Transcriber: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: David DeRuwe
There are 15,000 disposable cups made every second.
15,000.
It takes 16 cups of water
just to make the plastic inside of one of them.
And each time one of those is made,
it releases the CO2 equivalent of two cubic feet.
At 15,000 per second,
that fills up Yankee Stadium every seven minutes.
And that's just from cups.
The numbers for forks, plastic bags, clamshells are all just as bad.
And yet the EPA reports that we recycle just 9% of our plastic in the US.
Now, as consumers,
we are all facing the incredibly difficult and stressful decision
every day.
And no, I'm not talking about whether or not to cc your boss on that proposal,
or whether you really need to buy your mother-in-law a birthday present.
I'm talking about something much, much more stressful ...
What bin do I put this in?
(Laughter)
But seriously, it's a tough choice.
I mean, what do you do with the pizza box, the paper plate that held the pizza,
the napkin, the best-wishes card,
the pen that ran out of ink signing the best-wishes card,
the paper party hats, the plastic packaging?
What about that stretchy thing, the soda bottle, the vodka bottle,
their respective caps, and the paper cups used to hide in-office drinking?
(Laughter)
I know.
Donna's retirement party was stressful.
(Laughter)
Now, if you had doubts about any of those items,
you are not alone.
Recycling is confusing.
And there is a lot of mixed messaging out there,
and the real answer is "it depends":
whether or not something is recyclable,
whether it's actually being recycled,
or whether it even makes sense to,
all lead to very different answers.
Now, I am a waste consultant and entrepreneur,
and I help businesses reduce their waste.
When I start working with a property, I always start with a waste audit.
That means me coming around at midnight.
I weigh bags; I check their contents.
Really I'm doing two things here:
One, I'm trying to figure out
how much does this weigh over the course of a month?
In other words, how much does it cost to remove it?
And two, I'm checking the quality of the recycling.
How well is it sorted?
Is there any value to be extracted from the load?
Could they save money by sorting better?
Should it be priced as recycling, as trash, or somewhere in between?
Recently, I was on a waste audit in Brooklyn,
and I'm doing my thing, weighing bags and taking notes,
and I pull a garbage bag out of the garbage dumpster,
a recycling bag out of the recycling compactor,
and I open both of them up and I see this:
[Which is which?]
Any guesses as to which one is the recycling bag?
Now the bag on the left was destined for the recycling compactor,
but the truth of the matter is that both of these will end up as trash
because they're so poorly sorted.
And I see this everywhere -
your favorite grab-and-go lunch spot, your iconic beach taco joint -
trash and recycling going into the same black bag.
Now, before we talk about which bin should it go in,
let's talk about where your waste actually goes.
So let's say you're in an office building.
You've made your choice,
right or wrong,
whatever's in your hand is going into the blue bin.
Now, assuming you're not going down from the 17th floor yourself,
there's probably a cleaning crew or a custodian
making rounds to aggregate your waste.
Are they going around with one bag or two?
Let's say they have two bags and make their way to the loading bay -
where are they putting it?
Is there one dumpster or two?
How is it labeled?
And let's say there's two dumpsters -
one for garbage, one for single-stream recycling.
Who's picking it up?
Is it the municipal fleet?
Is it a private company?
Are they sending one truck or two?
Let's say they're sending two trucks:
your garbage goes in the garbage truck;
your recycling then goes to what is called a materials recovery facility,
or MRF for short.
Now, this is what we think of when we think of recycling:
all of your waste gets tipped onto a warehouse floor,
it gets pushed onto conveyor belts
where it can be sorted by people and machines
into bales of material type.
Think large cubes of number two plastic, or cardboard, aluminum.
And this is where the narrative ends -
in our school systems, in educational videos.
What most people don't realize is that these are all materials
that need to be bought and sold on an international market
in order for them to be recycled.
As NPR puts it, "We are all players in a global scrap trade."
There needs to be a business
that can reprocess that material,
turn it into something of value to use or resell
in order for it to be recycled.
And more than likely, it would need to be cheaper than virgin material.
Plastic, for example, is made from oil,
so when gas prices are down, so is the price of virgin plastic.
If there are no buyers for material, it's not going to get recycled.
Now, you may have heard something about the Chinese import ban,
but what does this really mean?
Well, China was buying most of our waste for the last 30 years.
China was and still is,
by and large, manufacturing a large percentage of the world's goods.
In order to meet that demand, they needed an influx of materials.
They were shipping goods over to the US;
we were filling up those same ships with our waste.
And they were pretty loose with what they took.
China allowed a 10 to 15% contamination rate.
That's the amount of trash that's mixed in with the recycling.
30 years of innovation has been built around hitting 10 to 15%.
That's before the Internet, before flip phones.
30 years that influence sorting equipment,
trucking practices, and messaging to consumers.
In late 2017, China banned the import of over 20 materials -
mostly plastics and mixed paper -
forcing countries like us to find other markets to send our waste to.
And those other markets, without proper infrastructure,
have planned their own import bans in the coming years.
So what does this mean for our waste?
Well, economics says it's really basic supply and demand.
We have the same supply of waste.
There's no replacement for the demand of China.
So your demand line slides down the supply line,
and your price is going to drop.
On the other hand,
your quality standards are going to increase.
Imagine I'm selling apples.
Every day, I have 10 apples and 10 buyers -
do I care what the apples look like?
No.
Now, imagine I still have 10 apples,
and you are the one person buying one apple.
Are you going to pick the bruised one
or the shiniest, prettiest apple in the bunch?
And that's what's happening to our materials.
The buyers are really picky.
Cardboard, for example, at times,
has a contamination rate of half a percent.
