Stuff You Should Know - Who's Up For A Circular Economy

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

What if we could take all the trash and waste we generate every year – gigatons worth – and used it again as raw materials. What we would have is a closed circle, one where we have everything we need without taking anything else from nature. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership listen to black tech green money from the black effect podcast network on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeart radio But really, what more do you need on stuff you should know? Yeah, in our world, in about two or three minutes, Jerry will just come in and go, hey, I'm here, guys. Sorry, I'm late. I feel like she's learned not to do that. She'll just sit there on mute for a while. Really?

Yeah, she hasn't done it in a little while. She's really turned over a new leaf. All right. We'll see. We'll see. We should leave it in if she does come in. Yeah. We should do that.

We'll share with everybody. Except they'll just hear our end. So all they'll hear us, oh, God, Jerry. Well, no, I think if she chimes in on Riverside, we could edit that into the final edit. All right. This will be a fun test. It will be. And there's a little peek behind the curtains for everybody of how we do our thing.

Slapdash. That's right. While making fun and Jerry. Yeah. Hey, I just noticed we were not on the list of Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Podcast of all time. What? Really? Yeah.

It was funny because I saw that list, and my first instinct was, I mean, top 100? That's a lot. Like, surely, we cracked the top 100. They probably haven't heard of us is what it is. No, we're not on there. Literally, all of our old-time colleagues. Oh, I'm sure. You name it.

Radio Lab, 99% Invisible, Ira, Marin. Like, every podcast of note of the past 18 years except for us, basically. Wow. That's very stuff you should know, isn't it? It is. It is very fitting. We don't let that stuff get to us, though, do we? No, Time magazine, who cares?

Yeah, I didn't even know they put out a stupid podcast list. Yeah, watch, we're going to be men of the year now. The headline on the cover will be like, oh, gosh, we forgot. Well, no, you'll be men of the year, but I won't be a mentor. That's how it'll work. That's what time does. They tinker with relationships by dividing. That's right.

Speaking of tinkering, I think we could all tinker with our worldwide economy a bit. and perhaps make it more circular. What are you talking about? Well, Josh, I'm talking about our topic at hand. Mm-hmm. Talking about circular economy, my friend. Oh, I didn't get the reference. Mm-hmm.

So have you heard this before? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I ran across it. As far as I know, it's fairly new from the 2000 aughts. I didn't see that it was an idea that was laying around already in this exact form. and then was picked up and promoted. So it's possible it was generally created by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Hats off to Ellen MacArthur. Yeah. So Ella MacArthur, as far as I know, still holds the world record for the fastest solo sail trip around the entire world. 26,000 miles of circumnavigation. Circular. In 72 days. Yeah, she loves circles.

And apparently on her trip, I was reading about it. It sounds just insane. And by the way, whenever I read of, like, world sailing trips, I can't help but think of one of the best documentaries of all time Deepwater about Donald Crowhurst. I believe you've seen it before. I know we've talked about it. Oh, if you haven't seen it, I actually envy you.

Is this the guy who, the diver? Nope. He's a sailor. It was about a, like, a 1975 world sailing competition. So he was, why is it deep water? wasn't deep in the water. Because he's sailing over deep water. Oh, over deep water.

They should call it over deep water. You should see it. You should actually, I'll wait. Let's just pause recording and go watch it. Is that good? I'll look into that. I've been on a documentary kick lately, so I'll definitely, I'm ripe. Time would put this one on their top 100 documentaries of all time, probably.

So, yeah, so while she was sailing around the world, she just started, she had, I guess, a lot of time to think and saw. a lot of waste and junk and terrible stuff and realize that there's a better way. And a lot of people have thought, like, okay, there's a better way to do this. There has to be. And what she promotes, what she's kind of come up with is this idea of a circular economy. And in a very short back-of-the-envelope sketch of it, the outputs, the waste of the economy, get reused as inputs. Yeah. As basically turned into raw materials.

And people say, oh, we're cycling. That's a big part of it. Yeah. But as far as the circular economy is concerned, we idealize recycling. Like, we're like, that's the best you can do. They're like, that's actually the least desirable out of all of them. There's a bunch of other stuff we can do instead. So circular economy.

Yeah. I mean, it sort of aligns with the whole reduce, reuse, recycle ethos. Mm-hmm. I think we could best explain it by maybe starting with what we generally have now, which is linear economy. Mm-hmm. And that's, who helped us with this, Dave? Yeah, Dave helped us.

Yeah, it smacks up Dave. But Dave calls it, and Dave didn't invent this term, but it's a take, make, waste economy system where you take resources and, you know, whatever like cotton or any kind of raw material. You make something into that to a product to sell the people. And then that thing maybe generally, quickly wears out and you throw it away. And it goes into a landfill. It's very, I mean, it's kind of the worst possible scenario you could ask for if you care about planet Earth and people and the world and animals in nature. And it's linear because it goes in one way. You have something, you make something, and then that thing wears out, and you throw it in the landfill.

