While a plastic straw ban might make us feel better, does it actually reduce consumption in the long-term? Does recycling really make a difference? As we think about waste management solutions, what questions should we be asking in terms of sustainability? What can we do to be more thoughtful about our waste and consider where our trash goes when we throw it AWAY?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon here in the Nori office in Ballard, Seattle. Christophe, we have another Cleantech Brain Trust guest on with us today.
Christophe Jospe: We do. And I’m really excited to have this conversation. Before we dive into it, if you like the show, please share it with someone and tell them why you liked it. It’s better than that kind of generic like, hey, this is a cool podcast. You should listen to it. But like this person said this really insightful thing that I thought was cool.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re like micromanaging their sharing of our podcast.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I am. Because that will get you more likes. It’ll get you more shares and sticky growth. And we’re all about that. It’ll be fun to geek out about entrepreneurial concepts because we’re actually sitting across the table from a fellow entrepreneur. She was the co-founder of the Seattle Impact Hub, and she also works in the solid waste management space. We’ve got Lindsey Ang. Lindsey, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Lindsey Engh: Thanks, guys, for having me.
Christophe Jospe: Lindsey, we like to start this podcast out with people’s story, really. What got them to where they are today? What makes them tick? Why trash? And what does that have to do with Reversing Climate Change?
Lindsey Engh: Great question, Christophe. So as Christophe mentioned, I started my career in the philanthropic and social impact sector, starting the Seattle Impact Hub, which is located down in Pioneer Square, part of the global affiliate Impact Hub network. Well, I was there for about seven years. I became very involved in the commercial development space because we were in Pioneer Square and there was a lot of development going on during that time. And I was part of the neighborhood business improvement district in Pioneer Square. And honestly, trash started out as an interest in affordable housing and why affordable housing was so expensive.
And after I left Impact Hub, I took a sabbatical of about a year and a half and did some traveling, ended up in southeast Utah in southwest Colorado where my family is and where I spend a majority of my time, at least half of my time, And started digging into trash there. And over the last two years, I’ve transitioned fully into the solid waste sector, primarily in two different areas, one of which is low-tech processing of hard-to-recycle materials in rural areas. I’m And the other side is thinking about trash and material waste on a commercial scale, primarily working with market development and construction firms here in Seattle.
And in terms of your question about why I am here and why trash matters from a clean tech perspective, I spend a lot of my time thinking about market development for trash and specifically market development in the industry sector as a whole. And agriculture and industry are the two biggest contributors to carbon. And they’re also The two biggest areas that don’t have a lot of great solutions for carbon reduction and trash is...
Ross Kenyon: You can go ahead. That was just a host only signal that you weren’t supposed to see.
Lindsey Engh: I kind of thought that you guys were like, that’s not right.
Ross Kenyon: Like, nix this. We’re going to cut it. It’s terrible. No, sorry. Go ahead. I just have a question. I asked for priority.
Lindsey Engh: Yeah. I think about trash in terms of commodities and for anyone that has ever done... You know how volatile they are and you also know how much oil drives the cost of commodities. And so in a large overall sense, trash comes down to the cost of oil, which we all know is a main driver of carbon and climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Great. There’s a lot that I’d like to ask about. First, kind of a surprisingly difficult, I bet, question. The answer is, what is trash first? And then when you’re talking about market development, are you talking about people that are buying waste from those industries or buying their recyclables? What does it mean to develop market in solid waste like this?
Lindsey Engh: That’s a great question. So I’ll start with the market development side first. And just to kind of take a step back and In the solid waste sector today, there’s three primary problems, so to speak. One of those problems is market development, so the creation of diverse domestic markets here in the U. S. And what that means is recycling, again, so these materials that are being recycled are commodities. Commodities are driven by supply and demand. There has to be a buyer in order to make recycling profitable. And as we all know, trash has been in the news for a long time because of the China ban that happened about two years ago when China stopped accepting all of our trash.
And so what happened there is one of our largest buyers, about 60% of our trash, both trash and recycling, we had been shipping to China for the last 30 years went away. So market development is one component. Because we had been shipping trash to China for so long, there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure for Both processing materials and selling materials here in the US. So market development in terms of domestic market development. The second piece is product stewardship. So in terms of these materials that are currently being created by the industry sector, there’s only really a finite number of options that one can do with these materials when they reach the end of their life.
And so long term, 10 or 20 years from now, product stewardship means manufacturer responsibility at the end of that materials life, which is obviously a regulatory thing. And then third, obviously just individual consumer behavior change. So coming from this at a large level, the system of trash, it really isn’t one simple elegant solution. There’s multiple different components to it. But to get back to your question, Ross, about market development, that’s what I mean when I say that is because our largest buyer of materials went away about two years ago. And I can get a little bit more into why that was.
