The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis https://amzn.to/3qhTkna An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy—and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away? In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future. With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. This is the part that they call the ramble. The ramble where I make up shit and I just wing it right off the top of my head and I say whatever I'm thinking.

And clearly I'm not thinking anything because I'm just defining the ramble in the intro. So there you go. I just cheated, really, when it comes down to it. But there you go. We make up something different every time. I've had friends say to me, you know, we just go listen to the intros, Chris, for whatever the hell you're going to make up. But we really appreciate you guys being here.

We have an amazing author on the show. He comes all the way from over what they like to say the pond in the UK, in the Britain area. He's from Cambridge. He's not from London. I was going to say London. Is London close to Cambridge? I'm not sure. It's pretty close.'s yeah yeah it's all english right uh so

old english we should we should we have to disclose that the attorneys say we have to disclose old english because we know america is well you know number one uh anyway moving on uh you know those damn asshole americans. What can you do with them? Anyway, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking about his latest book. We're going to be talking about the environment and cleaner future in the secret world of waste. His book is entitled Wasteland. And I think it's a novel about my dating.

No, it is coming out. It just came out July 18th, 2023. Wasteland, the secret world of waste and the urgent search for a cleaner future, which probably also is my dating future. Oliver Franklin Wallace is on the show with us today. into a shocking journey into the waste industry and the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy. And we're going to find out more. But before that, let's get to know him a little bit better off his bio. Oliver is an award-winning magazine journalist whose writing has appeared in GQ. I've offered to appear in their magazine for the most sexiest man.

They're considering it. Wired, The Guardian, New York Times. No, they're not doing that. The Economist and many other publications. Wasteland, his newest book, is his first book and newest book, I should say. And I just wanted to reiterate that. Welcome to the show, Oliver. How are you?

Hey, thanks so much for having me. I was thinking there in your beautifully executed ramble, reiterate that welcome to the show oliver how are you hey thanks so much for having me uh i was i was thinking there and you're and you're beautifully executed ramble like whether you were going to make make a trash joke because you know often people do and it's like trash talk is an option or if it's late depending on where you are and and how late late it is we can get into dirty talk later on if you want but uh yeah there's a lot of puns and you didn't go for it so i feel you know i feel like you missed an opportunity there okay we're gonna make up for later show we're gonna hit rewind and we're gonna start i'm just kidding uh but no i'll i'll let you slide

some of those in because you probably have assembled some uh in your thing so welcome the show congratulations on the new book give us a dot com where you want people to find you on the interwebs please oh sure yeah you can find me at oliverfranklinwallace.com. Easy. All good bookstores, some mediocre bookstores. You can, yeah, wherever. I think you mentioned my day job. I'm an editor at GQ magazine, so a lot of your readers might know that

and various other pieces. This is a very different world than than you know celebrities and and fashion there's a bit of fashion in there we might we might touch on it but it tends not to be uh the same the same vibe uh but yeah still like a good men's uh sort of magazine there i think it was always you know you go there for your nice suits and stuff yeah i hope so i hope yeah yeah and if you need me you know for that sexiest man list and you just let me know where to submit my pictures and you know you can check my kinder profile stuff anyway moving on uh what motivated you oliver to write this book yeah sure um so uh there's a long version

of the story there's a short version of the story i'm gonna give you the short version which is um it started interesting me not that long ago when everyone suddenly started noticing, well, there's all this plastic in the ocean and all this. I was going to swear there, but I better not. You know, stuff going on in our rivers and things like that. And I was just like, where is this all of this stuff come from and at the same time i did this piece with the guardian about the fact that china which for um a long time from the second half of the 20th century was like the preeminent destination for a lot of our a lot of our garbage a lot of people don't know that the things you're throwing away for like recycling was being loaded onto container ships and you know on the west coast and in your case and uh sailed over the pacific to china and some cases recycled and often not

and 2018 or so they said no we're kind of done with that we don't want to be the world's trash can anymore shut their doors and ever since we've kind of been like wondering what to do with it and um I was kind of intrigued by that notion at the time uh but the the thing that kind of caught me in it is like we spend a lot of time thinking about where our stuff comes from is it organic is it trade? Is it this or is it that? But we never really think about what happens to it after we throw it away. And a lot of time, the journey is just as long and just as complicated and just as interesting.

So yeah, this is my kind of attempt to find out. And it was pretty wild at the time. There you go. I thought the plastic in the ocean made it give it that shininess when you look out across the horizon. Oh man, I'm'm gonna get hate mail for green peace now well we were just talking off the air about the story that i was doing um for the economist a while back about submarines and uh you know i went on this research boat in the pacific

and you would just be like sailing in the middle of nowhere and occasionally you just see like a you know a load of load of plastic just kind of floating on by so i think maybe that you know that was many years ago now, and maybe that kind of planted the seed back in my mind. There you go. Yeah, you see it everywhere. And it looks like you travel the world. You go to Ghana, I believe.