Yeah, you take the cotton that you grow, you make it into a car, you drive the car into a landfill and jump out right before it goes over the cliff. That's what everybody does. That's right. So you left out kick back and watch the money roll in because that's ultimately what the biggest challenge to implementing a circular economy is. One of the biggest ones is that the linear economy that we have set up that's been around since the Industrial Revolution is a money-making machine. And it's easy to criticize when you sit there and look at all of the terrible waste and pollution and inequality that's been generated from it. You can also say, yeah, this wealth has funded a lot of science. It's improved a lot of living conditions.

Even the poorest people in America are living high on the hog compared to the poorest people in other nations. Like, the wealthy nations have really done well for themselves with the linear economy. Again, that's a big reason why there's a lot of reticence to transition to something different. Yeah, for sure. there are some, you know, notable, I'm trying to think of a term we could come up with that labels instead of a gold star, like an industry that gets the opposite of that, like a turd pin or something that you wear? I hate that weren't so much, turd. But yes, that would work very well. Do you know what makes turd worse is that it's spelled T-U-R-D?

Yes, that definitely does make it worse. Everything about that word is so bad. Yeah, totally. Turtly. So the four sectors that are sort of the worst are food, electronics, consumer goods, and construction, food obviously. And we're going to get into these, you know, more specifically as we go on. But generally speaking, food is a pretty terrible sector. And we've talked about food waste before. But it's not just the food waste that's like tossed by grocery stores and restaurants and stuff like that. But it's also, you know, a lot of places still are just using those single-use bags. And people are like, sure, double baggett, triple baggett. I don't want my. a tube of toothpaste to fall through that thing into the parking lot. And then all the packaging that goes into it. And we've, you know, again, we've covered all this stuff in various forms here and there. Unsustainable farming.

Electronics don't even get me started on electronics recycling and electronics that are basically impossible to repair or get repaired. Well, they're designed that way. We did an entire episode on that, planned obsolescence. And nothing gets me more mad almost. Yeah, when a company purposefully designs a product to break in a short amount of time, like they'll put some sort of sensor or electrical component next to something that generates a lot of heat so that it degrades faster. Like, it's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one. That's a big problem.

Yeah, like you said, with electronics, but clothing is another one too. It's designed to just be worn. you buy it cheaply, you wear it for a little bit, you throw it away. And we'll, like you said, we'll talk more about this stuff later. But my eyes started popping out when I was reading about clothing. Yeah, that's one for sure. And then construction, a lot of resources used in construction and, you know, basically construction materials, anytime we've done any sort of like renovation project, because, you know, we live in like a hundred-year-old house. So we've, instead of moving, we kind of stayed and fixed it up over the years at first by ourselves.

and then with, you know, the help of contractors and such. And as you know, you've been through stuff like that. It's like when that construction dumpster pulls up, we do everything we can. We fight tooth and nail to give stuff away. Like, hey, can you put all these awesome hundred-year-old bricks out by the sidewalk? Someone will take them. And, you know, they will acquies us.

You know, they hate dealing with us because they just want to throw that stuff in the dumpster. But we've managed to get rid of a, you know, we're going through a little thing now. And I had this really awesome screen door. and they were literally throwing this really nice screen door. It was like a good one. It wasn't just like a $40 screen door. It was like a Prada screen door. No, this was Gucci, I think.

No, but it was like a from like a craftsman company for craftsman homes. It was sort of like an upscale screen door. And they were throwing at the trash and I almost tackled the guy. And I put that thing out there and it was gone in an hour, you know. Oh, I bet. Just little things like that make me feel like, oh, God, I think I saved one little thing. from the landfill. Nice work, man.

Not for a pat-on-back, but you know what I mean. It just... Well, you still deserve it. It just kills our conscience is just burning up when they're throwing away even old wood and stuff. You know, I try to take that stuff to the camp and burn it? You know what I found when you're dealing with contractors and subcontractors? If you want them to do something, you have to tell them directly and kind of an authoritative voice and then finish with chop-chop. Yeah, and also stand there.

there and watch them because as soon as you leave they'll just say like whatever dude yeah for sure yeah for sure um okay so you guys out there listening probably have bloody crescent shape fingernail marks on the heel of your palms from hearing all this stuff so just settle down relax a little bit because now we're going to tell you a little bit about an alternative to that the closed loop model not linear circular the circular economy and it basically says it takes a look at everything wrong with the linear economy and fixes it one by one. And it's like there's a lot left open. It's not like this is just a like a completely ready to go economic model. It's going to solve every single problem and it's not going to create any other problems. It's more we're at the most conceptual stage. Yeah. That is being presented to people to say, hey, there's another way and here are some of the ways we can do it. Yeah. And it's sort of just the opposite of everything we were just saying. Instead of planned obsolescence, there's a planned permanence.

Like, hey, let's make something that lasts for a long time. That's one. Make something that's repairable. That's another. One really kind of brilliant thing that we're going to talk about later is this idea of, instead of owning something like sharing stuff, renting things, sharing things, paying for the use of things that you don't own. Right.