We don’t really have any more buyers in the U. S. because the infrastructure hasn’t been developed. So it’s really thinking about diverse domestic market creation here in the U. S.
Christophe Jospe: Can I ask a clarifying question? So you talk about trash as a commodity. And when I think about commodities, I think about a good that represents something or it’s a physical thing. So like rice, right? Commoditized rice. The carbon removal certificate is another example, right? One ton. Pulled out of the atmosphere represents another ton pulled out somewhere else. But with trash, you have so many different streams going into producing that trash. At what point do you commoditize it? And can you say this is trash is a commodity when you have so much variance around the inputs?
Ross Kenyon: It’s probably the same with like corn where they say it’s this much protein and it’s this quality of corn and you probably have trash that says it’s 30% plastic and it’s this. Am I right? Is that how it works?
Lindsey Engh: Yeah, you’re definitely right when you think about certain materials. Let’s just break down materials as a whole and let’s talk specifically about the materials that we’re probably all aware of. So there’s plastics, there’s cardboard, otherwise known in the trash world as OCC cardboard, which is just a heavier weight cardboard. Within cardboard, there’s multiple different kinds of cardboard. There’s aluminum, there’s steel, there’s organics. So these are materials that we are all aware of and handle every day. And so within the trash world, that’s one of the problems as to why it’s so difficult to value these commodities.
You hit the nail on the head, Christophe. For example, with plastics, there’s many different kinds of additives that are added to plastics in order to create this amazing material that we’ve come to use for 50 or 60 years now. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen Not the Godfather.
Ross Kenyon: You’re not going to do The Graduate, are you?
Lindsey Engh: The Graduate, yes.
Christophe Jospe: I was hoping we would avoid it.
Ross Kenyon: I was hoping so too. I think Kristoff’s done that one. I think I’ve said it before.
Lindsey Engh: The future is in plastics. And he wasn’t wrong, right? Plastics are a material that we have come to depend on as a society. And because there’s so many additives that are added to it to create the many different kinds of plastics that we have in use today, that’s why you see The different numbers on the bottoms of plastics that you handle and use because of those additives, it makes it really difficult to break down together and turn into a product that can be reused over and over again. You may have heard that plastic degrades every single time it’s recycled.
This is true. And a big problem with the Recycling world today is just the fact that, especially at the city level, we’ve implemented what we call single stream recycling, which means that everything goes into one bin, which makes it easier for the consumer. But once that bin goes into a truck and then the truck goes to a recycling transfer station and it all gets dumped on the floor... There’s technology that’s required to sort it. Most of these material transfer stations were developed in the 60s to process newspaper and paper, which we don’t see a lot of today.
We don’t see as much of today, especially phone books, which was another common thing that happened or that you saw a lot at these stations in the 60s. And because additives are being added to these materials at a faster pace and we’re able to create technology to sort – It becomes really difficult. And that’s the primary reason why China shut down imports from the U. S. because our material transfer stations, also called MERVs, which is where recycling goes to get sorted, they have a Sorting rate of about 25% cleanliness. So what that means is that the contamination level, both in terms of how well it’s sorted and how clean it is, is about 25%.
The China ban said that we’re not accepting anything Above 0. 5%. So you can imagine what that looks like at a domestic level, and that’s why it’s created the type of disturbance today. But anyway, to get back to your question, yes, that is one of the very big problems in the recycling world is just the fact that all of these materials, even though they are traded as commodities, especially with plastics commodities, meaning number ones, number twos, number threes, to number sevens, and then different types of cardboards – It is very difficult to create a positive value for that because the ability to sort is so challenging.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any place that does this with more of a consumer-driven model? Like, for instance, sorting your own recyclables. I’ve been to places like Japan. I remember an Airbnb, I say, that had like 10 different sorting bins in the place I stayed. It was inscrutable to me, but it was also very new to me. You could also fine people for not participating, or you can make them do the warm fuzzies and do it themselves. But do they not pay people for this in places? Can you not? Like, how come if I’m really diligent and have really clean recyclables, could I not make money on that?
And if that doesn’t happen, what’s stopping it?
Lindsey Engh: That’s a great question. There are still places that have bottle.
Ross Kenyon: Like the California five cent deposit.
Lindsey Engh: Yeah, bottle deposits. You normally see those in more rural areas. But again, business was good for a while. We bailed our trash, whether it was well sorted or not, and shipped it to China where they burned it because they needed the fuel. The trash that was primarily being shipped to China was going to waste-to-energy facilities. And so, again, because business was good, there wasn’t really a need to think about the consumer side of it because there wasn’t a need to sort well. In the U. S. , we did used to have dual-stream recycling, which means that exactly what you mentioned in Japan, where you saw...
