Waste Expert Answers Garbage Questions From Twitter

Hey, I'm Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli.

I'm a waste expert and garbage nerd.

Today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter.

This is Waste Support.

[upbeat music]

Alright, first up,

Goldperil asks, WTF is zero waste, brah?

Zero is an approach to resource conservation

that recognizes every step of the supply chain.

Everything is made of something,

and the point in a zero waste approach

is that there is no burning,

so no incineration, and no discharge,

so that includes no landfilling,

no materials ending up in the ocean,

and no particulate matter

or any other impacts from disposal ending up in the air.

The term, zero waste,

comes from the Zero Waste International Alliance

We, as waste experts,

garbage nerds, recognize that we need to restructure

the entire economy in order to get there.

But we're working on it.

From Daniwanifofanny,

why are landfills/dumps still a thing?

Shouldn't we be able to just launch

all our shit into space now?

Have you ever seen a rocket launch?

There's like fire underneath it,

'cause it takes a lot of energy to shoot things into space.

It would be really ill advised

to waste energy to shoot our waste into space,

when everything's made of something potentially valuable.

So this is a bad idea, don't do this.

Lelemonhead,

why don't we use volcanoes as waste incinerators?

The Zero Waste International Alliance says

that we can't use burning to dispose of material.

Volcanoes would burn stuff.

If we're making something to be able to use it,

to be able to just get rid of it by burning it,

you're disrespecting all of that value

that went into the thing, that includes the human labor,

it includes all of the natural resources

and everything else, the time,

that went into making the thing.

We wanna be able to use that value over,

and over, and over again.

Another reason is that burning waste

in incineration facilities can be incredibly dangerous.

Harmful toxins, referred to as dioxins,

and lots of other potential chemicals

can be released into the atmosphere,

and the communities that live around

those incineration facilities

can end up with higher levels of cancer,

higher levels of asthma.

So aside from this recognition that materials have value,

we don't wanna burn things

because it ends up endangering the lives of people

and everything else that's alive on the planet.

Yesbutwhytho says, does recycling matter?

Tell me it does.

Recycling totally matters.

Everything is made from something, and so by recycling

and by participating in a recycling economy

we are respecting all of the nutrients, all of the labor,

all of the emissions that went into producing

those things that we hold.

And in order to make a new thing,

if we use a can as an example, we have to use many,

many, many more resources to make

a brand new can out of brand new, virgin materials

than if we're taking a can that already exists,

sending it through a recycling system,

and making a new can out of it.

And the main thing that we really need to do

as part of building a circular economy

and moving towards zero waste is to increase access

to the ability for people to recycle things,

improve infrastructure to make it easier

and more afford to recycle things,

and hopefully reduce the travel distance

that we need to send things

in order for them to get recycled.

And also to recognize that some things probably

just shouldn't be made.

Britnianise says, why is it so hard to recycle?

You are 20 and can't put a plastic bottle

in a separate bag from the regular trash,

make it make sense,

or putting regular trash in the recycle.

You're not alone, recycling is confusing,

and it's not your fault.

So I've actually got a couple bins here,

a trash bin with a clear bag,

recycling bin with a black bag.

So this is one of my favorites.

We have four different material types here,

we've got a wooden stir stick

that should be put in the compost, ideally,

anything that was once alive can be composted.

The lid is plastic.

It's a number six.

The little triangle that's on plastics

that has a number in it,

that number is a resin identification code.

So six is a polystyrene plastic.

Depending on where you are,

different numbers of those recycling codes might be accepted

or might not be accepted in your recycling program.

This like brown part here is paper,

so it should go into the paper recycling.

And then the cup is made of paper,

but it has a plastic lining to make it water tight.

That plastic lining makes this cup really hard

to recycle in most recycling programs.

So the cup actually belongs in the trash.

This cup also actually says,

this cup is made with 10% post-consumer recycled fiber.

That's awesome

because post-consumer recycled content supports

a recycling economy by making products

out of recovered materials.

In waste and in waste lingo,

and when I'm educating people about waste

I talk about materials literacy,

which is the idea of recognizing

what the thing you're holding is made of.

So if we use this glass jar as an example,

glass, metal.

So two material types.