Like, you know, splitting that up. And then if something finally does reach the end of its life, because not everything will last forever, even the most well-made thing, those components then you can take down. And hopefully most, if not all of that, can be recycled or remade into something else. Yeah, and if you'll notice, reduction of consumption isn't an emphasis of this. I didn't see that talked about much at all. So no one's saying like, hey, you can't keep growing. it's just that the stuff that you're creating needs to last much, much longer. And the greatest thing you can do is to keep it as close to the consumer as possible, right?

So let's say you have a hammer. Everybody knows a hammer breaks like the second time you ever use it. Would you hammer in the morning? More of the evening for me. Okay. But I would do it all over the land. All right. So when you take a hammer, I was kidding about it breaking.

But if you have a hammer and you don't use it a lot, the best you could do is give it to somebody else who is going to use it more rather than throw the hammer away. That's a terrible example. I know people don't really throw hammers away. But keeping it reused so that there's no inputs or very little inputs, that's the ideal. The more inputs necessary, taking it apart, transporting it somewhere, putting it back together, refurbishing it. That is the least desirable, even though that's still within this scope that we currently have in the linear model that that's like the best you can do. The, you know, like recycling. Recycling is the last thing you want to do.

Yeah, and hammer's not the worst idea, my friend, because I'd say 99% of the people out there, if their hammer handle breaks, let's say you have a wooden hammer handle and that breaks, people just throw it in the trash. And you can fix that. One of my favorite things to do is I follow a few Instagram accounts where people fix things in front of your face like that, just simple everyday things. And it's incredibly rewarding to see someone take something that would normally be in the trash. And they're like, all you need to do is get another piece of wood, get that other piece of wood fully out of there and shape it like the broken piece. And then you've got another hammer. How do you shape it like the broken piece? What tools do you need for that?

Well, I mean, these people do this for a living, so they may have a lathe or something. But, like, it doesn't even have to be pretty. I bet you, you'd give me a broken hammer, buddy. With my limited tools and skills, I could make that hammer new again if I really wanted to. Okay. Here's a challenge. I challenge all stuff you should know listeners to mail Chuck your broken hammers, and he will fix every single one of them for you for free and mail them back out of his own pocket.

That's right. Send it to Top 100 podcaster at... One, two, three, Lane, Atlanta, Georgia. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right. We'll be right back. American history is full of wise people.

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like making products planned for permanence, making them just better rather than cheaper. But all of this stuff like is going to take a complete shift. in how we view economics, how we view growth, and also how we view consumer behavior. Because we're in a linear model right now, and the basis of the linear model is making it as easy as possible for you to buy and use and throw away, get rid of, whatever product it is you're buying,

whether it's potato chips, a hammer, a cotton for a car, whatever. You're going to get me every time, by the way, if you keep going back to that well. Yeah, but, you know, there are examples of things and companies that are and have been doing this. You know, Dave looked down on his kitchen table and saw an aluminum can and was like, hey, there's a good example right there. Aluminum is a very recyclable thing. Yeah. And thankfully, it's being recycled in pretty good rates.

It depends on where you are. If like you're in Brazil, that's about 100%. If you're in the USA, about 65%, but the average aluminum can that you're going to purchase in the United States is made from about 71% recycled materials. So we're doing okay there. It's a good example. We're doing great. It's a great example. It's probably the top example as far as the United States goes.

People tend to recycle cans and they're easy to recycle. So we have a process and an infrastructure that makes the whole thing fairly low hanging fruit. and because aluminum cams are light enough but also compactable, you can transport a bunch of them, so it's worth your while to transport them from a pickup site to like our actual recycling center. It's just checking all of the boxes. Even still, though, you see, with as easy as it is,

35% of those aluminum cans just get thrown away in the trash. Who's doing that? A lot of people. In 2075. Yeah, I know. It's kind of nuts, but it is. That is the case. So that right there just kind of goes to show you, like, that's where the consumer behavior

needs to change. Everything else is basically in place for us to recycle. All of the aluminum cans that we have, we're just not doing it. So that's, like, kind of one pillar, or an example of one of the pillars that has to be adapted to go to a circular economy, making people more thoughtful, I guess. Good luck, buddy. I know. I think that's probably more than anything what makes this a.

A pipe dream. I should say the most cynical side of me says that. Is getting everybody on board with a single idea these days is not possible, basically. Yeah, because all it takes is one schmo to throw his can away in the trash. And you just lost your 100% recycling status. And then everybody goes, what's the point of a circular economy anyway and goes back to the linear economy? Yeah, but the stat they could throw out then is 100% except Gary. Mm-hmm.

You know? And it would be a garrie. Yeah, I'm sorry Gary's. You know it's true. Yeah, not all Gary's are bad, but all bad people are Gary's. There's a stuff you should know, sure. Not all Gary's. Just, that's it. Okay. There are also some examples of companies that, you know, I'm a big Shark Tank fan of that TV show. And it seems like more and more companies are coming through there that are small.