There’s a bin for 10 different kinds of materials. That did used to happen in different places. In more rural areas, you see smaller recycling facilities that have dual stream bins outside, so people are still expected to sort. And there are certain municipalities that are trying to switch back to a more consumer-facing side of things. As you can imagine, that requires a higher level of consumer education. Which is difficult to start out with, and so you still have a high level of contamination as you begin that switch. But even in places like Sweden that say that they recycle 100% of their trash, they’re still burning it for fuel.
And I know that there’s a contingent that says that trash is renewable energy and waste to energy is renewable energy. But at the end of the day, trash is actually not renewable because it is a commodity. And for example, plastics are a petrol-based product. They do come from oil, which is non-renewable. You could say that paper is renewable, but again, it takes a large amount of energy to grow a tree. And just to kind of get a sense of thinking about the question, and this is what I try and do a lot in my work, What does sustainability mean in today’s world?
It’s a word that we throw around quite a bit. And I think that it bodes well to think about that word in more detail than we currently do.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to take us back to before humans thought it was a good idea to recycle. At one point, there’s a movement. It’s like, oh man, we’re producing all of this waste, all of this garbage. Why don’t we figure out places where we can reuse some things? Or maybe we can get a second life out of this. But why do we recycle? Like, why? Why? Because, okay, well, let me get contrarian all of a second. So, you could argue that in some cases, we might be better off not recycling.
You could say that there’s carbon stored in certain plastics. And if you just take that directly to a landfill... And let it sit there that now is a form of carbon sequestration. Whereas if you took that plastic and spent all this time sorting your number one from your number seven, or I don’t even know how it works. Maybe you can give some insight there, but you’re spending a lot of energy in getting another use of something when perhaps we should consider not trying to get another, we should stop making plastics altogether.
So why are we recycling it? And I guess what I’m trying to get at is there’s an energy footprint there. Accompanied with all of this. And so is recycling and this mantra reduce, reuse, recycle actually the best place to even begin when we’re looking at the whole trash issue from a climate change perspective?
Lindsey Engh: This is such a great question. And I’m totally on your side. I think that there’s a lot of people that are starting to ask the question, does recycling make a difference? My take is that recycling only makes a difference if it prevents production of virgin material, which right now it doesn’t. But does that mean that we should stop these systems that we’ve created? So to get back to the carbon footprint, there’s this idea of embodied carbon, that every material has an embodied carbon count. And as you mentioned, there’s embodied carbon that’s created when it’s created and then throughout the process of its life and then the end of its life.
I mentioned that one of the major issues with regulation today is just the fact that There is no regulation around end of life for these materials. So even if materials are well sorted and they’re clean and we can process them and turn them into as much as we can a virgin grade quality that can be turned into another product.
Christophe Jospe: And those are big ifs.
Lindsey Engh: Those are big Fs. That’s what we’re finding today because, as I mentioned, most of the sorting stations in the U. S. called MRFs were built in the 60s and haven’t really been upgraded for a long time because there just hasn’t been a necessity because our biggest buyer hasn’t demanded it. So as I mentioned, there’s really only a finite number of things that one can do with these materials. And when I say materials, again, I’m talking about the materials that we handle every day. So glass, aluminum, plastic, cardboard, paper, etc. There’s really only a finite number of things that one can do with those materials.
You can reuse it, you can landfill it, or you can recycle it. And the argument for landfills, I think is a good one in some cases. As humans, we’ve been burying our trash for millions of years. The US has a lot of land. Obviously, there’s very high EPA regulation around landfills. And so it’s very difficult to create one. But a lot of our landfills still have plenty of years left in them that will be continued to be used. So at some level, as humans, I imagine that we will Always bury our trash to some level.
And you’re right. A lot of landfills have methane capture systems to get that methane that’s coming off of the landfill, which is primarily from organics that are being thrown away in the landfill. And for plastics, it can be considered a method of carbon sequestration. So that’s one thing that you can do with trash at the end of its life. And those options are still quite limited. You can... If it’s well sorted, at least, you can do energy recovery. So paralysis, you can do mechanical, which is where you grind it and then melt it and turn it into a relatively virgin grade product.
Paralysis is also considered depolarization. So using chemical recycling methods to turn it back To turn polymers, at least in plastic’s case, back to original monomers and trying to get as much of a virgin quality as possible. Or you can do waste to energy, which is still considered recycling in a lot of areas. So again, I think the questions that you’re asking are really valid. And I think the biggest thing to keep in mind with a lot of these questions is that there is no one solution. Waste is something that is part of our lives in a very real way.
And I think there are many solutions within that, but they’re good questions to be asking because they need to be asked in order to continue to shift the system that we’ve created today.
