled and paying for it to be recycled. That's just because some state or city said that that's the law and they have to do that

if they want to do business there. But what they're trying to figure out with extended producer responsibility laws today is to include all packaging, all shipping material, all of that waste, figuring out how to make that fall into an extended producer responsibility model. And that's proving challenging, like you said, especially in the United States. Yeah, I think India has a pretty good idea in creating a kind of competition among companies. They require that a percentage of plastic produced by any manufacturer ends up getting recycled like it's a requirement.

And if you do better and if you overperform, you get credits basically and you can sell those credits to other companies who are underperforming. So all of a sudden you have this competition going on where a company is manufacturing something and they're really incentivized because not only are they getting these credits, but their competition potentially is having to pay them money because they're underperforming. So that's a really good way to say like, well, get it in gear then because you're paying your competition to take care of your waste for you. Yeah.

Do you remember those carbon trading schemes from back in the 2000 aughts that were kind of big? Like buying carbon offsets? Yeah. Same thing. It was they put a cap on carbon emissions and companies that didn't emit as much could sell their credits or whatever to the other companies that did. And yeah, it's a great idea.

So it would make sense to make an extended producer responsibility scheme out of that. But that's how wide open it is. Like however you could figure it out, that's the stage that we're at right now, however you could figure out how to hold people accountable and we're just not quite there yet. No. It depends. You know, it's come down to the state level, of course, in 2021 there was a coalition of states, the lawmakers got together, they were known as the EPR for packaging network.

And they, I believe California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington all got together to introduce bills that, you know, basically to give some teeth and legislation to this kind of thing. And I think that Maine passed one, a really big one that saw that basically it was a fund that manufacturers had to pay into. So based on how much they were, like what kind of packaging they produced, they would pay into this fund, depending on how recyclable it was and it was like a sliding scale. And that would, that fund was then used to help municipalities manage that packaging

material. Right. And then California saw this and said, hold my kombucha and they passed definitely the strictest EPR packaging law in the country back in, I think, 2022. Also known as 2022. I don't know why I said it like that. But under this law by 2032 and 10 years, all packaging in the state has to be either recyclable or compostable.

That's a huge leap forward. Packaging has to be reduced in total by 25%. Great. 65% of all packaging has to be recycled after use. And you might say, oh, wait a minute. I mean, like how, how would the companies make that happen? California said, figure it out, make it happen. When you packaging, packaging industry, you have to create an organization that basically

oversees this and make sure that industries doing business in California are recycling 65% of their stuff. Even after they sell it to somebody, you have to figure out a way to make sure that the consumer out there who has your Dorito bag in their hand is going to recycle it. Yeah. Here's the problem though in America is half of the country will say, well, yeah. But every single penny of that is going to be passed down to the consumer because the company isn't going to take the hit.

So they'll just raise prices on products and then that'll lead to inflation and it comes out of our pocket. So we'd rather just throw everything in the trash because I don't even see what happens to it after at least my house anyway. So I mean, that's a really good point. I don't know if it's actually how it would pan out. You'd think that, that of course the company would pass along that cost. But I think there's plenty of people out there who are like, you know, I'd pay a little

more for something that I knew was going to be recycled or that I knew was going to. Is it pennies? Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know. And the thing is when more and more of these laws come about, companies are going to start creating subdivisions in their research and development divisions that are figuring out new packaging that are going to like follow these laws.

And then, I mean, if we sick industry on a problem like sustainable packaging and we make it worth their while because they're required to figure this out by law, it's going to get solved pretty quick, I would guess. And then yes, at first, products probably will be more expensive than they are pre, you know, the pre-passing or inaction of these laws. But after a while, those prices are going to come down because those technologies will have been developed and will have been deployed widely and they'll be ubiquitous. And now, all of a sudden, all of our shipping and packaging material will be able to be

composted at home or 100% recyclable, or we'll just turn into pixie dust in your hands the moment you finish that last review. Well, we're in a situation, though, where we're so divided politically in this country. We are having a hard time even getting together on something as easily and obviously bad as plastic grocery bags. You know, a lot of states have stepped up and said, you know what? You can't use these anymore. You just can't use plastic grocery bags.

Or you know what? If you want to use one, if you insist, then pay a nickel for it so we can at least take care of the recycling. And then there are a lot of states in this country that pass preemptive bans on the bans. And I looked it up and it's on ballotpedia.com if you want to look at a list of them all. But there are a lot of states that are like, you know what? We're going to pass a law that says there will never be a law that bans plastic bags. And the citizens of the state of North Dakota have a right to use those plastic bags forever.