Yeah, so the UK, the US, India, and Ghana. A lot of this reporting happened during the pandemic, so you couldn't get into a lot of places. So I went wherever they'd have me. But yeah, it's a fairly global journey, and it's all sorts of different things. So it's not just plastic, which I'm sure we'll talk about. It's clothing. It's electronics.

It's sewage. It's food. It goes all the way. I think the last chapter is nuclear waste, which is kind of pretty heavy. I stood in a room which looked like a missile out of a Bond movie where they store all of Europe's nuclear waste in these super thick tubes that's going to be

radioactive for 10,000 years. That was interesting. Craziness. You can still feel the heat. I think they're like two or three meter deep plugs and you can still feel warmth coming out of them, even with all the crazy levels of safety and stuff going on to give you a sense of...

Should you be able to feel the warmth? Well, maybe. I was a little bit surprised. But they give you a little Geiger counter. You wear this little alarm thing. You go in and you've got to wear these special shoes and safety helmet and all this kind of stuff. And you wear a little alarm. And then when you kind of come out, they check you, basically, to make sure that you're not radioactive. I'm not sure like if the alarm goes off like what

do they do like how well we i never i never really thought to ask that question but if maybe they would have just kept me in there you're probably it's probably like that movie with cher back in the 70s or 80s where you know she's a three-mile hunter or whatever and they have to give her the soap bath and scrub her down and yeah i imagine imagine probably not gonna end well so what how did you how did you approach this journey like how did you say okay um how are we going to paint this picture how did you uh tackle this because it seems like you know it's a very big you know there's there's a couple things garbage out there yeah because you know and and it's it's a kind of weird thing to get your head around but from one sense this this is a book about trash and garbage and that that feels like Yeah, because, you know, and it's a kind of weird thing to get your head around.

But from one sense, this is a book about trash and garbage, and that feels like something small. But then once you start on this journey, well, you realize, well, actually, the story is of everything. Everything. We have to dispose of everything at the end of its lifespan, eventually, like going from the tiniest thing up to bulldozing, like TNTing power plants and blowing up power plants and scooping all the way. And so I had to kind of work out which of the things that I wanted to follow. And so a lot of the time it was focusing on the things that we use most common in our everyday life. So there's the story of paper,

there's the story of like a plastic bottle, what happens to your thrift store donations, for example, your old iPhones. Yeah. But something that kind of became very clear to me early in the stages of reporting is like, there are essentially three forms of waste. There's,

there's the kind of the regular everyday trash that you throw away in your bin. There's what they call in the industry, putrescible waste, which is a lovely word, but essentially means stuff that decomposes like food and sewage, the stinky stuff, essentially. Bodies. None of it smells great, but yeah.

Bodies, yeah. The stuff that decomposes. And then there's this like third category, which is kind of like the dangerous sticky stuff, which is like toxic waste, industrial waste, the nuclear stuff. There's stuff that's really difficult. And so like the last third of the book is like what you do, what you do with that. And I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but like a big challenge with this industry

and with all of our environmentalism is like a lot of our world is like filled with these toxic chemicals and stuff that you don't see every day now and microplastics and all these things we're only really starting to get to grips with the impact they're having on the environment and on our bodies. So yeah, I hope that people can kind of see the threads and that the journey makes sense. Yeah, I love microplastics and some of that forever chemicals. I sprinkle that on my Cheerios every morning and get that extra zip, that extra zip of flavor. You know, you realize you're going to have a whole mess of people on your Amazon

reviews going, this book is trash. Yeah. I, I actually, I, I, at one point,

uh, genuinely pitched my publisher and I said that we, we, we should have this book is garbage as the title. And then I could be like, ha ha. Yes, it is my friend.

Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm fully, uh, fully acknowledging that there will be puns and abuse and things, but I lean into it.

You've got to embrace it with two hands. I've got your book here. Is this fully recyclable? That's just what I don't know. I don't see it. It is. It is fully recyclable. Yeah,

there you go. You can use it as a paperweight or put your laptop on it. You know, there's all sorts of uses. You can, and you can read it too. You could read it. Yeah. Some people do all sorts of uses. And you can read it too. You could read it. Yeah.

Some people do. There you go. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com.

Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris foss leadership institute.com now back to the show uh and so let me ask you this uh i know people really need to get in the details of the book and everything else but are we really saving anything with plastic and paper uh straws did you get into any of that in the book oh you mean like changing plastic

straws to paper yeah yeah and stuff like yeah and and this is a really interesting like area because something that happens and this is true of the whole wider environmental movement area any kind of environmental issue is that when you identify a bad guy you know like what happened was all of a sudden we started seeing these pictures of turtles with their heads and like beer beer rings and things like that and everyone went okay well we need to find a solution and a bunch of canny entrepreneurs and people on like in the business world went okay well we can we can sell these alternatives so you have you know all these keep cups and tote bags and all these like this whole green industry suddenly moved and started basically saying, well, the solution is to

buy different stuff, which in a lot of ways doesn't really solve the problem. But in a few cases, they're better, right? Like, so a paper straw is more recyclable than a plastic straw. So like, I think, you know, weight for weight, it's probably an improvement. But you do have this thing where a bunch of the replacements were actually worse. So for example, it's difficult to say the word worse, but so,

but they're complicated. Let's say the word they're complicated. So for example, um, you can recycle a plastic, you know, uh, a,

let's, let's say you want to use a beer glass, a beer, a plastic beer cup, the kind that you might get a music festival or something. And it made out of pet which is a very common uh plastics that's the kind of thing your coke bottle is made of and that's a pretty recycled plastic it's recycled all over the world and what happened was particularly during the pandemic and i saw it a lot in my own life is that we saw a lot of places swapping those out for compostable is that how you

pronounce it over there compostableostable plastics, these alternatives, these kind of new bioplastics and things. And the idea is that they break down. The problem is, is that it turned out that a lot of those new materials are only designed to break down in these high-tech industrial compost facilities, like under heat and pressure. And certainly in the UK, there's very few of them. industrial compost facilities, uh, like under heat and pressure, you know, and, and, you know, certainly in the UK, there's very few of them and there's nobody collecting them to take to those places. Right. So you were replacing this recyclable product, which, you know, plastic

has lots of other problems, you know, that, that are not saying that plastic is good by any means, but we took something that was recyclable and we replaced it with something that people thought were being composted, but no one really thinks oh hang on a minute i didn't put this in you know there's no compost bin um and so they all ended up burned so you get in this and this weird thing where it's like okay well we swapped something bad for something that's just bad in another way and it turns out that there's this all sorts of examples of this throughout the industry and so you kind of have to say to people, it's sometimes a difficult conversation to say, well, hang on a minute, let's not maybe rush

because a lot of the times there's no good choices, there's just choices. And we need to sometimes lean into a bit of the complexity in some of these cases. There you go. You know, it's one thing we have over here too. I don't know if you guys have in the UK, but they made this thing where they wouldn't give you

paper bags anymore. Like, yeah, we're not giving you paper or plastic bags. You got to buy this canvas piece of shit that probably isn't compostable in any way, shape, or form. You know, it's like thick and heavy. And they're like, hey, you got to put all your groceries in there. Meanwhile, all your groceries come in like giant plastic, oversized. Like I saw a TikTok video recently, and the guy goes oh here's my you know my special bag from the grocery bag and and then he pulls out like every product just covered in

plastic and giant like his chicken he had some like roasted chicken it was a giant plastic thing and especially if you go to like costco i don't know if you guys have those yeah yeah for sure house stores but you go to costco like last one layers i pass the parcel yeah it's like half an acre of plastic and so um it's kind of i don't know and people like i'm saving the planet and shit and you're just like are you really well this is the thing like you know tote bags is a great example you know and and i i should say i made a joke about this because one of the worst industries for this stuff is the publishing industry. The publishing industry loves tote bags for some reason. But, you know, you take something, you know, something like a plastic bag, you replace it with a tote bag.

Well, what have you got to do? You've got to clear cut a load of forest and grow a load of cotton. And there was this Dutch, I think it was Dutch study. There was a study done in Europe which found that you had to use, in order for it to be environmentally beneficial, you have to use these things thousands of times. I don't have the exact figure, but it was like multiple thousands of times before they're better.

So if you suddenly, you know, I've probably got 20 of these things now. Most of those are not going to get used thousands of times. So, but this is the thing where like a lot of the solution is just, okay, maybe we just don't need a bag at all but that's you know sometimes uh the obvious choice is the harder is the harder one to choose the thing you said about plastic is is so true like you go to the supermarket now you go to whole foods wherever it's maybe not whole foods but if you go to walmart or whatever um and you have all these fruit and vegetables and everything packed with layers and layers of it and that and the packaging industry or the food industry for a long time

their excuse was okay it will make things last longer it's like fresher and all these kind of things and very rarely it turns out there's very rarely is that actually true it's just practical for them right it's just like practical logistics but you get this side effect which is that you know if you're a single person and living in manhattan or whatever you go to the supermarket you go to costco it's like do you want large or extra large so you want to buy a bag of salad leaves and it's like you can buy two kilos or five kilos but you can't buy you know a lettuce or something and it's covered in five kilos of plastic it's all exactly but you also get loads and loads of food waste. And if you want a kind of mind-blowing figure,

a third of all food grown worldwide is wasted. It's never eaten. Really? A third of all food waste. Between 8% and 10%, according to the IPCC, between 8% and 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions is caused by food waste. Wow.