Ross Kenyon: This sets up a little game that we wanted to play. We have a series of questions. This is me playing Christophe here with my game.
Christophe Jospe: This is my game. I want to play.
Ross Kenyon: You want to play? Lindsey, let’s pose to you a couple questions and see if you can give people some quick guidance and we can unpack these too if so needed. But what are we doing now that we should be doing more of?
Lindsey Engh: What are we doing now that we should be doing more of? We should be asking more questions about sustainability and I know that’s... I know that’s... Hear me out.
Christophe Jospe: Like, where does my trash go?
Unknown speaker: This better be good.
Christophe Jospe: How much energy goes into producing the recycling streams?
Lindsey Engh: I know that’s kind of a cop-out. But again, at the end of the day, consumption is consumption. I think that the zero waste movement is really important. But at the end of the day, we are humans. We have impact. And our only option is to have as the most productive impact, both positive and negative possible. And a lot of it comes down to making individual choices for ourselves. I know that largely a lot of your listeners are individuals. And I know this question is asked a lot, you know, what can I do to make this trash problem go away?
And I’m here to tell you, it’s not going to go away overnight. And it really does come down to continuing to ask these questions and be curious about the systems that we’re a part of. And then make choices based on your values and what you’re learning about as part of that system.
Christophe Jospe: But, okay, sure. I’m not satisfied with that answer. So I’m gonna give the answer that I wanted. Just give me like one thing that we are doing with waste management that is actually good.
Ross Kenyon: And you can you can go go ahead.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I was gonna I was gonna say things that are not good that we’re now trying to do better on. So unfortunately, Definitely I go to events where there’s way more food than there needs to be. And at the end of that night, I’m like, oh my God, what’s going to happen with the food? And I usually can’t take it. And I usually don’t know where it goes. And most of the times it gets thrown out, like food waste is this major issue. So what are we doing that I think we should be doing more of?
I think finding those events that says, well, can at the end of this event, can we donate this food to people who might be hungry? I think that’s one great example.
Ross Kenyon: Is he right, Lindsey?
Christophe Jospe: But I don’t think we’re necessarily doing enough of that or as individuals even thinking like I’m at some catered event and they probably produced way more than I needed and then they’re just throwing it out. But is that really happening? Is that happening at some like good rate? Because I like I’ve gone to events and they’ve told me that it was donated. I’m like, oh, OK, I’ll feel good.
Ross Kenyon: Donated to the trash. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Gotcha.
Ross Kenyon: Also, Lindsey, I feel like your comment was a little bit insensitive to asking all these questions. Won’t people end up like Socrates and just imprisoned by the Athenians and forced to drink hemlock? Are you okay with that on your conscience?
Lindsey Engh: You know what, guys? I’m going to play devil’s advocate once again.
Ross Kenyon: So many flanking maneuvers happening.
Lindsey Engh: Because here’s the thing. Do you guys consider yourself scientists?
Christophe Jospe: No, I don’t.
Ross Kenyon: Hardly.
Lindsey Engh: What happens when you sit in here with a scientist? You guys have had many different conversations. What happens when you sit in here with a scientist versus, I don’t know, someone that is a student of the world, per se?
Ross Kenyon: We try to translate it. I ask very, very silly questions like, can we pump all the CO2 to space and let them tell me why I’m a fool? I probably banter less. Sometimes they’re a little bit intimidating or they’re very erudite. What do you think, Kristoff?
Christophe Jospe: I mean, we’re all students. When it comes down to doing science, you have a hypothesis, right? That’s the core. My hypothesis is that if humans had more information about where the trash was going, they would reduce their trash flows. Or if humans had the agency to say, my trash can somehow contribute to sequestering carbon in some capacity, they would feel inclined to want to vote in that direction.
Lindsey Engh: And so the reason I ask, and maybe I should have been a little bit more leading with this question, is because I often find that when I speak with scientists and when I speak with people who have been in this industry for a long time, The number one thing that they do is they give solutions. And the fact is, is that we are in a place in our history, and you guys know this from climate change, there is no one solution. You know why? Because short term, sure, we need to get carbon out of the atmosphere.
Long term, we need to reduce consumption. And there is so much inherent in what that looks like, because it comes down to on a systemic level, it comes down to a regulatory level, it comes down to And so that’s what I mean when I say that it’s actually, I think, worth asking these questions because I know it sounds philosophical, but again, we need to be willing to accept the fact that chaos is going to win out in the end when it comes to moving into a different stage of our humanity and what that looks like on a long-term basis.