And obviously they're small because they're on Shark Tank and looking for initial investments. But they're trying to do the right thing. here. Getting corporations on board is the big problem, but I've seen a lot of companies come through Shark Tank where they're like, hey, and the reason I mention this is because Unilever is one of the examples of a corporation that's partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They're reducing plastic waste, and they sell a ton of stuff. But like when they're selling detergent and stuff like that or shampoo, now they have programs where you're like, hey, send in your empty shampoo bottle, and we will fill that thing up and send it back to you. Or

or get it and concentrate, stuff like that. And there's a lot of, like, shark tank companies that are doing similar things, including cleaning products where they're like, hey, there's a better way to do this where you're just not, even if you're recycling that plastic, just burning through these things on a daily and weekly basis and tossing it in the recycling or worse trash. For sure, right. And I think, like, entrepreneurs creating small businesses

and focusing on, like, one thing that is sustainable, reusable, whatever, That's how larger corporations start doing that stuff because they buy those smaller corporations for that idea and implement it company-wide. Hopefully. So that's great that those people are out there. Or they squash it. Yeah, or they squash it. Yeah. Good Lord.

I just want to tell everybody we should say, hi, Jerry. Jerry's here, everyone. Oh. I was wrong. Yeah, I saw that there are, I did not see a single shampoo refilling station in the U.S. I found them in Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, and Pakistan so far. I mean, that's even better because then you're not, you know, mailing stuff, you know, because that's another type of waste is like just mailing the empty bottles and having that mail back.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you're going to the store already, and they're like, they're attractive little shampoo refilling centers. And I guess if you were really hard up, you could go just put your head under the nozzle and do little. A little squirt and then run home and wash your hair. Yeah. I mean, they've been doing that with the big five-gallon jugs of water forever, you know. Right. I thought of that, too.

Yeah, that's a good thing because those things are huge and just swapping those out and refilling them. Just it only makes sense. Yep. There's also, there's a Dutch company called Niagara, which is, again, backwards. You'd never know that unless someone told you or you happen to be wearing a Niagara T-shirt in front of a mirror. Yeah, it is the word again. I think just the way you said that might be confusing. Okay.

I got you. Yeah. I'm sure it was confusing. Can't you just hear like a time podcast monitor going and like checking some box that keeps us off the list? Yeah. Like, mm-hmm. 101. So if we're lucky.

So this company, they're Dutch, they targeted carpets and mattresses. And those are two of the worst offenders as far as, at least as far as textiles go, but maybe as far as all products go. Yeah. Because they're big. They're essentially impossible to recycle. They're very, very hard to recycle.

And people throw a lot of them away. I think 20 million mattresses are thrown away in the United States alone. 30 million in Europe. And we toss about two billion pounds, yeah, of carpet away every year in the United States, into landfills. Only 5% of carpet gets recycled. I couldn't even tell you where you would recycle carpet. I don't know.

Is there a place called recarpet? Maybe. That's what it should be called, right? Or carpets again. Right. Or all of that backward. Yeah, I mean, the other reason those two, they're targeting those two, A, is because the people of the Netherlands are great.

And, hey, if you live in the Netherlands and you would go see a live podcast of us there. In Amsterdam, let us know. Sure. Let's go ahead and just say that. We're putting out feelers for Europe, so we'd love to hear from people about where we might could get an audience. Sure. Is that okay to say that? Yeah, we should probably tell everybody it won't be for two years. Yeah, we're targeting 27, but we're going to get back on the road next year. Coming for you, Canada, in a big way. Yeah, for sure. So you better close the borders. That's a little, well, they might. I hope we'll be welcome. We'll get a pass. I hope. It's up in the air.

But long way of saying, the reason that they are targeting those specifically is not just the lifespan, but they actually have a name. They're called medium life bulky products. They, you know, this stuff lasts about 10 years, and they're just full of nasty chemicals. And so all of that leads to them being two of the worst defenders, mattresses and carpet, full of chemicals, don't last long, and they're fairly large. Yeah, especially if they're stained mattresses. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck. Recycling that. I saw 80 to 120 years for a mattress to degrade in a landfill, which actually seemed a little fast for me, but, you know, it's still not fast enough. So this company is like, okay, we're actually going to make this stuff out of recyclable materials. But even better than that, we're going to make it so that every part of the mattress is replaceable. Imagine that. Or repairable. Yes.

So you're like, I got just a gallons of urine staining the cover of my mattress. I need a new mattress cover. Rather than throwing out the whole mattress and waiting 120 years for it to degrade, you just call up Niagara and you say, hey, send me another mattress cover. And they say, hey, we didn't know that you could call direct from the United States to the Netherlands, but that's new for us. We'll send it to you straight away. And they send it to you.

You put it back on. And there's no urine whatsoever until the next time it happens. That's right. But they say, what's the magic word? And you have to go, again. Like a two-year-old. Again. They actually do that.

It's great. And we'll look at other Dutch companies because they're doing the right thing. It seems like in a lot of ways. One key to all of this is design. if you have a linear economy, which we do, like we said, it's purposeful. It's designed in such a way to make it, you know, either obsolete or just, you know, a mattress that can't be recovered or whatever. So you have to start with design. It has to start on the very conceptual phase of like, how could we make a mattress that could last you forever?