That feels wild. But then you think about that practically. So 28% of all farmland worldwide is being wasted. They're being used to grow food that's never eaten by people. If you add up the hectares of all that farmland, you could cover the subcontinent of India with farmland that's being wasted. So the figures are just kind of mind-blowing. The great thing is the opportunity there is that any, it's like the figures are just kind of mind-blowing and the great thing is the opportunity there is that any you know it's like low-hanging fruit in terms of

like if you want to cut carbon emissions then you just need to you know take away some food cut some food waste buy less vegetables make sure we're eating what we're growing and it's like a it's there's a real opportunity there so i just try and make it's kind of scary figures but also i like like to see the upside. Those are extraordinary figures. You know, and here we have, you know, human hunger everywhere. Yeah, 820 million hungry people in the world, I think, is the current figure. Are we just, what is our problem? And discover that in our book, what our problem is.

I think as a separate book, it's going to require a lot of thinking. A couple of hits across the head or something with a plate like what's what's going on there you know tell me if i have any bearing of this this is kind of a joke but i always do but you know i'll have these friends that i'll be at a party or something on facebook and i'm like hey you know uh i'm single and i live my life and i have plastic forks, plastic knives and plastic spoons and paper plates. And that's how I go about my life. It's me and my two dogs.

I'm 55 years old, never been married, never divorced, never got tired of being happy. and so I eat that way. And so sometimes I'll take a picture of something nice food. I made like a crazy salad and people will give me, but oh, you're eating those plastic forces. You're filling the environment. So I eat that way. And so sometimes I'll take a picture of something nice food. I made like a crazy salad and people would give me a bit.

Oh, you're eating those plastic forces. You're filling the environment. And I'm like, Hey man, I'm one guy. I didn't have any kids. So, uh, it dies with me. Like I'm Mr. You know, that's just me, my world. You had four freaking kids and, probably about 50 of them so so basically there's you and your wife and you had a kid so since there's two of you you've increased

the quotient of garbage in the world by 50 of what your output originally was now if you have four kids you just did it by 200 and those kids are gonna have four kids or two to four kids and those kids are you basically have started a fucking landfill of your own basically so uh that's the shit i give them and i go so shut up you had kids and your garbage is probably four cans and mine's barely one so i'm gonna take a little bit of extra and I'm going to have my plastic forks. Fuck you. Am I, am I in the ballpark? Am I full of shit?

And this is like the Thanos, the Thanos Marvel logic of the world, like depopulation. I love how very quickly we've moved on to like depopulation and, and theorizing about genocide. Like, yeah, let's stop.

The Chinese tried that. It didn't go very well. What I would say is there's two arguments to this right like it's very true that one of the most sustainable things you can do is have less kids but also it's not very practical it's pretty like dark when you get into the policy implications of that so you can't really like legislate for it whereas you can legislate plastic forks so we're gonna go for the low-hanging fruit um well the thing i would say to you is like if you first of all like why plastic forks taste gross second of all is like we're starting to understand now if you knew the shit that was in your plastic forks it would blow your mind like a lot of the time there's about 10 000 common additives that

go into plastic really and uh a lot of them now we're starting to understand like phthalates for example which is this whole class of additive that goes into plastic. Really? And a lot of them now we're starting to understand, like phthalates, for example, which is this whole class of additive that goes into plastic. You go to these plastic recycling facilities, for example, and essentially they're just these huge kind of industrial facilities, loads of conveyor belts. And when you see garbage in large amounts, it's kind of like almost a religious experience

because you realize the scale of what we're doing to the planet. You see this stuff and they chop it all up into these kind of tiny little flakes and then they melt it. But before they melt it, they kind of pour in like a barrel of this like green, mysterious ooze. And they call it master batch, which is like this really dark euphemism. It sounds like soylent green or something. And you're like, well, what's in it? And they're like, we don't really know. And maybe. green or something and you're like well what's in it and they're like we don't really know and it may be but um some of that stuff you know and we now know for example like if you you were

probably around uh a kid at the time when they used to have things like bpa and and kids you know toys and bottles and these kind of things so we're only we're still only learning like if you you could do a whole people have done whole books there's a great book um it's called slow death by rubber duck, which is basically about all the shit that's in like toys and plastics every day. And it kind of talks about that, but sorry,