Christophe Jospe: This reminds me of what I was telling you this morning, Ross, about my experience in Egypt. I was hoping to have an opening for it, and I think I just got one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you can do it now.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it’s good. We’re going back to the game, though. We’re taking a detour. So the word zebella in Arabic means garbage, and zebelin are loosely translated garbage people. But these are people who will collect trash, and most of it’s organic, and they collect all of Cairo’s trash and then feed it to the pigs who go through this organic matter. And then they do this amazing activity of finding the things that the pigs will not eat and recycling those and actually selling those things. And so I just wanted to bring up this as a solution in an extremely chaotic city where you have people who are going around with donkey carts, picking up And so I just wanted to throw that in, in terms of systems, old school, and to your first game question, what are we doing that we should be doing more of?
Like finding what works for that local community. Well, how about that? Care to comment, Lindsey?
Ross Kenyon: Would you like to condemn the Egyptian government on the air?
Lindsey Engh: Why don’t I just make this whole tangent go away for you, Ross, and make it easy for you? I think one of the things that we should be doing more of is thinking about waste solutions in context, so on small scale levels. So one of the things that I’ve been doing in rural municipalities is, again, low-tech processing for hard-to-recycle material. And what that means is that there’s lots of different facilities that are being built to do Depolarization or other forms of chemical processing for plastics and other materials. And the fact is, is that these facilities have $100 million price tags, which is just not feasible for smaller communities.
And I think that for like Christophe mentioned in Egypt, there’s good examples of smaller countries that have More grassroots economic activity around waste and thinking about the principal least amount of processing for highest amount of yield is something that we are currently doing and I think we definitely should be doing more of.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Thank you for humoring my very pedestrian insistence upon a concrete example. But asking questions is very important. We try to do a lot. The LCAs, life cycle assessments of these various processes are complicated and they interact in complex ways. And you can’t really just say one thing. It’s just a simple yes or no. A lot of the time, the details matter.
Lindsey Engh: And just to say one more thing about LCA and embodied carbon, do you guys know the EPA’s WARM model, which is their version of LCA?
Christophe Jospe: I don’t, do you?
Ross Kenyon: Seen it before, yeah.
Lindsey Engh: So this is a really good example of that. There’s a lot of municipalities that are starting to track LCA, especially in solid waste departments. And everyone is using WARM. I won’t use that misnomer of everyone. There’s a lot of municipalities out there that are using WARM and there’s so few people that trust it. LCA and embody carbon is a really complex question. And so again, thinking about sustainability as what it actually is rather than how we Emotionally feel around it and what makes us feel good. I think that’s another thing we should be doing more of.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m satisfied with that answer now. Great. All right. The next question in the game. What aren’t we doing now that’s low hanging fruit that we should be doing?
Lindsey Engh: So many things. I think the most important thing is product regulation, to be totally honest. Again, I work on the market development side of things. I see market development as a stopgap measure to try and figure out what to do with all of these materials that will be created in the next 10 years and try and stop the flow of the trillions of pounds of waste that we’ll see in the So there’s a lot of question as to whether or not these processes have a positive effect on carbon reduction overall because it also is quite energy intensive for some of them.
And so again, product stewardship, which is end of life ownership from the manufacturer side is crucial. We’ve seen a couple of different processes. Bans go into effect, especially in Seattle. Like you’ve probably heard of the plastic bag ban. You’ve probably heard of the plastic straw ban. Again, these are good questions to be asking because there are pros and cons to these bans as well. There’s, for example, the plastic straw ban. There’s a big conversation going on between the disabled and abled community around what that actually means and who it’s really affecting people.
And then, for example, in terms of all of the different compostable straws you now see in production and rotation today, it’s not always clear whether or not they can be composted at our local composter here at Cedar Hills. So I think definitely thinking about product stewardship, but again... Thinking about product stewardship and manufacturer regulation at the federal level with an eye toward what does sustainability actually mean in today’s world?
Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty good. And as much as I like markets and prices and getting things to happen, I think in some of these cases where there’s merely a cost and it isn’t something that can be transformed into something that is valuable, that sounds like an appropriate place for regulation. Maybe that is end of life regulation might be the best way to address some of those issues. So I think that’s a good answer. Christophe’s nodding thoughtfully.
Christophe Jospe: I’m just trying to decide how feisty I want to get. It’s the afternoon and so I’m inclined to get feistier. I don’t think that the plastic straw ban is a good idea in Seattle. I think that there’s a very small percent of the trash which is even comprised of plastic. Yeah. Actually, what Starbucks has been doing is replacing the plastic straws with a more durable plastic lid. So on that, there’s more plastic going into production because of the plastic straw ban.
Lindsey Engh: Let’s get feisty. So, Christophe, if you were listening, you would have heard me say that I think there’s a lot of pros and cons to the different bans that we have in Seattle, including the plastic bag ban and the plastic straw ban. I mentioned one of the problematic issues, which is the ableist. And there are many, many other problematic elements of that, which some of them you touched on. And just to be clear, the Starbucks cup that I’m drinking out of, I have had for four months. It sits in my car because I use it when I don’t have my other reusable mug out.