And then you design it that way because it's possible. Yeah, and design doesn't just apply to products, although that's the easiest thing to do is to say, okay, how can I design this product to fit into the existing recycling infrastructure or design it to be reusable or repairable? That's the easiest one. We also, though, need to design our recycling infrastructure to make it easier to recycle products that aren't designed to be recycled. So there's a lot of design that has to go, but you're right. Like, it has to be a conscious choice. And Dave points out something I think is important, too. Waste is a conscious choice, too.

Like, when your little, like, mini bag of Lays potato chips, when you're done with it, you throw it away, it was designed to be thrown away. Like, that was a decision that was made by the package designers. They didn't do anything to try to make it recyclable. They decided that the best thing for you to do with that package is, is to throw it away. And as much as you hate it, you have no choice. Your choice is to buy those lays potato chips or not buy them. And some people are starting to, based on the packaging.

So people, so some companies are starting to wake up. But for the most part, people are like, I don't want to think about the packaging that my potato chips come in. I have so many more bigger pressing issues right now that if you can just make it so that the people don't have to think about recycling it, then you're on to something. Yeah, 100%. And I was talking about myself,

I don't want to think about what I'm supposed to do with potato chip package. And I'm not being judgy. Like, I'm including myself in this. Like, I mean, I like to think I'm more conscientious than, say, the average person, but I'm certainly, I'm not at, like, Chuck level.

I'm not like the Emily level. You know me. I'm on her coattails. Right. I mean, when I was a kid, we had the Charles Chips driver come around. Yeah, I remember that. And we would give them our,

I mean, if you're of a certain age, you might remember this. There was a literal potato chip delivery company. They were called Charles Chips, and they came in a big metal tin. And you would finish with that tin, and your chip person would come by, and you would give them the tin of empty chips, and they would give you a full ten of chips. Yeah, they'd reach in with the cuff of their shirt, wipe the tin out, put the chips in the tin sometimes I saw. Yeah, and obviously, again, there's still waste with the delivery truck and stuff. So save the emails, but we're talking about, you know, we're not idealizing it as perfect. We're just saying, like, it's a better thing than what we're doing now, which is those little foil bags sitting in landfills.

For sure. And, yeah, that's another thing, too, is because this is kind of conceptual and not every issue is being tackled right out of the gate with it, like energy use is a big part of it. So they obviously are like, well, we need more renewables. That's kind of a no-brainer. But it's important because not everything can be done with renewable resources. Some stuff just requires fossil fuels. Some stuff, say, requires nuclear. So you have to be able to design those power plants or those industrial smokestacks

so that that stuff's being captured and reused as an input somehow. Right, exactly. And, you know, you talked about educating the consumer, but it's not educating the corporation. because they know this stuff. They do it on purpose for a reason, like you said. But it's more about, like, companies coming along where the end user isn't the single focus. They take a more macro view and say,

well, there's something bigger at work with these products we sell, and that's planet Earth and Mother Nature. And while the consumer is important and we want to give them a good product, we can start from the beginning and design something that has less of an environment, terminal impact designed to fit within these recycling networks, like, you know, aluminum, like you were talking about, like once those are up and running.

And a big one that I didn't even think of that they pointed out was like, do you need this new product? Does the consumer need it? Or is it just like, hey, I think we could boost sales in Q3 if we released a slightly different version of this dumb, same thing? Right. So you kind of mentioned something where, like, using something like leasing or renting something can also be applied to things we don't normally think of as what we lease or rent, right?

Right. One of the, again, a Dutch company called Bundles is basically they come to your house. They'll bring you your dishwasher or your washing machine or your dryer or your coffee maker or you can bundle it all together. That's the name. And they're going to bring you a really high-end MILA sustainably manufactured appliance. And you're going to have this thing in your house. And you don't have to lift a finger other than to use it.

This company brings it. They install it. They come by and maintain it. When it's done, when you're done with it, say you're moving and you can't use it anymore. They're going to come pick it up. They're going to refurbish it. They're going to bring it to somebody else. It's like really circular.

and the way that you are charged for is by the number of washes you, I guess, carry out. I guess that's how you talk about laundry. You carry out a wash. It is called a paper wash model and the whole basis of it is Wi-Fi. Like your washing machine is connected to their servers

so they're tracking how many times you're washing and then from what I can tell you get a monthly bill based on the amount of washes you did, the amount of use you did for that or you use for the washer or the dryer or whatever. You know what my takeaway here is? What? You've never washed your own clothes, have you?

That is not true. I'm actually kind of good at my own clothes. I had to get good because I don't know how I do it, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't get a spot on one of my t-shirts. So I've gotten good at salvaging t-shirts. Same. It's incredible how stained my t-shirt gets on a regular basis. And I do believe you can carry out of wash like nobody's busy.

Do you use shout? That's what I use. I shout it out. It works really well. I use, and I hate having to use it, but my friend from that has been working in wardrobe departments in Hollywood for 30 years said Zout is the one. I've not heard of Zout. Why do you hate to use it? Is it made from coal? It's just one of those disgustingly smelly products. Is it NAPtha? I don't know, but no. I mean, they mask it. It smells like, you know, just really, really, really, really, really. really heavily fragranced stuff. Yeah. And, you know, we're not down with that.