I'm sorry. I shouldn't swear. Um, probably use the part a lot of minutes. We, that was me, but my, my,

uh, yeah, my, all I would say is like, we don't know what that's doing to your body, to our sperm counts, to whatever. So, whereas like a metal is, you know know stainless steel fork is pretty inert and pretty cheap

yeah so that that would be like if i could appeal to the other other side of you i'd say i'd say that and the thing scared me enough i'll probably freak me out now the other thing that's kind of wild to me about plastic you know when i drive along the highway or something and i see people throwing away their cartons whatever and it is the hedgerows is that you know by some estimates they reckon that you know a coke bottle now will last about 450 500 years if left by itself crap um so when you think like when you think about the amount of stuff that we're producing and it kind of sits out there that i'm just kind of like well eventually we're going to get into this wall-e people talk about the wall-e situation where we have to kind of flee planet earth because there's just too much garbage around so um but yeah yeah and it's buy yourself a plate i'm going to send you a plate in the mail

well the plates are paper nice crockery how am i doing with the paper plates paper's pretty recyclable yeah as long as you're not getting it too greasy and stuff, then you can just throw it in recycling. It'll go in the landfill. They're in the U.S., so you guys still landfill pretty much everything. Yeah, we do. Or we just take it down to the beach and wing it in. Exactly, yeah.

Feed it to turtles. We had a guy on who talked about estrogenics. He talked about parabens and stuff like that you were in in things and you probably are familiar with that and talked about in the book let me ask you about my other beef that i get in arguments with people on social media for because i mean that's really what this show is about uh how to get how to win arguments with your book um is our our uh from what you found uh are electronic vehicles really helping the environment? Ooh, that's not the subject of my book.

I mean, I could spout some nonsense and some opinions on it. Did you say any of that? Is it in the book anywhere? I mean, I think the thing that we're talking about, so industrial waste is a huge problem, and I think one of the big points about the book is that we spend so much time agonizing and being guilty over what happens to stuff after we throw it away. But by some estimates, I think there's one estimate that comes from Canada, which is that 97% of all waste by volume is industrial waste. It's the stuff that happens before it comes to you if you think about when you buy a hamburger all of the wasted carcass but also everything that cows have written and then like the amount of feces that are sitting

in some horrible you know style this silage pond somewhere in the midwest so so when you start thinking about it that's it kind of becomes kind of almost mind-blowing you can't really picture it and you think the same is true of the amount of the tonnage of the tonnage of ore that you have to dig up to get a gram of gold is astonishing. Something like eight tons of ore or something for like a single kilo of gold. It's crazy the amount of stuff. And you see what we've done is we've kind of offshored a lot of that. So that happens in South or Central America or it happens in China. And you kind of don't see industrial waste and like that the role

on that that has on those environments so i would say that's true um the most sustainable thing you can do most of the time is just not buy the new thing or buy fewer of the new things and when we talk about cars you know like i probably will get in trouble with some of some people when i use this analogy but the analogy that i like to use is like classic car like fanatics you know you get these guys who have have you know a 60s jaguar or something and they they you know every weekend they're out there buffing it and waxing it and do all that kind of stuff and quite often they've tweaked the engine or they've swapped it for something electric or more efficient that car probably has a lower carbon emission than this the guy who's kind of had a new prius five times in the

intervening years right because the map the majority of the carbon emissions from that vehicle is in the manufacturer so if we all have this approach of okay well let's let's like try and buy things that we really love and they take care of them for as long as possible and you know we can talk about the right for to repair movement and all this kind of stuff because we have electronics farmers taking people to court over whether they can repair their tractors because one of the wild things about the tech industry now is like they put all these software things in there which basically means you like stuff breaks you can't fix it you know you can't replace the battery you can't which is a wild you know world for us to be getting into so if you're going to talk about things, if we're going to talk about

cars, let's talk about what tech companies have done and you can talk about obsolescence and things like that. Ask an EV expert, my friend. Okay. I agonize about it just as much as you do. I was just wondering if you could read your book.

You know, I had a joke set up somewhere in there, but one of the uh i had a joke set up somewhere in there but uh one of what you know one of the things is is uh this is why i drive a 1976 uh ford honda uh anyway uh you know but part of it is the disposable of it you know when these tesla cars burn they burn like extraordinarily hot like sometimes they have to submerge them in a fucking pool for a week just because they're going to burn and then a lot of the waste of these batteries you know is almost like a toxic way so i don't know if you got into that in your book yeah that's certainly true like lithium batteries are you know we've replaced a lot of

the material lead batteries batteries, for example, weren't particularly better, but lithium batteries are the plague of the waste industry because, particularly now you've got people having these disposable vapes and stuff. There's batteries in basically everything now. A little earpod.