And I’m on the road and I need to get a coffee and I don’t have my cup nearby. So yes, I think you are absolutely right. And you bring up a lot of really good issues. And Ross, just to make a quick note that I think that Kristoff is actually doing a great example right now of thinking about sustainability in realistic terms and asking those questions. So I’m so glad that you’ve learned something from our talk so far today.
Ross Kenyon: Well played, Lindsey. Yeah, that was elegant. The hoisting you just gave him.
Lindsey Engh: But let’s just revisit one of the things that Christophe mentioned, which is virtuous regulation. And I think that’s a really key point. And yes, economically, there is no data about whether or not it evens out over the course of the day, compostable versus plastic. And once again, it only really makes a difference when If you have the facilities to sort these materials and if you have the facilities to process these materials that are close by and thinking about freight and all of that. And I’ll just go back to the other thing that we need to do, reduce consumption.
It all comes down to consumption. At the end of the day, consumption is consumption. And we all consume. And again, thinking about consumption as a choice rather than Something that we feel guilty about I think is really crucial.
Ross Kenyon: I have this question whenever I read degrowth people or people worried about consumption. Are we talking about material throughput and about waste or is it including acts of consumption like if I’m buying a service like getting a massage or something like that? Is it the material we’re worried about or is it the act of buying something?
Lindsey Engh: That’s a great question. And I think there could be an argument to go into the division of labor and how that breaks down into consumption overall. But that’s probably more of an economic level to this podcast that we probably don’t want to get into today. I feel like that’s a totally different subject. So the consumption that I’m talking about is particularly material consumption.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s fine. It’s fine to just clarify that then. Okay, the last question in this game that we have, what are we doing now that we shouldn’t be doing?
Lindsey Engh: I will talk a little bit around that, if that’s okay with you guys, and I’ll talk a little bit about electricity and oil. And to create a short answer to that question, I would say we should not think about waste to energy as renewable energy. So I’ll just give a quick story. It’s story time with Lindsey now.
Ross Kenyon: Go ahead.
Lindsey Engh: As to why I think that, and this will also help to illustrate why trash and recycling materials, so again, plastic, aluminum, cardboard, et cetera, are really driven by the cost of oil. So for example, there’s about 75 waste-to-energy plants in the U. S. today. That are functioning. There’s one in good old Spokane, Washington, just a quick four and a half hour jaunt over I-90. It’s a beautiful drive. It’s a beautiful waste station.
Ross Kenyon: Do you work for the tourist board or what?
Lindsey Engh: I am from Spokane. Used to be a 509 area code, no longer. So this particular waste-to-energy plant in Spokane generates about 18 kilowatts of energy per day from about 800 tonnes of trash. And the plant requires about 3 kilowatts of energy to function. And ostensibly, they sell the rest to the public utility as electricity and But that only really happens when the cost of oil is low. And just to further illuminate what I mean by that, public utilities both generate and purchase energy from a variety of different sources in order to maintain the level of electricity that they need for their population.
I don’t quite remember the Seattle-specific breakdown, but it’s a lot of hydropower, some nuclear, some wind, some very small percentages, coal, nuclear, and natural gas, etc. Each state designates a per unit price for energy, which is called the avoided cost. And this per unit price just means how much public utilities pay other forms of energy. So when a public utility pays that external provider, they pay that unit price, which is called the avoided cost. So the avoided cost has two components, one of which is the energy component. So for example, if a public utility buys energy from an external provider, they will reduce the Operations at their most expensive facility.
So for example, Seattle gets the majority of our electricity from hydropower. If they’re buying power or energy from an external source, they’ll reduce operations at their oldest hydropower plant. The other component to avoided cost is capacity. And what that means is public utilities will buy more Energy from external providers to stave off development of a new hydropower plant, for example. So in Spokane, for example, let’s go back to that sweet waste-to-energy plant. They produce about 18 kilowatts of energy a day. They use about three. Technically, they’re selling the rest of that energy.
However, Spokane Public Utilities only buys that electricity when the cost of oil is high. So technically speaking, the public utilities might buy more electricity from waste to energy until the cost of oil goes down. So I think that, again, going back to your question, we need to stop thinking about waste to energy as a renewable resource because technically buying electricity from waste Wasted energy could be said to generate more carbon in the atmosphere since it drives the price of oil down.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve seen this sort of thing before. As renewables get cheaper, there’s more demand for renewables. That means there’s more supply of oil available. Therefore, the price of oil drops. People use more oil as a result. That’s sort of what you’re getting at. Yeah, it’s interesting. I still haven’t found a way out of that. It is confusing. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t think there is a way out of it unless you’re talking about fixing the market failure of if there’s carbon going into the atmosphere, we need to pull it back out. And you get away from that. You solve that problem by saying whatever form of energy we’re enabling, if that emits carbon... We either need to pull that back out or not have it emit carbon. But I think it’s worth, as you were talking about some of the decisions that utilities need to make, and obviously, I mean, they act like monopolies, but they also are working for the state because they have to deliver.