In New York City, the waste stream

that I would put this into

is a glass, metal, plastic waste stream.

So even though these are different materials,

they actually end up in the same place in New York City.

Waste streams are different,

depending on where you are, because recycling is municipal.

One thing to think about is don't put anything

that's soiled with food in the recycling.

And then take baby steps,

as you're working towards zero waste,

you're not gonna learn at all in the day, and that's okay.

So Maxblacksails says, question of the day,

just how does compost work?

I love this question.

Composting is the recycling of organic matter

in a controlled environment.

So you're taking food scraps and yard waste,

and mixing them together with air over time,

and you're making compost.

You don't always have to have food scraps in compost,

it can also just be yard waste,

but the point is that it's organic matter,

and I've got some samples here.

So this is a jar, and you can see that this stuff

is like moving pretty freely.

It smells pretty neutral, smells like earth.

I'm looking in here and I can see like

a little bit of kind of woody material,

because my brother's a woodworker

and he brings his wood shavings home.

So this is my carbon source,

and my greens or my nitrogen source are my food scraps.

There are micro and macro organisms

that are eating the stuff

that I'm mixing together over time.

And just like we, as people,

exhale carbon dioxide,

so do the microorganisms that are making compost work.

Over time, those microorganisms generate heat,

and we have a compost thermometer here.

This is like a laughably large thermometer,

you would not need one this big for a backyard compost bin,

but I'm a compost nerd, so I got the big one.

This is used to measure the temperature

of the compost because as those micro

and macro organisms are eating the food scraps,

they're creating a parabolic temperature curve.

So the temperature starts low

and then it starts to increase,

and at the peak you're reaching what compost people

call PFRP, or the Process To Further Reduce Pathogens.

So anything that we discard that was once you know,

alive, whether it's food that might have salmonella,

or E. coli, potentially harmful bacteria

or even plant pathogens or other pathogens,

part of composting is actually

like sanitizing the organic matter.

And so we measure temperature so that we can make sure

that we are reaching this PFRP,

131 degrees Fahrenheit or 55 degrees Celsius

for a minimum of 3 days or up to 15 days,

depending on the type of composting that you're doing.

And then this last example,

this is a way more recent sample,

I pulled this out just the other day.

You can see it's a lot more wet.

When you're compost has been in the bin for a while

or when it's kind of nearing

the end of the that parabolic temperature curve,

nearing the end of its cycle,

it should be the consistency of a rung out sponge.

So like if you squeeze it,

there shouldn't be drops of water.

I'm pretty sure if I squeezed this, some water would fall.

But this jar has been closed for a bit,

and one of the tests is if you smell it,

and it smells like ammonia, it's not ready yet.

This smells lovely.

So my compost is fine, it's just a little wet.

So I would wanna add more carbon through the process

so that it can absorb some of that moisture.

Compost is magic, and by participating in composting

you are also participating in making magic.

Miskeendee says, people who swim in Lake Ontario

will grow a third eye and an extra limb.

I do wonder what body of work this person is citing here.

It can certainly be dangerous to swim

in polluted water bodies.

Bodies of water can be polluted

by a lot of different things.

In New York city,

one of the most common sources of pollution

for our water is sewage,

because of combined sewage overflow,

which has to do with the way

that our wastewater infrastructure

was built hundreds of years ago for a city

with far fewer people in it.

Now that wastewater infrastructure doesn't have the capacity

for the amount of water that we're sending through it.

And so anytime it rains, out of,

I think it's more than 240 combined sewage overflow points,

raw sewage just spills into New York City's waterways.

Bf99Floyd asks, does biodegradable mean the remains

are earth friendly?

Bev, this is a super good question.

Short answer is no.

Biodegradable does not automatically

mean something is earth friendly.

An orange peel is biodegradable, but you might also get

like a piece of packaging that says that it's biodegradable.

That could just mean that that piece of packaging

is made of some combination of plant-based materials

and non plant-based, like plastic,

fossil fuel based materials,

and that over time it might break down

so that you can't see it anymore,

but the plastic kind of polymers,

the bonds that are in there at a microscopic level

will just contaminate the soil as microplastics

and be there on a human time scale forever.

So what you wanna look for is certified compostable.

