WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Plastic-ky Situation

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

This week we talk about the rules, regulations, and overall scams concerning recycling. Tune in to get Sad (!) about how much actually gets recycled, a new court case that probably won't lead anywhere, and the ultimately fruitless blame game of who is responsible. 

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Jillian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gouldsby. And happy day. Yes. That's all I'm going to say about that. What is there to say? What is there to say, Garrett?

Plastic. It's everywhere. Plastic. And people are mad about it. And that's what we're talking about today. This episode, okay, so we're talking about recycling more specifically. And this episode is a little bit of a weird situation because I saw a headline for a Wall Street Journal article

and then I was like, huh, that would be a good episode for social mediators. And so I just didn't read the article and I sent it to Garrett and I was like, you have to read this. And then I tried to look up things about it on social media and womp, womp, social media is not talking about it. Social media is concerned with the classic Donald Trump, Joe Biden. What do we care about them? We should care about the planet.

Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people care about Israel, Palestine, which countries are a part of the planet. So maybe more adjacently there. But what about turtles? Turtles are also a part of the planet. Yeah, I guess so. And plastics are killing them. I never, okay, so my only real experience with recycling, this is terrible.

But it's true is I was on a, I think it was called like the Green Team or something in third grade where we went around to the classrooms and told everybody to recycle. So you just told them? Yeah, we didn't do it. Yeah. And it was like, it was always just like, you should recycle because it's good, period. And now as social media is making me think maybe recycling is more complicated than I ever really dreamed. You could say that. So let's talk about what I found.

First thing I found was that, like I just said, you have to do a lot more steps for recycling than I thought. Yes. But I think I have some contradictory info going on here. Okay. Because on the one hand, I saw many a TikTok of these different recycling plants where these men stand at these conveyor belts of trash coming through and they take out stuff that's not recyclable and they let other stuff pass through. But I was also getting information from angry people on TikTok and Twitter saying, if you don't clean out the dirty food in your cans or in your glass containers, then the whole load of resources. then the whole load of recycling is at risk of being tossed entirely. But there are these men whose job was to pick through the stuff that wasn't recyclable.

So I'm a little confused about that. I mean, you can answer this later, but like just put a pin in the fact that... I don't understand if... Is it really? Am I going to contaminate an entire load of perfectly good recyclable goods if I don't clean every last bit of sauce out of my tomato jar? That's my question to start. off there. Some other things

I learned that panicked me a little bit is that plastic wrap and plastic bags are not recyclable at all. So no need to recycle those. And I guess if you use a plastic bag to throw away your recycling, the whole thing gets tossed. You can't recycle shredded

paper. Why? We'll talk about that hopefully. Can't recycle wood, which I guess kind of makes sense. But I did think maybe wood was recyclable until social media told me no. Well, you could reuse it, but... Oh, yes, but not put it in a plant

Unless it is like rotten or something. For the first time in my life, I learned that things that are recyclable and things that are not have recycling numbers on them. And the numbers mean different things, and you're going to have to tell me what those numbers mean. I will say social media did have a little video explaining what they all meant, but I didn't retain it, so you're going to have to repeat. it for the listeners. And apparently there's numbers one through seven, but only numbers one and two

really get accepted. So to me, what is the point of having numbers three through seven? What do they mean? If you can only really recycle numbers one and two, what do numbers one and two mean? I don't remember. And then again, there's that data that like only 10% of the stuff that you recycle is actually going to be recycled. The rest is getting put in a landfill. They said 10% that was the number. Yes, 10% was the number I received. My last, I think, important strain before I let you take over and maybe ask me some questions about all the valuable things that I learned is that people are not mad at other people for not recycling, which is great because I felt no moral responsibility to go recycle after watching TikTok today. because their whole thing is like if you take on the moral responsibility of recycling,

you allow companies to get away with doing way more damage, and they don't have to take any responsibility because you think it's on you. And so they talked about how the recycling movement in general was funded and started by plastic companies, trying to make it look like plastic was a good thing, by saying, look how recyclable and reusable it is. plastic rocks but in reality recycled plastic can only be recycled i guess two or three times before it's downcycled and the visual i got from that was that recycling you can come back as like other plastic until it's downcycled and then it turns into like a more permanent type of thing like a

bench well bench is the only thing they showed me but i'm assuming there's other options of things that you could turn recycled material into. And eventually when that breaks down, you just throw it in the landfill. So it all ends up in the landfill anyway. Recycling isn't even real for a long time, only for a little bit. You're only prolonging, what's not prolonging,

postponing the effects, which is really quite grim, but the blame falls on Coca-Cola, mostly from what I've heard. And I'm happy to blame Coca-Cola, because it sounds like recycling is really hard and a lot of extra work that social media doesn't really think that I have to do at all. So, yeah, I think that's mostly what I found a lot of people being like,