Yeah, I think that’s a good thing. So it’s kind of to further complicate all the calculations that go into figuring out like, do I sell energy onto the grid or not?
Lindsey Engh: Yeah, and that’s a good point. And I kind of hate this game a little bit because honestly, it kind of goes against my own process of never having a solid answer for any one thing. Because ultimately, that’s kind of how we’ve gotten ourselves in this position in the first place is wanting to have bottom lines that work across the board every single time. And that just isn’t the case. Yeah. And so I think that when you say, what is something that we shouldn’t do anymore? And I say, but we shouldn’t think about waste energy as a renewable resource.
Of course, there have to be times when we do think about it like that. And again, I think that goes back to just the question, what does it actually mean to be sustainable in today’s world? And what does zero waste actually mean? And we live in a world with 6 billion people. I mean, there’s going to be impact, right? We’re going to have to burn trash. We just consume way too much stuff to not do it. And so I think as long as we think about it in a way that makes sense for the current state of our economy and the current state of our environment, then yeah, go for it.
What we should not continue doing is thinking about it as a renewable resource.
Ross Kenyon: If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, Lindsey, I just don’t. Christophe, time is short and there’s still a fair amount on here. So Lindsey, you’ve done a good job here with offering the proper amount of nuance and digging into some of these topics. What do you want to ask about now that we’re wrapping up near the end? Dude, make this count. This is it.
Christophe Jospe: I think you know this question’s coming, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Which one is it? I’m trying to figure it out, but I don’t know.
Christophe Jospe: It’s the, Lindsey, you have two things in your hand. One is a magic wand. And the other is a crystal ball. So you wave the magic wand and whatever you want to happen happens. And you now have a crystal ball so you can see it happening.
Ross Kenyon: You haven’t listened to the show probably enough to know that this is a common Christophism. But okay. So she has those two objects.
Lindsey Engh: Okay. Sorry. I was rolling my eyes.
Ross Kenyon: What was it?
Christophe Jospe: This was thorough resting.
Lindsey Engh: What was the question?
Christophe Jospe: On air. This is the last time I invite friends on to do a podcast.
Lindsey Engh: So I have a crystal ball and a magic wand.
Christophe Jospe: Uh-huh. So let me rephrase. And Ross, let’s just cut this out.
Ross Kenyon: I’ll use my discretion wisely. I’ll say that.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Well, so you have a crystal ball and you’re looking into a future that you want to see. And it’s happening because you waved your magic wand and you wanted that thing to happen. So what has happened specifically? Like what’s our perfect ideal scenario with respect to trash and humans engagement with it?
Lindsey Engh: That’s a better question. I would say that there’s long-term and short-term goals. So the long-term is that we’re valuing waste. What is the highest and best use of our waste feedstocks? We are disposing meaningfully. How do we meaningfully biodegrade waste feedstocks when they’re no longer needed? We have product stewardship. Manufacturers have responsibility for end of life of material. And then in the short term, we have, again, a stopgap measure to deal with the immense amount of trash that will be created in the next 10 years or so. We are creating domestic markets that focus on lowest processing for highest amount of yield.
And we Recycling actually does prevent new products from being created, especially from virgin petroleum.
Christophe Jospe: I am satisfied with those responses.
Unknown speaker: You’re satisfied, okay.
Ross Kenyon: I asked that question at the beginning and we kind of jumped over it. Those very basic questions are surprisingly hard to answer sometimes. But I heard a quote, I’m sure this is the one that people always say at YouTube, it’s the, when you throw something away, where is the away? Yeah. Right. So what exactly is trash?
Lindsey Engh: Ross, we’re getting philosophical right at the end of this.
Ross Kenyon: Just give me a simple nugget. Yes or no binary. Get Boolean with me.
Christophe Jospe: And one’s man trash is another man’s treasure. Yeah, there we go.
Lindsey Engh: You know, that’s such a great question. And I will not. So I will not answer it. So I love spending time in landfills. I have to say I am happiest when I am at a recycling transfer station or a landfill. I think it’s fascinating what people throw away. There was just a story in the New York Times about trash pickers in San Francisco. One guy that spends the Along Mark Zuckerberg Street and the litany of things that he pulled out.
Christophe Jospe: Is that different from the freegans?