That's the language that we're looking for when it comes

to packaging and knowing whether or not it can be composted.

Pikesley says, WTF does this mean @BBCNews?

Is a microplastic a unit of measurement now?

Scientists have estimated

that 94,000 microplastics per second flow down the river.

Microplastic is a term that refers to plastics

that are less than five millimeters in size.

When plastic is in the environment or really anywhere

and comes in contact with UV rays,

the plastic starts to degrade.

It ends up like flaking,

like turning into smaller and smaller pieces.

There's microplastic everywhere.

Honestly, our clothes,

unless they're made of 100% natural fibers like silk,

or wool, or cotton,

they are producing microplastics like whenever you move.

One of the solutions is to reuse things

that aren't made of plastic

because plastic degrades over time.

We do need to work systemically

to make it so that it's easier for people

to not do things that produce microplastics.

YallaWael says, where will the trash go

when all the landfills are full?

If we continue with the way things are going now,

which is that a lot of very large companies

are buying up land and building more landfills,

and charging a lot of money to be able to collect waste.

When the landfills are full,

if we can continue on this trend,

we'll just have more landfills,

and eventually the whole world will be a landfill.

Won't that be fun?

Kevinkrejci,

how can Amazon do a better job of packing shipments?

So one of the things that Amazon can do

is certainly improve the amount of space that they're using,

maybe resize some of their packaging to be more efficient.

I would love if every packaging item that Amazon used

was made of 100% post-consumer recycled content.

That would be huge because it would mean that Amazon,

this massive behemoth who has incredible purchasing power

would be demanding from the global recycling economy

an incredible amount of recovered material.

So like bales, and bales,

and bales of recovered cardboard, recovered plastic.

If we could like just start there, that would be awesome.

I actually brought a prop along that's perfect for this.

Zip, zip.

This is a zippy pouch

that I made out of Amazon Fresh packaging.

And actually, the liner is made of those air pack thingies.

This is from TamarHaspel,

how do I responsibly dispose of my ridiculous collection

of defunct/obsolete electronics?

Good job hoarding, and I'm glad that you

didn't put these right in your waste bin.

This is gonna depend on where you live,

so you should look where you live

and then electronics recycling.

Some places will have electronics recycling drop offs

or depots where you can bring these things.

Sometimes it's an event

that's hosted maybe quarterly or maybe annually

that is also for hazardous materials.

Sometimes municipalities and organizations

will like lump those things together

to make it easier for people.

For some of these things,

you might be able to look whether a local big box store

or or store that sells electronics

might accept some of these things.

Recognize also, lithium-ion batteries can be dangerous

and can spontaneously combust

if they're not stored correctly.

So everyone should kind of like check

the random drawer that has their random electronics in it.

Remove the batteries and get those recycled.

If you're gonna kind of hold on the rest of the stuff,

'cause you don't wanna catch things on fire.

BeppiWap says,

what's the proper way to recycle Nickelodeon slime?

I have no idea what Nickelodeon slime is made of,

maybe flushing it down down the toilet,

assuming that it's food safe.

Just don't put it in your recycling bin,

it doesn't belong there.

So when is flushing something down the toilet appropriate?

If I have made food

and forgot about it in the fridge,

flushing it down the toilet's a pretty good option

if you don't have access to composting.

I put an asterisk there 'cause,

you know, you don't wanna flush like a loaf of bread

down the toilet, bad idea.

But if it's chili, for example,

it's probably okay.

Infrastructure is local,

so depending on where you are,

your wastewater infrastructure might not

be able to handle the additional input.

So I'm not suggesting that everyone go

and flush all their food scraps down the toilet,

that's not the thing to do.

Use the websites of your municipal entities.

It is gonna be different depending on where you are.

Daniwal16 says, I really, really,

really wanna start over cycling program at work

but I've no idea where to start.

Generally buildings have waste collection,

so that's the first step is figuring out

who's picking up the waste from where you are,

making sure that you have bins to collect the recycling in,

of course understanding what should go into those bins.

So that might be looking at your municipalities website

or talking to your property manager.

Ideally getting some signage and doing some education,

so teaching everyone else how to participate,

those are some of the foundational steps.

Alright, that's it,

that's all the questions.

I hope you learned something.

Till next time.

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