--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Students across the world today are walking out of school to protest for action on the climate. It's in conjunction with the big UN climate summit. Maybe you heard about the 16-year-old climate activist Greta, who took a boat across the Atlantic for the occasion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone's focusing on the big, but I'm sort of caught up on the small, and I'm catching up today explained in the small. I asked producer reporter Noam Hassenfeld to help me on this quest because I heard that there was a chance that my recycling was being burned.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Yeah, Sean, you sent me this article in The Guardian from a couple months ago, and it was about how Philadelphia was having problems with its recycling system and was sending its recyclables to an incinerator outside the city.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and I think it was kind of like shocking, right? Because it flies in the face of like things that we were taught as children. What happens to your recycling?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I sort of couldn't believe that it was happening. And so I had to go check it out for myself. I wanted to go to a local incinerator operated by the same company. And so I went to an incinerator in Alexandria, Virginia, right outside of D.C.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a view inside the combustion chamber. So this is where we're burning waste at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: It's a good view in there. Holy shit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, bend down if you can and look directly up. Oh my God. That's scary.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Yeah, it's just crazy to see this, like, huge... I mean, that's a bigger fire than I've ever seen in my life, I think.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. is in a recycling crisis. Say goodbye to recycling. If you live in the city of Deltona with lower demand for recyclable products and rising costs of recycling, the city decided to suspend its recycling program.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The city of Jackson is suspending its curbside recycling program until further notice. In Sierra Vista, concerns over contamination and cost forced city leaders to do away with curbside service. A slow-moving recycling crisis.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: This comes after China stopped accepting the bulk of American recycling last year. So now we're sending this stuff to Southeast Asia. So we were doing that for a while.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's happened is because there's so much plastic that we're talking about, a lot of the Southeast Asian countries have now been overwhelmed, and they have also put in their own plastic bans. So there's all these tons of plastics basically floating around with no clear home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The story of this recycling crisis starts at the beginning of 2018. That was when China essentially stopped accepting the world's crap.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: There were a few reasons why this came to be. Reason number one. Basically, in the mid-1990s, recycling was changing in the U.S. and we went to this single stream system. We could just put all of our recyclables into one bin and then we designed facilities to separate those materials out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those facilities didn't always do the best job. And so they needed sort of this secondary sort. Which China was down to do, in large part because of reason number two.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: The WTO was really encouraging global trade. China shipped goods to the U.S. Those ships had to make a return trip. And they could go back with this recycled plastic that then could be imported into China.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the profit margins on recycled plastic are tiny. And eventually China said all the extra pollution wasn't worth it to them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which basically gets us here. A slow-moving recycling crisis. But it's worse than it seems. The U.S. was in a recycling crisis well before China's ban.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: Even when we were exporting it, our average recycling rate for plastic has been around 9%. So, you know, that means over 90% of our plastic was not getting recycled anyway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To be clear, that means for the majority of plastic in America... About 79% was getting landfilled.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: It wasn't that long ago that plastic seemed like a miracle. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, sir. Are you listening?