I live with zero waste because I feel better about it morally, but you don't have to because let's go get mad at the corporations. And I'm always, I guess I'm forgetting mad at corporations because I don't have any reason to like Coca-Cola. I don't even really like Coke in general. I don't really drink that. So this is not really affecting your too, too much to be mad at the corporations. No, I do use a lot of plastic, though, I think probably. I think everybody does.

Okay, good. As long as I'm not the only one. And they've made recycling look pretty much close to impossible. So for those of you who are just tuning in on that really joyful note, I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Goulsby. And you're listening to the social mediators talk about recycling on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. Woo-hoo. Okay.

Take it away, Garrett. So what started this conversation that we are now having is a 68 page long report written by a bunch of climate activists. Basically, okay, I didn't read the whole report because it was a lot of jargon that amounts to, I read parts of it and it all amounts to the companies that make all these plastics have known since plastic was invented that it's really hard to rest. recycle, but knowing that, they still pushed it onto the consumer market in just a mass consumerism sort of way, and they knew that they couldn't ever recycle all of it, and they did it anyway. So they're bad, and it's scummy. And the reality is that plastic is really, really expensive to recycle.

But people are, I think for a long time, people weren't getting super mad about it in the U.S. because the dirty secret about recycling in the U.S. is that for many decades, we shipped most of what we collected as recycling to China. Yikes. So what we would do, and this was a contract that American companies had with Chinese companies, is they would collect bulk amounts of recycling, ship it to China, and because China had access to such a cheap labor force, they could have people sort through the plastic and do a lot of the plastic. processing for much cheaper and recycle that plastic material into usable things. Now, China's economy is so big that they produce their own plastic waste to the extent where they can

do their own recycling. Like, they don't need the U.S. waste to have a robust recycling apparatus. So now the U.S., and this is not just the U.S., this is basically every modern country in the world, ships at least some portion of their recyclable materials. to other small countries like the Philippines or Malaysia or may pick your Southeast Asian island. Got it. And most of those countries do not have any of the necessary equipment to deal with that recycling materials.

So it kind of just gets dropped there. So that's kind of one of the reasons why people are getting up in arms about this now is because it's a bigger problem than it has been ever before. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about you asked about how is it sorted? and what do we as consumers need to do and how does all that work? Okay, so let's talk about how it's sorted. When we recycle, when we throw things in our recycling,

then it gets taken to a plant and you saw it right, right? There are people that are standing there sorting through what can't be recycled, and that's a lot of things. There's a lot of things that can't be recycled. Really, anything that's not like plastic or, another good example would be. Glass can be recycled, but other than that, cardboard can be sometimes. Paper usually can be as well. The process by which paper is recycled is basically that it gets blended up and turned into this like pulverized paper sludge and then they dry it out and make more paper. Do you know why they can't take shredded paper? Does that make sense to you? You know, I actually don't know why they couldn't take shredded paper. That was curious to me that you said that because from my impression, all the paper products that get recycled get shredded anyway.

What? Maybe they have to shred it themselves. Maybe. That could be. And the risk could be that they don't have the process, they don't have the chance to essentially see what's in it before it gets shredded because one of the biggest problems with recycling is that if whatever you were recycling isn't 100% pure, it's going to mess up whatever product you try to make out of the recycled material.

So let's say you try to recycle plastic and you go through the whole process of recycling plastic and there's a tiny, tiny amount of something that's not the plastic left in whatever the new plastic you make is, it's going to mess up your product. And it's inevitable that that's going to happen no matter how good your processing is. So I'll just run you real quick through the process of recycling plastic, how it works. When it comes into the plant, it gets sorted by its number. So we talked about the plastic number. Whenever you see any kind of plastic thing, it always has like the chasing arrows, like the triangle arrows, and then a number in the middle. So that is why a lot of people are getting mad because consumers see that and they say,

oh, it's got the arrows. That means it's recyclable. That's not actually true. What that heck? That is a indicator to recycling plants, telling them how to sort it. And as you pointed out, there's only a couple numbers out of the one through seven that can even be recycled at all, and even of those that can be recycled, it's not super effective and it's very expensive.