So it gets out a spot, but it'll taint. You got to wash it by itself. It'll taint your whole load. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and be right back. American History is full of wise people. What women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is gory.

Those founding fathers were gossipy AF, and they love to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.

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We were laughing too hard. But on bundles and that renting appliances, you have to do a lot of education. in the United States to overcome the perception of what the rented appliances means. Yeah, for sure. Because we grew up in a, and, you know, it's probably still the same way as Gen Xers, where, you know, appliance rental was something like you did if you couldn't afford to buy stuff, like you rented your TV or whatever.

Right. You're like, oh, man, that means you don't have much money to buy a TV. But there's a better way. And I wish they had this here, man, because we've had some. really bad appliance look, and it makes me so mad because this stuff's expensive. I would love to rent washer and dryer. Well, I'll rent you mine. I've heard they can carry out a heck of a watch. Yeah, it's part of the American dream to own your own washer and dryer. Not me, man. I hate those things. The government can take it from your cold dead hand if they try.

Yeah, it's definitely part of American culture is you own your stuff. It's yours. It's yours. Let's talk about food, though. Okay. You own that, too. If you buy that, you own it here in the United States. Not sure what it's like in other countries. But food is a huge problem. We've done an entire episode, I think, on Food Waste before.

I know we've talked about it extensively. Because I remember, and what's sad is we've been talking about this for decades now, and the stat remains the same. A third of all of the food grown in the world gets thrown away every year, about a trillion dollars worth, and mindless amounts of water and fertilizer and labor inputs just wasted, not just in the face of all that loss of, like, money or resources, but it doesn't even get diverted to the poorest people in the world who are starving. Yeah, for sure.

And that's a great episode. So I encourage you to go listen to those. but one thing I don't know that we've covered on any of these shows while we were, you know, beating those horses. What? Dead horses? Skinning those cats? No. Is the nutrient cycle.

And, you know, obviously, you know, wasting food is a moral problem and ethical problem. But one thing we haven't talked much about is that it disrupts that nutrient cycle. If you look at nature, the system they have is a closed loop system. They're, you know, things grow naturally out in the woods. and it is from soil that is being, you know, if it's just literally out in the forest, just being treated naturally by the natural processes of Mother Earth. And then an animal eats that thing and then poops it out

and that poop goes back into the soil and feeds the soil. That animal falls over dead one day, hopefully a very old age. Then their bodies decompose and release those nutrients back into the earth. And it is a, dare I say, elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted. Yeah, we make food part of our linear economy where the food waste doesn't just get tossed on the ground

and, you know, biodegrade into it. You don't want to do that anyway. Just an annual PSA, don't throw apple cores and banana peels on the ground because that's not a good thing to do. What's the best thing to do is to compost them to some degree or some way. The worst thing you can do, though, is to throw them in a trash can

and have them taken to the landfill because then those nutrients that were put into that food have been taken out of the nutrient cycle for Earth, at least for however long it's going to take for that entire landfill to degrade, which I can't even imagine how long it takes an entire landfill that just turned back into nutrients and stuff. So it's disrupted in that way.

Then we also disrupt it because we don't tend to collect our waste for reuse. It's an output pure and simple. We don't put it back into the system. So there's two ways that we disrupt the nutrient cycle with the way that we treat our food. Yeah, totally. This may be part of a suite, like a playlist one day because I just realized we've done things on sewage recycling or sewage treatment plants. We've done them on landfills.

So maybe we should do like a little green playlist one day. Yeah, we got one on permaculture. That was pretty great. Yeah, totally. Wait, before we move on, those, I should say some of that, those what are called biosolids, treated sewage, it does get reused in some cases. Have you ever used malorganite? Why do I know that word? I think we've talked about that. It's a miracle fertilizer. It does wonders for your grass, especially if you pair it with an inch of water flooding your grass. But it's these little particles, and they smell, but not smell the way you would think because they actually are treated sewage. from Milwaukee's municipal sewage system.

Uh-huh. But they, it's like a nitrogen boost for, it's fertilizer for your lawn. It's insane how well it works. It's cheap and you're reusing waste from the good people of Milwaukee. Well, that's great. And you can get it almost anywhere. It's very, it's very abundant and easy to get. And I highly recommend it.

I'm down to zero grass now. Oh, you could use. Use it on basically any plants. So if you have plants that like nitrogen, you can toss a little malorganite on there. I'll pass along to Emily. She, I'm sure she knows about it. Zero grass. Is your entire lawn just, or your entire yard just covered with high-end antique screen doors?

That's right. It's a good look. I'll bet it is. I'll bet they, it's a little wobbly, though, right, walking around? Yeah. Or are they just for looking? No, no, no. You walk on them.

Okay. So Ellen MacArthur's foundation is looking to correct this and making, like, basically investing in the biological cycle of the circular economy, like making this a part of it too, and composting is an obvious one. But one of the things that is pretty amazing is called cascading. That is reusing food waste to make other things. And there's a, what, a Dutch company called Peel Pioneers, because. you know, in fruit peels, like orange and lemon and stuff like that, that's the best stuff is in that peel, the zest of those things and the essential oils that you get from those peals,

like that's the gold, man, and people are throwing that away or composting it, which is okay, but how about taking this essential oils and actually making other products out of them? And that is what Peel pioneers out of the Netherlands is doing. Yeah, and that's, I mean, you can find cascading in a lot of different food companies, That's a great example, because those, as orange essential oils in particular, are used in a lot of different other products. So you can have a pretty successful business just harvesting the scraps off the floor of an orange juice processor, you know? Yeah.