Your earpod gets thrown away in the bin and accidentally causes an explosion at a recycling facility because it catches on fire and sets a bale of bale of paper on fire so that's that's definitely true the thing that's um i find encouraging is that there is a lot of innovation going on in like how to recycle those batteries one of the tesla guys quit and now runs this battery recycling technology company based out of europe i can't remember the name of it. But there's a huge amount of investment in that space. So I can only imagine that within a few years,

we'll see a lot of that being recycled. And they take old EV batteries now, and they turn them into batteries for homes, whatever, or solar farms and things. So there is reuse because they're so valuable. that a lot of these raw materials these rare metals it's so expensive and so damaging to get them out of the ground that we have you know the the metals industry you see mining companies now they call it urban mining which is basically like they're getting into recycling through our e-waste um and they're even talking about in some places

digging up old landfills because you can strip the gold that was in like lining and old phones and old laptops and things that because there's more. There is more gold in a ton of e-waste than there is in a ton of gold ore. So you get these kind of weird economics where all of a sudden we have gigantic mining conglomerates getting into the trash business, which find this kind of fascinating and and seeing seeing that play out i've seen these guys in tiktok that they take apart like circuit boards and shit and like all sorts of stuff to get the gold off them and uh some of them are after copper of course uh i think they have a meth problem but no they're like they're like professional copper dudes like they have a whole thing and they cut them open they speed cut them i even saw a thing that's disturbing i don't know why i keep showing up on my for you page on tiktok do i get paid for tiktok plugs here um the uh where these guys and it appears to be somewhere in africa in one of the third world countries it looks like they're

they're not making a lot of money in their lives. But they're literally machete hacking open batteries, car batteries, and literally just pouring them out into the ground in a ditch. It's in their office. And it's in a closed office, so I don't even know the chemicals and the air. And they're standing in it, too. They have boots on, so they got that going for them. But, I mean, just the cavalierness of just pouring these batteries over. And they're standing in it too. They have boots on, so they got that going for them. But, I mean, just the cavalierness of just pouring these batteries over.

And you're sitting there looking at the health of these people and just wondering, my God, I mean, there has to be something going on there that impacts us as humans. Electronics waste recycling is one of the most toxic, um, you know, forms of waste processing that there is. And, you know, you want to talk about China, for example, for decades, a lot of this stuff that we were throwing away, like electronics wise was,

was getting shipped to China. Now I don't, I'm careful not to use the word dumped here. Cause we weren't like dumping it. A lot of the time there was a real market for this stuff and they wanted it because it's valuable and they can repair it and resell it on the second-hand market or whatever they want to do. But one of the

side effects is that you get places, these towns, there's a famous town called Guiyu in southern China, in Guangzhou province, where there was so much lead in the water that north of 80% of all of the children had lead poisoning

and like you had these rivers where they basically had to ship in bottled water because the rivers are ruined you know these the heavy toxic metals cadmium you know things like that you know they're poisonous and and will will will ruin you i went to ghana and i went to one of the um you know informal settlements there in akra akra is the capital of ghana which is in west africa and they they are one of the hubs for west africa for the import of used electronics textiles and loads of other secondhand stuff but but they've become famous in the last few years and um something we had a few reporters there and kind of covered it and then there was like a flood of youtubers that went in and took some kind of fairly gross footage but yeah they call like they call them burner boys and you get these kids who are essentially taking apart old cars or

old you know tvs and things and they will get a bunch of wire and they will basically put it on the in the big stick and they'll just burn it like on an open fire on the riverbank and you can smell the fumes from ages away. And some of these kids, they're not even teenagers yet. Are they getting high that way or something? I don't know. But it shows you the value. For these guys, copper is tremendously valuable.

The scrap metal trade is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. So there's value in it for them. So for them, they're making a decent living there you go i need to start going back through my trash every day or they throw me in here you know it's true if we knew the value you know some of the most interesting people that i met on my journey you know we take wait we take the idea that you can kind of put your trash can out on a weekday morning and someone will come and collect it for granted that is we are like a privileged few the privileged few right there's two billion people in the world who have no form

of waste collection whatsoever um so they're just literally like dumping it in the garden still like we were like pre-victorian era so like indian stuff like that where they just yeah i mean i was on i was in this it was in varanasi varanasi is this holy city on the ganges in india the ganges is considered a goddess like it's holy um and varanasi is this beautiful ancient one of the most ancient cities in the world and you get a bunch of the tributaries of the ganges all join there and i went down to one of these one of these rivers and i am not joking to you to say that it was the entire bank was covered in plastic about a foot deep holy and you had whole communities of people like basically like

picking the stuff up and it's it's you know brands a lot of the brands you would recognize a lot of the brands are the same companies that are trying to tell us about their recycling pledges in the west are dumping this stuff like the filling um the global south with this with these materials and i talked to these guys and they would say oh how much and i'd say you know how much do you make a day and they'll be like oh they make about 10 rupees a kilo which is like a fraction of a cent you know so if you want to i'm going to give you something that i think kind of blows your mind and i find the most outrageous recently uh is that in the last couple of years, particularly, a bunch of companies started