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: Yes, sir, you do. Plastics. Well, I just want to say one word to you. Complicated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all learned that plastic needs to be separated from trash. Sure. And it helps if your city separates plastic from glass and metals.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: But beyond that, plastic needs to be sorted from other plastic. You know those numbers on the bottom next to the recycling logo? Those are actually different types of plastic, all made from different materials, all of which have to be separated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ones and twos are more recyclable. Those are things like your beverage bottles, your detergent bottles. Milk jugs, peanut butter jars.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: Then from there, numbers three through sevens are things like polypropylene. Like the container my takeout came in on Thursday. And things like PVC. You know, when you think of like water pipes and things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they all have different properties in terms of processing, so you can't mix them together.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: And when you get to some of these higher numbers, more plastic starts ending up in landfills. There's many places that really just even wouldn't accept them in the first place. Because, again, you don't have enough value in capturing those.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then what we are putting into the recycled bin, if it's contaminated, then that doesn't get recycled itself. And so that percentage that is able to even be recycled just gets smaller and smaller.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: But great news. Even this is way worse than it seems. The U.S. only recycles 9% of its plastic. Seems bad, but that's only plastic we recycle once.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most plastic can only be recycled once or twice.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: You know, really, recycling just delays. It doesn't ever really prevent disposal at whatever point, and that would be not a landfill or incinerator.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it really simply only delays that eventual disposal that's needed.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: So only some plastic can be recycled, and during the process, more and more gets disqualified.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that only delays the inevitable, which is plastic going to an incinerator, a landfill, or even worse, the ocean.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: And all of that is happening while plastic production is skyrocketing. There's a great future in plastics. That has been rapidly increasing since we started recording this in 1950, and annually now it over 330 million tons
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We also calculated the cumulative amount of plastic that we had produced and that was equal to 8 billion metric tons
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: It's very hard to imagine. And even when we turned it into something like it's actually equal to 80 million blue whales, it's still very hard to imagine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But here's a twist. Contrary to everything you've been taught, throwing your recycling in the trash might actually be better for the planet.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: A question that was always on our minds was, what would be the optimal recycling rate?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were hearing that a complete circular economy with 100% recycling was a goal, and that sounded great. But we were concerned about the environmental costs of recycling combined with the economic costs.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: If you care about recycling, you probably throw your plastic in a bin and you feel like, great, I did my part. But your plastic goes on a journey. It has to be transformed. And all that effort makes your good deed complicated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At each stop in the recycling journey, there are both economic and environmental costs.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: So that recycling bin is put out on a Monday morning with all of your other recycled materials. And probably a different truck than the garbage truck will come down and collect those recycled materials.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The truck dumps it at some processing facility where all the plastic is separated.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Ideally, this is all ideal because a lot of the plastic ends up in the landfill at this stage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because they open up the recycling truck and there's plastic wrap in there and vegetable containers and different types of plastic that buyers don't want in their plastic.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: And so the buyer comes and looks at it and says, I won't take that. And ends up going to landfill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if it is being truly recycled, then it will be put in a container with other exact materials like it.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: And that container will then be trucked somewhere else, probably far from your home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's a long truck drive, probably shredded into little bits which required energy.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Those little plastic bits then could be used in some type of new product.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Think about every individual cost in that journey. The cost of the trucks, the equipment, the labor, the gasoline necessary to go around and collect the recycled materials.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Materials are then processed. This requires energy as well as additional labor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of that energy and all of that labor has a significant environmental cost.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: In the end, adding it all up. Plastic is one of those materials where the benefits are outweighed by the costs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My results suggest maybe we shouldn't even be considering recycling for plastic, given that the social costs seem to be higher than if we were to do other things with it.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: You're basically saying that recycling can be bad for the environment, not just like neutral or forgettable, but actually bad. It can be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Landfills tend to be closer to a municipality than a final recycling outlet is.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Or you take it to the coast and have it shipped to a developing country, which still does ocean dumping.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, which bottle is more likely to end up in the ocean? The one that you sent to your Missouri landfill or the one that's being shipped to a developing country that still dumps in the ocean?
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: So in some cases, recycling could actually be bad for the planet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Absolutely.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: And why do you think these sort of second layer questions about, you know, whether recycling can actually be good or bad are not necessarily being asked by most people?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it became more of a social question than an economic question.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: The idea was that we produce too much garbage. It's not sustainable. Recycling is a way of kind of entering into a more circular economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And therefore, it just makes sense to do this.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: And I think recycling maybe at some point was considered to be sort of like a gateway activity. Gateway into the world of responsible environmental living that, you know, we can get people starting to recycle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This will trigger other questions. How else can I help the environment? Maybe I'll stop driving everywhere and get my bike working and use that more often or I'll walk.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: And I'm not sure that's taken off like that. Instead of a gateway, maybe it's been used as an excuse, like, hey, I recycle now. I don't need to do anything else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I can continue to drive my SUV to work and keep my house nice and cold in the summer because I recycle my plastic. I'm okay. You know, I'm doing something.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Let's say I'm putting you in a situation where you're standing in front of a trash can and a recycling bin and you're holding that one water bottle. For you, the cost is exactly the same. You know, you can put it in either bin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which would you decide to put it in yourself?