That means for that bale of cardboard to be bought and recycled,
it needs to be 99.5% clean, pristine, beautiful cardboard.
That means no waxed cardboard, no salad dressing, no tomato sauce,
no broken glass stuck in the side of a box.
Really hard to do when you've been sending one truck for all of the recycling.
Now I know you're all dying to know:
am I recycling wrong?
Well, the first step in recycling right
is finding out who's picking up your waste and seeing what they accept.
And it's probably different depending on where you are:
whether you're at home versus your office,
Buffalo, New York; San Jose, California.
Those MRFs that I spoke about have different owners, different sizes,
different sorting equipment that dictate their capabilities.
That being said,
there are some general rules to go by.
What is or is not recyclable
really depends on whether the value of that material
is higher than the cost to transport it, sort it and reprocess it.
Metal, for example, typically high in value,
it's easy to sort out with magnets and electrical currents,
it melts nicely, and it doesn't need to look pretty afterwards.
Fibers, like cardboard or paper,
typically are already sorted for you.
Think about your office shredder or your warehouse
getting a shipment all the same time.
That being said, these have taken a big hit since the Chinese import ban
and have decreased in value up to 90%.
Some common mistakes?
Well I mentioned the greasy pizza box.
Cardboard's typically shredded and pulped to be recycled,
so that grease is not going to mix well with the water.
Cut off the top and recycle that. Compost the bottom if you can.
Coffee cups, almost never recyclable.
Coffee cups are lined with plastic,
which is great because it doesn't leak on your hands.
This also makes it undesirable to paper recyclers.
And what about the lid?
Well, what kind of plastic is it?
You've probably seen these on a piece of plastic before.
These are meant for the sorters
to help identify what kind of material it is.
They do not necessarily mean that it is recyclable.
In general, recyclers want number one and number two plastic.
These have the highest value and the most stable markets.
Number one is PET.
Think water bottle, shampoo bottles, some food containers.
Number two is HDPE.
Think laundry detergents, milk jugs, some cleaning supplies.
The rest really depend on where it's going
and what their available markets are.
Well, Michael, my lunch container is made out of number one, PET.
Let me ask you something:
if you were donating clothes to find a new home,
would you donate them with salad dressing on them?
Really, you're protecting the value of that material,
and your recycling bin should not really need a bag,
because everything should be clean and free of food waste.
And what about those compostable items?
Well, one,
wherever you're depositing that, do they have a compost program set up?
And number two,
where is it going?
The farms that compost typically will not accept this material,
because it doesn't break down or behave like other organics.
So if it ends up in the landfill or ocean,
it's going to stay in the landfill or the ocean.
The bioplastics take high-heat facilities in order to break down,
and those typically have sorting equipment to screen out contaminants.
So if it looks and feels like a plastic cup,
it might end up going to the landfill anyway.
And what about plastic bags, bubble wrap, film plastic?
Now, despite the fact that these say "Recycle Me" all over them,
they should not go in your curbside bin.
They act like hair on sorting equipment
and have no value at the end of the conveyor belt.
That being said, there are some take-back programs that exist.
Big-box stores,
like Target, Whole Foods, Home Depot,
can aggregate enough clean material to make the economics work out.
Now let me ask you another question:
how long is the average plastic bag used for?
12 minutes.
Now, when I think of recycling, I think about the journey that it goes on.
Plastic, for example: made from oil, maybe drilled in Venezuela,
refined, shipped over to China to be made into our packaging,
to sit on a boat for six weeks so we can use it for 12 minutes,
to truck it around, bale it up, send it back to Asia
for it, maybe, to get recycled.
Does that make any sense?
Somehow we have built a world where that is cheaper and more convenient.
But I ask you, "Does that make any sense?"
(Audience member) No.
(Laughter)
Now I want to be clear.
I am not saying we shouldn't be recycling.
We should recycle a whole lot more.
Find out who's picking up your waste, see what they accept, and recycle right.
But I'm also saying that this is not the solution to our waste addiction.
If you're like me, you grew up with the three Rs:
reduce, reuse and recycle.
And for the last half a century,
we have been focusing on the last resort.
We need to stop thinking of waste as something that needs to be managed
and rethink the way we do things so we can make less in the first place.
Now you know what I'm going to tell you:
bring your own water bottle, bring your own coffee cup.
Those are great places to start.
If you're a coffee shop, offer to-stay cups.
If you're a barista, ask each person if they are staying or going.
How many have a metal straw?
Raise your hands.
How many of you have put that metal straw into a plastic cup?
(Laughter)
What about a Mason jar for your green juice?
What do these four things have in common?
Correct: they all hold a fork.
(Laughter)
Or chopsticks if you're eating sushi.
(Laughter)
But seriously, do this tonight: put a fork and knife into your work bags.
Buy produce without packaging.
Buy in bulk, bring your own containers.
And vote with your dollar.
Whether you're a consumer, a small business owner,
or head of supply at a multinational company,
vote with your dollars.
We have voted for cheap, convenient, planned-obsolescent trash
for a long time.
It's going to take some time to reverse that, without a doubt,
but there are solutions out there.
TerraCycle, working with the biggest companies in the world, launched Loop.
That's reusable packaging for things like shampoo, deodorant, ice cream.
There are reusable cup options out there for stadiums, festivals, events.
Reusable to-go container programs are popping up and can be expanded.
There is a revolutionary technology that takes heat and water
to clean plates, cups, forks, knives.
(Laughter)
It's called "a dishwasher."
(Laughter)
Now since I started talking,
humans have thrown out over 15 million cups.
But that doesn't mean that we have to do it again tomorrow.
We can do it.
It might take two more seconds and a little bit of elbow grease,
but we can make less.
So we can have more of the sustainable future
that we keep talking about.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)