marketing these products, which they say are made out of ocean plastic. Have you seen these things around? You can buy like computer mice and sunglasses and like you sweat like soccer shirt. They're like, oh, they're made out of ocean plastic. And you think, oh, that must have been fished out the ocean. No, in the vast cases, it's actually what's called prevented ocean plastic now the definition of prevented ocean plastic is any plastic collected within 50 kilometers of a major river or sea in the global south 50 kilometers so that if you like add up there's like something more i think it's something like 70 percent of the entire world's population are like covered by this definition so what they're actually saying is we just paid some really poor people in the third world to

pick it up for you and then charged you a premium for it but you know the greenwashing is just crazy and i would meet these guys and they're not seeing the profit like you you're buying this these you know nice designer sunglasses makes you feel guilt-free they're seeing none of it so the the injustice that that goes on in waste in this world was shocking to me throughout this journey and still makes me mad quite now, as you can tell. Now, as we round out, one of the things you build in the book is a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world.

Do we need to kill all the humans for world peace? Do I need to be worried? Do I need to be like calling somebody? No, I just have a joke anytime someone never says to me hey we need world peace i'm like you know achieve world peace wow uh kill all the humans and everybody be peaceful after that it's us we're the problem this is like the environmental uh environmental prospectus practiced by like ted kaczynski but i'm enjoying i'm enjoying it no um only only

it's that other guy who would eat the people because that's more recyclable yeah that's true you know it's returning nutrients to the earth um so sorry i interrupted you your question is like what's the fix so yeah you offer a blueprint for building a healthier more sustainable world uh what should we do before all buried in trash sure i mean there's a couple of things which are really um obvious which are you know buy less stuff that you like buy less tat like try and buy things that like we that's going to last longer and that you can repair and pass down to your kids and love like i think it's very easy to people say buy less stuff and i'm actually saying just like you can still buy stuff just make sure it's good quality and that you can repair it and fix it.

And let's make companies and like ensure that companies are letting that happen. And there's a bunch of great companies that are doing that, you know, like framework and Fairphone and all these companies kind of do, do stuff. So that's one example. Second thing is like,

we need to cut company. Like we need companies need to basically be punished for, for greenwashing. And like, we need to basically be making sure that they're telling the truth when with this stuff you know i talk about in the book about coca-cola's recycling pledges they've done over the last uh 25 years or so um you know in the mid coca-cola have been pledging recycling uh like recycle content in their bottles since the 1990s and every single time they've set a

target they've missed it target they've missed it and they've done it i think five or six times over the years and nobody ever kind of goes back and check so there's a couple of those big things but yeah i i i could sit and tell you i'll make sure you buy these things and but i think the the honest answer is that the place we we have we didn't really talk about this but one of the things that that is kind of fundamental of the book is that our entire concept of waste and individual responsibility for it was eventually essentially invented by the packaging industry in the 1950s as a way to avoid being legislated against in the same way that the carbon footprint was invented by

british petroleum bp the oil company like popularized the carbon footprint like and a lot of people know that but like, like, you know, so we are kind of taught to reduce, reuse, recycle by basically the companies producing this stuff as a way of getting away with it. And so we kind of need to, when we talk about individual action, like, a lot of the

time, we're kind of playing into their hands where if 97% of all waste is industrial waste, then it needs to happen kind of before it gets to us so that's the thing the thing i would say to people is like if you want to make a difference the the places that you can make a difference are not in the costco aisle and they're not when you're like washing out your pizza boxes or whatever after you've had a takeaway or you with your with your plastic fork it's like the boring midweek meeting where you're like working out with

a stock that you're going to buy for the next year and like choosing something slightly lower waist footprint like you know what i mean like if i can if i can convince the procurement manager for like a chain of you know fast food restaurants then then that person is able to make decisions that's that much more than every if every single one of your listeners started, you know, washing their out their milk bottles. So yeah, let's not like, let's make,

try and make sure that those are the people listening and everyone else. You can kind of, I don't, I don't want to say you kind of get off scot-free, but my hope is that this book can kind of, is kind of an interesting, fun, sometimes gross ride into this world that we don't think about.

And the first step would be let's think about it a bit more and talk about it, and we'll go from there. You should have smell-o-vision on the pages so you can be like, oh, so that's what papers smell like. I make a long attempt at describing what landfills smell like, but the answer is I've been on a lot of them now. The one I went to in India, Ghazapur, I think it's 65 metres

tall or something, which I'm not sure what that is, about 200 feet tall. But you can see it from several miles away and it looks like a mountain range. Like, no jokes, you can drive trucks spiralling up the sides of the top and there's an entire town of people that live on it. But yeah,

trying to describe the smell of that is wild. I found out, for example, if you want a good fact, there's this chemical called cadaverine. Cadaverine is the smell of rotting corpses. It's like an actual chemical compound. That's like Kelowna. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah.