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: Well, you know, I'm a creature of habit like so many of us. So I still find myself putting it in the plastic bin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's possible that we want to keep the supply chain going just in case there is technological innovation that occurs soon.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: We're all hoping for that, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But to be clear, for right now, it's better to throw that bottle away?
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: With plastic, yeah, it's better than landfill or incineration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, this is Sean. I'm back. I started off this whole thing saying incineration is shocking. That absolutely cannot be the thing we should do, right?
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: But what if it is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam stares down the fire after the break on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you guys listen to Love It or Leave It? It's a podcast hosted by John Lovett, presidential speechwriter, comedy writer. co-host of Pod Save America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Each week, he's joined by comedians, journalists, elected officials, activists, actors, musicians, and they break down the latest news, they quiz the audience, they have fun games and try to understand the frustrations and absurdities of our politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: New episodes drop every Saturday morning, and the episode that drops this Saturday morning, tomorrow, will feature me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was on the show this week. I talked to John and his panel about this development you may have heard about in Canada this week something about the Prime Minister dressing up in brownface as a Canadian who has a brownface.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I had some feelings about it check it out also, fun fact, Love It or Leave It one of the catchiest theme songs in podcasting I hope you like what you hear it's playing wherever your podcasts are playing Stay sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before we get to incineration, let's just set the stage. Our recycling system is broken. The vast majority of America's plastic is not getting recycled. It's mainly ending up in landfills. Or worse, the ocean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what do we do? Well, to figure it out, I hopped on a bus and headed down to the Covanta incinerator in Alexandria.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Yeah, there's an odor. To be honest, though, it's not that bad. Like, it's certainly not as bad as where I used to live in New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yeah, the crane operator is operating the crane or claw using a series of joysticks.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: We're in a giant warehouse. There's a guy on a perch operating a jumbo version of that arcade claw game, picking up mountains of crap instead of teddy bears.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a huge wall of mixed waste on either side of us. Plastic, cardboard, furniture, banana peels, you name it.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: And right in front of us, there's maybe a 30, 40-foot drop down to where the trucks are dumping waste.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the waste-to-energy process, this is the beginning. Step one, sorting. Waste comes in, it's dumped onto the tipping floor before being pushed into the refuse storage pit.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: So, Kevin, I just saw the claw, like, lift up and then sort of drop a chunk down. Was that the mixing process?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, we call it fluffing the waste. It's preventing you from just having all of one kind of material, all cardboard or all paper.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: You know, we know some waste has more heating value, like plastics. Wet cardboard is going to have less heating values. That's why they're mixing it before feeding it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this sea of waste out here, but they're always burning one-third plastic, two-thirds non-plastic.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: And on the upper ledge with us is a series of hoppers, which are basically these huge buckets with slanted ramps for the waste to slide down on its way to the combustion chamber.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Once the claw picks up a good mix... It's going to be dropped into that hopper. We're going to be gravity-fed.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: This waste will be reduced to ash in about one hour to two hours.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All the trash in the hopper gets burnt up?
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Yeah, it's going directly into the municipal waste combustor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can we see some fire? Absolutely.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Step two, combustion. This is a view inside the combustion chamber. So this is where we're burning waste at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, the way we're generating electricity is we have water wall tubes lining inside of the boiler.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: You're heating up water to convert steam. Steam goes with the generator and turns the blades to generate electrical energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a good view in there. Holy shit.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: By the time the waste gets to this wall, it's reduced to ash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At this point, we've taken a pile of mixed waste, burned it, and what's left over is ash and chunks of unburnt metal.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Which brings us to step three, metal recovery. Basically, ash passes off the end of this vibrating pan and falls into one truck.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The metal is picked up and dropped into a separate box, which is eventually sent to a scrap metal yard.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: So you should see some recovery here. I'm sure you'll see some spoons and knives and stuff like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is just like an enormous rotating magnet?
