--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a new year and there is new news, but we are not quite back yet. Team Today Explained is resting up before bringing you a year's worth of wall-to-wall election coverage and other coverage and all that character you've come to know and love. We are back on Monday, the 6th of January. So today you get one of our favorite episodes from last year, from September 2019. An episode I asked Today Explained producer Noam Hassenfeld to go out in the world and make because I heard 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: Yeah, 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.
--:-- [Sound effects: A bus ride]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a view inside the combustion chamber. So this is where we're burning waste at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a good view in there.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Holy shit. 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. 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.
--:-- [Sound effects: A bus ride continues]
--:-- 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. 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. The ban was disruptive. About half of the plastic that we were recycling was getting exported to China.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: She's a National Geographic fellow and a professor at the University of Georgia. 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. 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.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: But the profit margins on recycled plastic are tiny. And eventually China said all the extra pollution wasn't worth it to them. Which basically gets us here. A slow-moving recycling crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's worse than it seems. The U.S. was in a recycling crisis well before China's ban. 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. To be clear, that means for the majority of plastic in America... About 79% was getting landfilled.
--:-- [Sound effects: A bus ride continues]
--:-- 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. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, sir, you are. 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. 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.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: Ones and twos are more recyclable. Those are things like your beverage bottles, your detergent bottles. Milk jugs, peanut butter jars. 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. 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.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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. And most plastic can only be recycled once or twice. 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.
--:-- Jenna Jambeck: And so it really simply only delays that eventual disposal that's needed. So only some plastic can be recycled, and during the process, more and more gets disqualified. And that only delays the inevitable, which is plastic going to an incinerator, a landfill, or even worse, the ocean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 We also calculated the cumulative amount of plastic that we had produced, and that was equal to 8.3 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: Economics, Bucknell University. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: At each stop in the recycling journey, there are both economic and environmental costs. 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. Ideally this is all ideal because a lot of the plastic ends up in the landfill at this stage because they open up the recycling truck and there's plastic wrap in there and you know 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 and says I won't take that and ends up going to the landfill but if it is being truly recycled then it will be put in a container with other exact materials like 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. Those little plastic bits then could be used in some type of new product. 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. All of that energy and all of that labor has a significant environmental cost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the end, adding it all up? Plastic is one of those materials where the benefits are outweighed by the costs. 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. Landfills tend to be closer to a municipality than a final recycling outlet is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or you take it to the coast and have it shipped to a developing country, which still does ocean dumping. 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. 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?
--:-- Thomas Kinnaman: I think it became more of a social question than an economic question. 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. And therefore, it just makes sense to do this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think recycling maybe at some point was considered to be sort of like a gateway activity, a gateway into the world of responsible environmental living that we can get people starting to recycle. 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: 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. Right. 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: And it's possible that we want to keep this supply chain going just in case there is technological innovation that occurs soon. We're all hoping for that, right? 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? But what if it is?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Noam stares down the fire after the break on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are you doing? Rating and reviewing. What are you doing? Rating and reviewing. What are you doing? Rating and reviewing. And one more thing, every now and then. Pick your favorite episode and send it to a friend. And one more thing, every now and then. Pick your favorite episode and send it to a friend. What are you doing? Five stars. What are you doing? Love this show. Today. Five stars. Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. Before we get to incineration let just set the stage Our recycling system is broken The vast majority of America plastic is not getting recycled It mainly ending up in landfills Or worse the ocean So what do we do?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Well, to figure it out, I hopped on a bus and headed down to the Covanta incinerator in Alexandria. It's one of about 100 waste-to-energy plants in the U.S. and like the name says, it's designed to do two basic things. Get rid of waste and generate energy.
--:-- 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. 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.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: There's a huge wall of mixed waste on either side of us. Plastic, cardboard, furniture, banana peels, you name it. 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 gonna have less heating value. That's why they're mixing it before feeding it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They need to get it just right. 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 gonna be dropped into that hopper. We're gonna be gravity-fed. This waste will be reduced to ash in about one hour to two hours.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: All the trash in the hopper gets burnt up? Yeah, it's going directly into the municipal waste combustor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can we see some fire? Absolutely. 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.
--:-- Kevin McGonigal: The way we're generating electricity is we have water wall tubes lining the inside of the boiler. Or 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. 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, which brings us to step three, metal recovery.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: Chemical Engineering, City College of New York. 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. There's something called the waste hierarchy. The waste hierarchy starts with reduce, reuse, recycle. 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. Then, all the way at the bottom, the worst thing we can do with our waste is drop it in a landfill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you put material into a landfill, you're releasing methane. Which is 86 times stronger than CO2 over a 20-year time frame. 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. Still, there's obviously the whole burning waste thing. Anytime you dealing with this garbage there going to be emissions in one form or the other whether it 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-to-energy facility processing waste for 100 years.
--:-- Marco Castaldi: And there have been studies that examined the effects of living near these 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even so, incineration is really controversial. 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.
--:-- Ana Baptista: Environmental Policy Program at the New School in New York. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to trace public health outcomes to any one particular facility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What I am confident about is incinerators are definitely contributing to the overall pollution burden in a community. 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. 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. There's about 500 incinerators in Europe. America's got under 100.
--:-- Janik Vak: Zero-waste Europe, Brussels. Not a fan of incinerators. But not because of the pollution. I don't think the air pollution is the main issue nowadays. It's mainly the lock-in effect. The fact that these are plants that have to be there in order to pay back at least 25, 30, 40 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that locks the waste management system into burning. Even though countries in Europe are some of the best recyclers on Earth, Yannick wants even more government investment in recycling. Like Professor Anna 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. Back in the United States, things are a little more dire. China doesn't want our plastic. We're using more and more of it every day. Only 9% of it is getting recycled. And then people are scared of incineration. But maybe that's because people don't understand just how bad waste really is.
--:-- Ana Baptista: And who can blame them? Europe is burning things out in the open. We're mostly doing it in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Europe talks about landfill bans. The U.S. talks about plastic straw bans. 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. Plants can't handle it, which is why Covanta stopped burning recyclables outside of Philly, and has rejected similar offers from other cities too.
--:-- Ana Baptista: 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. In a sense, China forcing our hand here might have been a good thing. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whatever the less-than-ideal scenario is, we're living it right now. And most of us don't even know it.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: That was reporting he did back in September. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. Afim's The Engineer. Bridget McCarthy, Amina Al-Sadi, and Halima Shah produce. Will Reed probably helped with this one too. Olivia Ekstrom checks our facts now. The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder brings us music. Today Explained is back and better than ever on Monday. The show is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