You seem like that kind of guy. I know, it's kind of a theme. It's a callback joke going on now. There's a theme there. guy. I know, it's kind of a theme. It's a callback joke going on. No, it's a whole show, isn't it? There's a theme there. Murder. I don't know what you're saying. About the cadaverine?

Yeah, cadaverine. It's the hot new scent of fall. There you go. It was in GQ. I saw somebody have it. It's one of those things. You're going through GQ and they have all this. I'm just kidding. I'm going to get you fired.

It's not in GQ, people. That's a joke. So we've learned some really interesting stuff. What did we learn today, Kenny? I never have heard this term. I may have heard the term greenwashing, but I never probably understood what it was. I just thought it was where you scrub your vegetables. But greenwashing is a term used to describe false or misleading claims made by an organization about the positive impact that company product or service has on the environment. Now, they claim here that greenwashing is illegal and ethical, according to the United States Federal Trade Commission.

But we know how that shit works. Yeah. Yeah. You just pay some money and it goes away um i mean in in this country we have the the advertising standards agency and you know they basically you get a fine if you put an advert that said that says something like untrue you get a small fine and a lot of the time that they just kind of take the take the l and tweak a small word uh and and get away with it but yeah you yeah, the reality is

that the waste industry and recycling, recycling, I should say, really important. The environmental benefits of good recycling cannot be overstated. It creates more jobs. It's better for the planet. But a lot of the time, it's just not

happening. It's just not true. There's so much smoke and mirrors in this world. It it's kind of unreal um so yeah like we want to talk about greenwashing it's a great place to start what about us buying a shit people do on amazon i mean i know some people maybe personally that have stuff that comes every day from amazon you know and there's there's trucks that bring it you know yeah it's like some ten dollar thing of salt or something and you're like that's a you know they put it in like a giant10 thing of salt or something. And you're like, that's a, you know, they put it in like a giant box about this size for something, you know, that's about that big.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, they kind of cracked down on that here recently because it was like a social media campaign, which, which really seemed to convince them. But the thing that they got in trouble for, and I got, you know, I cover in the book is that not a lot of people realize that when you return stuff, particularly if you're online shopping, like if you return stuff, and if it's below enough value, they often just throw it away. Like it doesn't get resold. They can like the logistical cost of hiring a staff to retort it. So Amazon in the UK was caught basically shipping a load of stuff that was unsold returns just straight to landfill and they had this insane footage of you know like headphones and massage guns and clothing and all this stuff just like

straight in there um the fashion industry has been doing this for years they have this thing called dead stock which is like designer brands in order to artificially inflate the the value of a lot of their clothing were just burning like anything was unsold. They would either literally slash it or they would just throw it straight in an incinerator. And there are fast fashion brands. There's this story in the book about H and M, the fast fashion brand producing so much clothing waste that there's a place in,

um, I can't remember which country it is. It might be Denmark. It might be Sweden. Um, where like they had an incinerator that like switched over to being powered by clothes. Like there's a waste of energy plant

just powered by clothing waste. They're providing the electricity for half the country. Yeah. But yeah. That is crazy, dude. That is crazy. Well, very insightful book. I've learned a few things. You scare me away from plastic. So good job there.

You've won one person over with your book, and I'm sure there'll be more. So thank you very much, Oliver, for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm going to send you a new fork in the mail. If any of your listeners want to chip in and get a full cutlery set, let's sort Chris out, I think.

But make sure it's got that lead base, because that lead base gives it that zing. I like that zing, man. It gives it that flashy flavor. It makes your mouth tingle a little bit and your brain goes, ooh. And then the next morning you're like, eh, buddy, which is pretty much the story of my life. Give us a.com, Oliver, so people can find you on the internet. Yeah, sure.

You can find me at oliverfranklinwallace.com. And as I said, the book is called Wasteland. It's out in all good bookshops now. I hope you like it. There you go. Thank you veryiverfranklinwallace.com. Uh, and as I said, the book is called wasteland. It's out and all good bookshops. Now I hope you like it. There you go. Uh, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Uh, go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, order the book where refined books are sold.

You can go to, uh, wherever they are, uh, wasteland, the secret world of waste. It's a secret and the urgent search for a cleaner future and open up your eyes. And, you know, really, if you want to save the planet,

stop damn breeding so much. Jesus. I mean, go adopt a kid. There's plenty of shelter. It's kind of like getting a dog. Just go get one of the shelter. They're already there. Just adopt them.

Anyway, I'm just teasing you people. You can do whatever you want because you will. So there's that. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.