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Yes. There's a bicycle just went by. A shopping cart.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's hard to picture just how crazy this all looks.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: There are big chunks of metal like mattress springs, bed frames, silverware, all just going and sticking to this huge rotating magnet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We get about 30 tons a day of that material, 11,000 tons per year.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: That's 11,000 tons of metal that's being recycled every year instead of heading to a landfill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The air pollution control, I'll walk you through it. We'll just go outside.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Step four, pollution control. See that ductwork there? That's where all the flue gases come.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you burn trash, you've got gases that come off of that.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: That's what that ductwork is. Basically, you're injecting a lime slurry. A lime slurry is basically a chemical mist that reacts with the flue gas to reduce acid gas emissions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then it goes to a bag house.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: Kevin walks over to the bag house, which handles the bigger pieces of flying ash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are six compartments where gases are going through.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: It's designed that way so they go through a cleaning cycle one at a time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It just blasts air, knocks the ash down into a hopper here, and drops it back into the boiler.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: So it's kind of a closed-loop system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've got combined ash sent into a truck, which is eventually, at this site, it's sent to a monofill or ash landfill.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: That ash goes to a landfill, but that's only about 10% of the size of the original waste.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Finally, we get to step five, energy creation.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: So the steam enters the turbine, which generates electricity, goes to a switch yard owned by Dominion Virginia Power, who will sell that to the end user.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, that's how they work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So should we be burning all our plastic?
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: It's not ideal. The ideal situation is to reduce waste.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: The ideal situation after that is to reuse it. And then whatever cannot be reduced or reused or recycled, you have to extract the energy from it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And converting it with waste to energy has a lower environmental impact than landfilling.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: There's something called the waste hierarchy. The waste hierarchy starts with reduce, reuse, recycle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's all most of us got in school. Just the first three words of the waste hierarchy. And that's best to worst. Reduce, then reuse, then recycle.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: But guess what's next? Plastics. No, go away. It's incineration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then, all the way at the bottom, the worst thing we can do with our waste is drop it in a landfill.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: When you put material into a landfill, you're releasing methane. Which is 86 times stronger than CO2 over a 20-year time frame.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which means... For every one ton that you convert in a waste-to-energy facility, you have offset nominally one ton of CO2.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: So greenhouse gas emissions, definitely a benefit with waste-to-energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Still, there's obviously the whole burning waste thing.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: Anytime you're dealing with this garbage, there's going to be emissions in one form or the other, whether it's air emissions or solid emissions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the amount of dioxin that released from waste facilities is minuscule you will get more exposure to dioxins looking at a firework display for 15 or 20 minutes than you will be exposed to dioxins of a waste facility processing waste for 100 years.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: And there have been studies that examined the effects of living near these plants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, one that's just come out where there was a seven-year study on facilities in the UK that looked at infant mortality, you know, birth outcomes in terms of, you know, abnormalities, and it showed that there was none.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: Even so, incineration is really controversial.
--:-- Ana Baptista: Most of the incinerators in the U.S. today are located in communities of color and low-income communities that are often referred to as environmental justice communities, and they contribute pollution to local communities that are already overburdened by other pollution sources.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very difficult, if not impossible, to trace public health outcomes to any one particular facility.
--:-- Ana Baptista: What I am confident about is incinerators are definitely contributing to the overall pollution burden in a community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Environmental justice communities, if you ask them what their target is, they would say that they don't prefer landfills or incinerators.
--:-- Ana Baptista: Professor Baptista wants the world we were promised. Ideas like zero-waste solutions that divert a lot more of the waste stream to composting and to recycling, and in some cases, looking at opportunities to reduce the overall burden and load on waste systems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I should point out that this particular debate is very American.