Lindsey Engh: I think so.
Christophe Jospe: Okay.
Lindsey Engh: Because the trash pickers sell them.
Christophe Jospe: Got it.
Lindsey Engh: But I am not totally well versed on the details of this new economy.
Christophe Jospe: And the freegans eat it. So they hang out like outside of the Trader Joe’s trash.
Lindsey Engh: Right.
Christophe Jospe: And they, you know. All right.
Ross Kenyon: Let her tell her story.
Lindsey Engh: So I am totally fascinated by the things that people throw away. If you’ve never been to a transfer station or a landfill, I would highly recommend it. You can find anything from boats to cars to designer jeans to really new baby stuff to... Pet crates to anything. I think it’s fascinating. I don’t think that anyone should necessarily feel guilt about the things that they throw away because I think it’s a very complex problem that makes us all human. I think, again, thinking about what it is that we value is actually the more interesting question there.
But I do want to touch on the point that Ross said about trash going away. I think this is problematic because we do say that we throw trash away and ultimately away is a place. It’s a location. And that place used to be China. It’s no longer China. And now we’re trying to ship our trash to other aways like Malaysia or Vietnam or Hong Kong or India. And a lot of these places are fighting back and Don’t want to accept our trash. And so we’re looking for other aways to ship our trash to.
And that is a large reason why these commodities continue to be so volatile is because the buyers and the availability of buyers keep on changing. And at the end of the day, I think that away is a problematic idea because it means that we’re Ultimately trying to colonize places that we don’t really care about with our trash. This is not my idea. There is a very amazing science lab in Alberta. The lead scientist there has talked about away being the next form of colonialism. But I do think it’s an important thing to think about.
Ross Kenyon: A whole second podcast worth probably. And we didn’t even get into organics. There’s so much here. We’re going to do another one about organic waste too. I guess you could just say trash is stuff you don’t want anymore. That’s kind of a tepid, weak little answer. We’re coming for you, organic waste.
Christophe Jospe: But how about we wrap this up, Lindsey, with you giving the listeners maybe one takeaway or idea of something that they can do that makes them closer to their relationship with trash?
Lindsey Engh: Great question, Christophe. I would really encourage folks to look at what they’re throwing away. It’s funny because this is very much a science-based podcast, and we’ve actually been quite philosophical about this the whole time. We haven’t really dug into the economics behind waste all that much, but I think it’s a good thing for us to think about our values and our relationships to the things that we throw away. As a precursor to thinking about what comes after that and what else is involved in the systems of trash. From a logistical standpoint, recycling isn’t profitable at all unless recyclables are clean and well sorted.
So if you live in Seattle or pretty much any major municipal city, your recyclables, if you’re throwing into your recyclable bin, have to be clean. So no recyclables. Dirty peanut butter jars. That therein begs the question of...
Ross Kenyon: Is almond butter okay?
Lindsey Engh: Yes, of course. Anything besides peanut butter. But that again begs the question about water consumption and energy outputs there. But let’s just keep this simple and say that make sure that your recyclables are clean. But I think it’s really interesting just to start thinking about the things that you’re throwing away. If you have the opportunity, take yourself or your kids and do a field trip to your local transfer station or landfill. They’re usually always available for tours. And Just be ready to marvel at the things that you’ll see there. Actually, and fun fact, our local landfill here in Seattle has its own elk herd.
So if you go to the landfill in Seattle, you might get to see a herd of elk.
Ross Kenyon: Very Portlandia. Okay. That’s nice that they have that. I’ve only been to one. I went to the one in Guatemala City and it was a whole trip. No time for that now. What? I don’t want to pull, Todd, do the Egypt. You already got the one cool, look at me. I’m well-traveled and smart story. I’ll let you have the badge.
Christophe Jospe: You get it on other episodes. I’ll come back on it. You get it, Ross. Well, thank you so much for hanging in with us, listener.
Ross Kenyon: This has been a wonderful time. I’ll probably tidy it up a little bit. Lindsey, where can someone find your work? Is there a website, a Twitter handle, anything that you want people to know about?
Lindsey Engh: You can find me on Instagram.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Lindsey Engh: Lindsey Ng, L-I-N-D-S-E-Y-E-N-G-H. And I actually started sharing a lot of my findings about trash when I first started learning about it there. And I was actually pretty tickled by the number of people that were also as equally fascinated about it as I was and still am. But if you like following along and seeing pictures of trash, definitely... Send me a DM.
Ross Kenyon: All the people like looking at pictures of trash, DMing, crowd in your inbox. Okay. That’s good. Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us. It was super fun. Thanks for listening. Tell your friends, share the podcast, give us a great rating and review in iTunes, Apple Podcasts, as they say. And thank you so much for joining us.