Converting stuff to biofuel is another pretty obvious one. Yeah. And then anaerobic digesters. I have, I'm putting a lot of, like, hope on anaerobic digesters in the future where we just figure out the microbes that eat this stuff, or these microbes. eat this kind of plastic. These microbes eat this kind of oil and, like, just unleash them on all sorts of stuff and then reuse their byproducts as inputs.

I really hope we reach that feature. That, to me, is like, the greenest of green. Yeah, we've talked about that, too. I can't remember what episode. I can't either. We'll have to use that stuff you should know transcript search tool to find it. Yeah, I feel like it was like

someone was using worms to do something. Doesn't that ring a bell? It might have been a biofuel up. Yeah, maybe so. We'll look at it. Can we talk about fashion? Yeah, this is just crazy to me. I think we should do an entire episode on fast fashion, but we can hit some high points, I think.

Yeah, fast fashion is sort of an environmental nightmare and a humanitarian nightmare because they're made in sweatshops for very little pay by people, you know, making very little pay. They are sold very cheaply, cheap synthetic. materials are used, so all the inputs are bad. They don't last long. And it's an environmental nightmare, basically. I think the fashion industry is the second largest consumer of water. That has to be behind the factory farming, right? Yeah.

And it produces 10%. The fashion industry produces 10% of the global CO2 emissions total. Yeah, and 85% of all the stuff that the fashion industry makes ends up in landfills, not recycled landfills, 85% of all the clothes made in the entire world. There's another issue with it too when you wash, just

washing, just using these things, washing them in your bundle's leased washing machine, you're releasing microplastics into the ocean because a lot of clothes, even recycled clothes, are made from plastics or contain

plastics, and those things get flushed out and it's a huge plastic pollution problem too, which is, I mean, it's ironic. Like Patagonia always held up as a great example of a company that tries to make sustainable circular clothing. And one of the things that they do is their, I think their line of responsibility t-shirts, super cute. They're made from fabric scraps, cool, but also plastic bottles.

Also cool, because we want to recycle plastic bottles, but the problem is, is that plastic It gets transferred to the ocean. So it's one of those things where it's like we're so far from figuring this stuff out that even the people who are trying to do something are still having inadvertent effects that, you know, I'm sure keeps them up at night. Yeah, for sure. And you can also, man, you can send a 10-year-old pullover to Patagonia that had a collar that ripped or something, and they'll fix that thing for you, probably

for nothing. And you can buy, you can send stuff back to them that they will resell. And you can buy, like, you know, gently used things from Patagonia online. They are also working with a startup called infinited fiber. And what they're doing is they're working on the waste on the front end. It's a process to recycle that textile waste because, you know, it's not like, all right, we've got this much cotton and every single fiber goes into making that t-shirt and there's zero waste. Or that car.

Yeah, sorry about that, that car. There's, you know, there's going to be some textile waste on the front end. And so what they're doing is they're taking that stuff and they're recycling that textile waste into a new fiber called Infina. Yeah. And that stuff is 100% recyclable. So eventually, over time, if this loop were allowed to really kind of take hold, eventually all the cotton would be put into or transferred into the Infina circle. And since it's 100% recyclable, you can. could conceivably never have to put new cotton in again.

Yeah, for sure. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I'm just saying conceptually, that's kind of how this stuff works. Yeah, it's even compostable. It is. So you would have to put some new cotton in once in a while because Gary would go composted just to be a jerk. Right.

But, yeah, for the most part, you could, once it really kind of took hold and got going, it could, it could overtake the existing cotton stocks and make them 100% recyclable and then you wouldn't need more cotton stocks, which is, again, an issue we'd have to deal with because then all the cotton farmers are out of work. That's right. And we have no more new cotton cars on the road. But one other thing that I found that really got to me, Chuck, I found a stat that said that most of the returns, like if you try something on, like a clothing, especially if it's mailed to you and you try it on and send it back, right? Yeah. Most of those things are thrown away into landfills. Yes.

What? 9.5 billion pounds of just clothing returns alone were put into landfills in 2022 alone. Unconscionable. Yeah. And the reason why is because companies are like, I'm not going to pay somebody to fold this thing back up, put the pins back in it, put it in the plastic, and make it new again so that I can sell it. It's cheaper for me to just throw it away. And there are programs that divert that stuff to, like, developing countries so that those clothes are donated. But I guarantee that's not as cheap for the company as it is to just throw it away.