So when... It's a scam. Kind of. So when it comes into a sorting plant, it goes through all of these different machines that sort it by size and color and all of those things. And then it gets shredded up, kind of blend it up, and melted, and then they make plastic pellets out of it. And then those plastic pellets can be melted.

belt it down into making and molding new plastic products, whatever they might be, new bottles, whatever. But the problem is no one kind of plastic can be mixed with another. Remember, plastics are petroleum products. And I think we mentioned this on a previous episode. I'm trying to remember what the episode would have been about. But the thing about petroleum's composition is that it's different depending on where the petroleum was harvested, right? All petroleum products are just organic substances that have been decayed, right? And it could be anything. It could be bones from an animal or plants. And those are going to have different chemical compositions. And so the plastics that are made as a derivative of all those things, they wind up with a different structure and are just

made of totally different stuff. So you can't mix a type one plastic with a type three plastic. They have to be perfectly sorted. And if that process is done at all poorly, then you can't use whatever you wind up with. So, you know, as consumers, we're not sorting our plastic that way, right? We're putting the ones through sevens all in one bin. And sometimes it's in a little bit. Sometimes it's ripped up, whatever. You know, it's not sorted so nicely for us.

So when it gets to the processing plant, they have to ensure somehow that every little piece of type one plastic in their type one plastic bin is all type one. And same goes for all seven kinds. So it's really, really expensive, really, really difficult. to do that kind of quality control. And the reality is, 3 through 7 pretty much can't be recycled at all. Most of those go to the landfill.

Like, what's the point of even, like, labeling them if you can't? It's marketing, pretty much, is the answer. The dirty answer is that plastics, back in the 1950s, when they sort of started to become popular, the way that they became popularized was not only because of their convenience,

but because consumers and producers realized that this was something that they didn't, that they could sell multiple times over and over again. So a consumer would purchase it. It would get used and then they would have to purchase it again and again and again. And that's great for business. And so the kind of the littering problem started to become an issue at that point. People were like, oh, there's all these reusable plastics. They just get thrown away and all this littering is happening. So the plastic companies stepped in. They started campaigning against littering, and then recycling sort of just got lumped into that argument, and they never brought it to the public's attention how difficult it was to go through the recycling process. So kind of wild.

And that's what this report that sparked this whole conversation is about is how the companies knowingly advertised that plastic was recyclable when in reality the actual number is about 30%, 30 to 40% of all plastic. plastics can get recycled. The rest is, goes to the landfill. Is there any hope? Is there any hope? There is some, I will say, but it's, everybody wants to pass off the responsibility, right?

The consumers want to blame the companies. The companies want to blame the plastic companies, right? And the plastic companies want to, I don't know, blame God or something. I'm not sure who they want to blame. Maybe China. Maybe they can blame China. Right. Everybody wants to blame China. But.

True. Ultimately, what has to happen if they're going to change this problem is, first of all, that there needs to be a more cost-effective way to use plastics, to reuse plastics to recycle them. And it needs to be such that they don't just get used over one time or two times, but many, many times. So the technology of recycling itself needs to improve. And the other thing is that the material that the types of plastic that we're using in consumer products needs to change. Because the reality is there are certain kinds of plastic that are just probably not going to be recyclable. There's a few companies that are starting to produce more plastic goods of those more recyclable types. And that's going to help tremendously.

But you're talking about getting the junk. giant capitalist consumer market of not just America, but the West as a whole, to make a change. That's a big, big thing to get moving in any direction. So if any change happens, it's going to be slow and probably will not occur in our lifetime. Or we may begin to see a change occur, but it's going to take a very long, long time. Let's see. Did I miss any of your questions? Is there anything else? I have another question that you might not have the answer to, but I thought I'd ask.

anyway. Hit me with it. I know back in the day, here's a little anecdote for you. My high school, we had recycling bins in the high school, and we found out my senior year that my school didn't actually recycle, that they had like the blue recycling bins everywhere, but they just dumped them in the same dumpsters outside as the, as the regular ones. So it was just the appearance of us that we were recycling, but it doesn't exist.