I wrote an expletive on my printout after that one. It's so maddening. I mean, and these are the same people who are screaming about states' rights, you know? It's just disgusting, dude. A ban on a ban, a preemptive ban on a ban for a municipality is just gross. Yeah. Unless, of course, they're preventing discrimination or whatever. Right.

If there's places for it or not, but yeah, I guess when it's something that I agree with and they're banning it, then I got a problem with it, you know what I mean? With the plastic bags, though, there always is another side of the coin. Like, obviously, plastic grocery bags are pretty bad for the environment. But they did do some studies in California when they did ban these plastic bags. And it did reduce use of those plastic bags, but they did find that people started buying... Like a lot of people reuse those things for dog poop or lining trash bins or whatever. There's all little car trash bins or bathroom trash bins.

They all of a sudden had to start buying the thicker plastic bags to do that stuff, which are worse for the environment. And then, of course, people would switch to a cotton tote bag, which is far and away like the worst kind of thing that you can get as a cotton tote, apparently. So I saw that compared to plastic bags just because of the sheer number of plastic bags out there and just the fact that they're petroleum based and all the emissions that it takes in creating them, that a cotton tote is still better than the plastic bags in general. But if you compare one cotton tote to one plastic bag, yeah, the cotton tote is way

worse because there's all sorts of pesticides and industrial fertilizer inputs required. They use forced labor in China, which supplies the world with 25% of its cotton. There's some problems with cotton, for sure. And I saw that one study found that a cotton tote would have to be used every day for 54 years to outlive its environmental footprint. So yeah, there's problems with cotton totes. The idea is there. It's a good idea, but we've also seen like, okay, we need to figure out something else.

And there's this designer named Anya Hindmarch, who's just an awesome designer. She uses rainbow colors and everything, so I like her stuff. She created a cotton tote back in 2007 or eight and kind of kicked off the trend of using reusable shopping bags. And it said like, I am not a plastic bag. Well, since then, since it's become clear that cotton totes are problematic, she's created the same thing, but it's made out of recycled plastic and it says, I am a plastic bag.

Right. That's what you need to seek out. Yeah, for sure. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. Since we talked about Anya Hindmarch, everybody, I think that means it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this, shall we take a break? Hey, guys. Thanks for all the quality and lightning information, humor, and all the joy the podcast brings me and so many others. Is it time for a break? No, not yet. Oh, no, I know this email. That's not that hard, right?

I'm not sure what it takes to convince one another to actually defer taking a break, but it's been a fun anticipation game for me for the better part of a year. I almost did that today just to sort of give Tony here a little, a little, a little thrill, but I didn't. I've listened since 2018, but sometime late last year at Dondami, I couldn't actually recall either of you turning down, taking a break when you offer it up to each other. I think we've done that before. At least once.

Yeah, it's almost always posed as a question, which seems like it's giving your counterpart an option. Yeah, the response is always the same. Not sure if you guys have a pact to never defer, but if you read this out loud, then the beginning part of this email gives me the joy of at least hearing a break question, a typical response. So thank you for that. Take care.

Keep up the good work. And that is from Tony Coasters. Nice. And the closest... Sounds like a doo-wop fan. His middle name is Anna. I saw that coming. The closest you guys have come recently to deferring a break was in the infant formula

episode and you have me on edge. So Tony, just to let you know, we don't have a formula for that per se, but we generally shoot for about 45 minutes an episode-ish. And that would mean the breaks fall around 15 and 30 minutes. So we keep an eye on the clock and there always just seems to be a natural sort of organic spot within that rough time frame. Yeah, USDA organic spot to break in for sure. We don't have a pact or anything like that either to defer.

But also, can you imagine if one of us was like, and we're about to take a break, so we'll be right back? You know? Like the other one I think would feel a little bit stepped on. I think so. I know I would. I wouldn't want you to feel stepped on either. So of course we're going to ask one another, you know?

Yeah, we don't step on each other. No. And when we do, we edit it out. That's right. Well, thanks a lot, Tony and the Coasters. We appreciate that email. That was a good one. A little mind boggling too.

And if you want to boggle our minds like Tony did, you can send us an email. The Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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.

I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts. Introducing The Biz Take, your all things music, business and media podcast. Join me, Joe Wasleski and my co-host, Colin McKay every Wednesday, where we discuss the breaking news, changing the music industry and what your favorite artists and creatives are up to. Listen to new episodes of The Biz Take every Wednesday on the Nashville Podcast Network, available on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.