--:-- Yannick Vach: In Europe, it's a whole different ballgame. First of all, they're just way better at recycling. They're also way more into incinerating.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's about 500 incinerators in Europe. America's got under 100.
--:-- Yannick Vach: In greater Paris, garbage that can't be recycled is converted into energy, some of which the plants use to run themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sweden burns half its waste and even imports some from the UK just to burn it.
--:-- Yannick Vach: Sweden is considered the world leader in the field of waste to energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Vienna, the incinerator is featured on postcards.
--:-- Yannick Vach: I think it's a pretty remarkable step that the city of Vienna did this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the most original plant is probably in Copenhagen. Downhill, downtown. This is the city center power station the neighbors don't object to.
--:-- Yannick Vach: The Danish plant has an actual ski slope on its roof. Seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our ski slope here at Copenhagen is a lot different than when you visit a mountain.
--:-- Yannick Vach: There's a lot of reasons why the U.S. and Europe are so different when it comes to waste.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Europe needs the energy from incineration more than the U.S. does because it's not as rich in fossil fuels.
--:-- Yannick Vach: And they have much, much less cheap land for landfilling. Most European countries even have landfill bans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But most noticeably, incinerators are right there in the middle of some of the ritziest neighborhoods.
--:-- Yannick Vach: The most well-known, like the one in Vienna, the Copenhagen, the one in Amsterdam, in Paris, it's not necessarily areas where you have poverty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, most lands in Europe, I would not say that they are kind of hidden somewhere.
--:-- Yannick Vach: Not a fan of incinerators. But not because of the pollution. I don't think the air pollution is the main issue nowadays.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's mainly the locking effect. The fact that these are plants that have to be there in order to pay back at least 25, 30, 40 years.
--:-- Yannick Vach: And that locks the waste management system into burning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even though countries in Europe are some of the best recyclers on Earth, Yannick wants even more government investment in recycling.
--:-- Yannick Vach: Like Professor Ana Baptista at the New School, he wants the world we were promised. Reduce. Reuse. Maybe even recycle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Europe, it doesn't feel nearly as out of reach.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Back in the United States, things are a little more dire.
--:-- Yannick Vach: China doesn't want our plastic. We're using more and more of it every day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Only 9% of it is getting recycled, and then people are scared of incineration.
--:-- Yannick Vach: But maybe that's because people don't understand just how bad waste really is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And who can blame them? Europe is burning things out in the open.
--:-- Yannick Vach: We're mostly doing it in poor neighborhoods and communities of color.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Europe talks about landfill bans. The U.S. talks about plastic straw bans.
--:-- Yannick Vach: And that is not putting much of a dent in those 80 million blue whales worth of plastic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Incineration can and should be part of the solution, but we can't just go burning all of our plastic.
--:-- Yannick Vach: Plants can't handle it, which is why Covanta stopped burning recyclables outside of Philly and has rejected similar offers from other cities too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's left is a choice with no easy answer. Either we stop making so much plastic or somehow we innovate our way out of the problem.
--:-- Yannick Vach: In a sense, China forcing our hand here might have been a good thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It might force us to confront the ugly realities of incineration or the even uglier realities of landfills or the ugliest reality of floating plastic islands the size of Texas.
--:-- Yannick Vach: Whatever the less-than-ideal scenario is, we're living it right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most of us don't even know it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam Hassenfeld, reporter, producer, Today Explained.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I'm Sean Ramas-Furham.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer over here.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Afim Shapiro's the engineer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bridget McCarthy, Amina Al-Sadi, and Halima Shah produce as well.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Will Reed has been our summer intern up until today, but all good summers come to an end.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What he's taught us is that where there's a will, there's a way.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Shout outs to Jelani Carter for being our best friend in New York City and to the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder who I can only assume is heading out to Area 51 right now
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is a 401 episode old co-production of Stitcher and Vox.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