That's a huge impact that the fast fashion industry has on the planet. That's crazy to me. Yeah, I haven't been this upset about something I've heard from you in a long time. Oh, and I say some upsetting stuff. I know. You usually text them to me, but... Those are upsetting pictures. All right, one last thing we can talk about is the right to repair movement,

which we talked about in the planned obsolescence episode. But, you know, it's exactly what you think. It's, hey, we need to be able to repair our whatever's, our small appliances. That's a big offender. A lot of companies are saying, because, you know, I don't know if we covered this part, but because I don't remember why companies didn't do it,

or at least why they say they don't do it. One thing they'll say is like, oh, you know what, with electronics, if we publish, like, how to, other people can fix these things and basically give repair companies repair manuals, like it's, it leaves people vulnerable to hackers that they can get information from that electronic device. And I just call foul on that. Yeah. That sounds like a bunch of BS to me. They're like, don't forget hackers. Hackers are going to get you. Yeah, because you want your. whatever, your iPhone fixed.

Right. And you can't, I have an Acer Swift laptop that I love, but it's, I've tried to replace the battery before and it's designed to not replace the battery. You cannot replace the battery. And obviously the battery is the first thing that goes out. It's infuriating. It is infuriating because it's like he made it so that you have to get rid of your laptop and get another one. It drives me nuts. So if you put all this together, Chuck, like electronics companies successfully lobbying against right-to-repair laws,

companies using planned obsolescence left and right, people like Gary just throwing their stuff away to be jerks. Like, how can this even be implemented? I can't see it happening, at least in the United States. I know the EU is really taking some strides toward this stuff and hats off to them. But in the United States, I can't in the foreseeable future,

like as far as I can think out, I can't see this being implemented. No, I mean, certainly not now with what's going on in our country and I'm not trying to get too political, but that's just a fact. It's not only not a priority for our current administration

to invest at all in something like a circular economy, but it's not even on the radar. Right. Or it's outright being squashed. Right. Even more disturbing is that even outside of the United States, globally speaking, recycling or secondary materials being put back in as inputs is actually on the decline by significant numbers. Yeah, we're headed in the wrong direction. Right.

Even though Dave points out that, like, social media posts and articles about circular economy have tripled in the last five years, so there's more awareness. but we're going in the wrong direction as far as actual, you know, feed on the floor kind of stuff. Yeah, and consumption keeps growing and growing and growing. Apparently, from 2018 to 2024, we consumed 500 gigatons of material. That's everything, raw material, finished material, fossil fuels. And that is 28% of the total amount we consumed in the last 125 years. Yeah.

So it's just growing. exponentially. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to overcome. You might say it would take like an authoritarian government to implement this kind of thing. And it turns out China has committed to creating a circular economy for themselves back in the 2000s. And apparently they're focused right now on automotive remanufacturing, which is essentially taking old cars and refurbishing them and their parts selling them like new at a discounted price because they're refurbished. Oh, okay. So I guess keep an eye on China and the EU to see where things go. Chuck laughed a little bit, but his laugh was dripping with, okay, let's go to listener mail. So he just

unlocked listener mail. This is a correction on a correction. So we heard from quite a few people about the most famous Brandfurtian. People wrote in and said, Alexander Graham Bell, forget Gretzky and Phil Hartman. Alexander Graham Bell was not born in Brantford So this is from Joel Hey guys, probably not the first person to say this But I'm correcting your email correction That claimed Alexander Graham Bell was born in Brantford

He certainly lived in Brantford So they claim him He was born in Scotland And moved to Brantford as a young man I guess at one point in his life He would definitely say he was from Brantford But that's not where he's from. Love the show, that is from Joel Dawson

Very nice So I guess Phil Hartman moves back up to number two I guess so. And you know what? Whenever someone sends in their business or something, and it seems pretty cool, we like to tout them. Yes. And Joel signed his with freespiritours.ca. So I'm looking now, it looks like paddling and stand-up paddleboarding, caving, forest therapy, wine tastings, woodness, wellness. Wow. Also, I want to shout out Witchbolt again. Did you see Witch Bull got in touch of this to say thanks for the mention on the alchemy episode? I did not see that They did

He did I should say He got in touch to say Hey you guys want some t-shirts Thanks a lot He's been listening for 15 years His name's Nick He's been a listener for 15 years Which Bolt has

Remember the Dungeon synth guy Yeah yeah yeah So he wrote in and I was like I'm actually a little starstruck right now So there's like this big circular love fest going on Not a circular economy But a circular love fest going on

Between stuff you should know And Witchbolt right now Yeah. All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Joel or Which Bolt, you can send us an email too. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app.

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When I became a journalist, I was the first Latina in the newsrooms where I worked. I'm Maria Inojosa. I spent my career creating journalism that centers voices who have been historically sidelined. From the most pressing news stories to deep cultural explorations, Latino USA is journalism with heart. Listen to Latino USA, the longest running Latino news and culture show in the United States. Hear it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

it's black business month and black tech green money is tapping in i'm will lucas spotlighting black founders investors and innovators building the future one idea at a time let's talk legacy tech and generational wealth i had the skill and i had the talent i didn't have the opportunity yeah we all know right genius is evenly distributed opportunity is not to hear this and more on the power of black innovation ownership listen to black tech green money from the black effect podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Jeney, aka Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcasts. And I'm bringing you an all new mini podcast series called Sincerely Jeney.

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