And then social media reminded me of this because they were like, some cities don't even really recycle. Like you can have the recycling bins and waste management or whatever. We'll collect them. But because your city doesn't recycle, they'll just go in the trash. Is that widespread? Is that legal to have recycling bins? And then just be like, no, we don't do that here. Like what?

What are the, are there laws for recycling and false advertising? You might not know the answer. This is a really good question, and I actually do know the answer to this. The challenge is that laws are different in every state. Every state has different regulations when it comes to recycling. And the reality is it's actually not super regulated to begin with. So the question that you asked, is it illegal for them to do that? Probably not.

Which is a little bit crazy, right? But it is probably not against the law for them to do that. Is it misleading? Yes. Does it make us very upset? Yes. But. It's kind of scummy.

in my opinion. Yes. It's also a little bit scummy that some products have parts that are recyclable and parts that are not. Like pasta boxes, you got to pop out

that little plastic thing because apparently that's not recyclable but the cardboard of the box is. Like, how are people even supposed to know that? You know what I mean? Yes. Well, the reality about mixed plastics

is that if it is mixed in that way, it's pretty much making the entire thing unrecyclable. So an example that I saw in my research was a Pringle's can, right? They're like cardboard on the outside. They have a paint that is made of some sort of plastic substance. There's a layer underneath of another kind of plastic and then there's a coating on the inside that's a third different kind. And I think two of those three are recyclable, but one is not and they're impossible to separate in the sorting process.

So you have to just throw the whole thing out. And that's super common. Another thing that's very common. You know any sort of used once container where you peel off the like plastic film, right, at the top. You know what I'm talking about? You peel it. You peel the end. You like pull the lid off or whatever. Usually one part is recyclable and the other is not. And if you don't peel it off all the way and like take off the plastic film all the way, they can't recycle that.

Because they're together. They're stuck together. So it's like not even worth it. I know I shouldn't say that and people are going to be mad at me, but like, it just sounds impossible at this point. Maybe quite, quite possibly. I, you know, I think the... Derek doesn't want to get in trouble. He doesn't want to pick a side on this one.

I don't know. I think my side is that people need to have more self-control with the plastics that they use, but also there needs to be a change on what is offered to them to begin with because the challenge is that for a lot of people, the reusable plastic, or they, The single-use plastic products are just the thing that's most readily available. And people aren't going to go out of their way to change that. I know a few people that what they have resorted to doing is they have just reusable jars that they fill with things. And go to bulk store and you just fill your jars, right? No plastic is used in the process. And like that's great.

A lot of that. A lot of people don't want to go through the trouble of lugging jars around or having the right size or having storage for all of those different jars and what, you know, whatnot. So it's a two-way street. Everybody needs to work on what they're doing. Surprise, surprise. I kind of figured this would be the case. I mean, social media was real glum about it anyway. Speaking of social media being glum,

are we ready to give it a grade? I think so. For those of you who are just tuning in, this is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. We are about to go give social media a grade on how they did concerning recycling, recycling. What fun, except for it was actually really sad.

So anyway, I'm going to count down from three, Garrett. Do you think you'll have it by then? I think so. Okay. Three. Yeah, I said from three. Oh my gosh. For a second, I was like, wait, which one?

Okay, no. Three, two, one. B. Hey. Yes. Oh my gosh. We never get the same. There was some good info.

It sounded like you had some true things. I think I'm just sad about it. And the fact that I'm getting, the reason I didn't give it an A is because I had to go digging for it. You know, like this is never something that will really come up on your for you page. It will come up if it's like a trendy mom filling up jars with almond butter. Like that'll come up and then maybe she'll mention something about recycling. But other than that, I had to type in some pretty specific keywords to come up with any info. And algorithmically, that's kind of a nightmare for anybody who just wants to stumble upon this information.

But the information I found seemed fine and it's fittingly sad. Although nobody really talks about recycling. So again, it's a tricky situation we found ourselves in. Any final closing thoughts for us, Garrett?

Hmm. Recycle kids. And when you do, remember that it's probably futile. Oh my gosh. Wow. That's what you want to say? Yes, I'm ending on a depressing note.

Also, why did you say futile, like a futile system? Feudal. Fudal? Because I'm from Texas and we pronounce everything wrong. Feudal. Wrong?

I'm from Texas too. Wait, what the heck? Futile. Okay. Anyway, this conversation is futile. Thank you so much for tuning in to the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Gary Gillespie. We'll talk to you next week.