The Garbage Podcast

"It's the smell, if there is such a thing."

Population density is the answer, maybe.   Cramming people together in cities makes controlling trash more efficient.  That being said, cities stink.

The smell of garbage is pretty bad but unavoidable to a certain extent.  Strong smelling perfume/cologne is avoidable and therefore is more offensive.  Why are people not allowed to assault the eyes and ears but allowed to assault our sense of smell?

Remember when you gave your spelling test to the kid next to you to be graded?  What about that idea but for garbage? Instead of a test you pass your garbage to your neighbor.

The worst part of a large bag of dogs**t is the plastic.  

The USPS needs to take some accountability for their role in the avalanche of trash we are dealing with.  What percentage of paper mail do we get everyday that is garbage? Think about the last time you got a letter in the mail you actually wanted.  Think about how much more bad news comes in the mail compared to good and how much better your life would be if you didn't ever get another letter.

Are generic Christmas cards worth it?  …….Christmas is the ultimate trash creation day.

"When you think of garbage, think of Akeem."

Are dog leashes like gun safeties?

Can we talk about the Lakers?

The whole trash thing begins to wear thin. 

Business Idea Discussion: Garbage analytics company.  A garbage company that collects your trash, analyzes it and gives you monthly truth reports.

 Garbage and Mental health - The effect of the repetitive nature of garbage.

End of days….wake up in the morning and find that nothing has changed except garbage collection no longer exists.

Speaking of Garbage:  ESPN's redesign is hot garbage

Jardim Gramacho and Fresh Kills Landfill

The "pickers" at Jardim Gramacho spawned the "Associa��o dos Catadores do Aterro Metropolitano de Jardim Gramacho"   Basically a union for people who sift through garbage looking for things worth money.

Freshkills has the GOAT landfill name.  Started as a temporary landfill but quickly became permanent.  It was closed due to "community pressure" in 1996 so trash was diverted to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia.  In other words: People around that landfill felt like they were more entitled to not be around it than some other people.  More to the point the people closest to the landfill get rich enough to complain. It was reopened temporarily in Sept. 2011 for 9-11 debris.   

What do trash trains tell us about garbage?

Rats are the coal mine canaries of the garbage world.

Trash is truth.  Cave drawings tell us some things about ancient man but their garbage tells us much much more.  Archaeologists are always looking for trash pits to get the real scoop. Consider future historians, what would tell them more about the realities of you we are?  Our social media pages or our trash?

Plastic Things

Plastic is essentially gas turned into things.  Gas is poison. You can go to pesticide and herbicide school and learn all manner of chemical related safety but in the end gas is far more poisonous than anything else we have come up with. So what does this mean?  

1. Metal wins, like it always does.
2. Throwing away plastic things is a great way to purge.
3. Historians will laugh at plastic.

Plastic Toys vs. Tablets

Garbage Collection And Mental Health

The flow of trash in our lives allows us to accentuate the positive and diminish the negative.  This may cause issues with decision making abilities in other areas of life. What should this mental disability be called?

What would you do if garbage transport was outlawed?  What if anything you brought home was your problem forever?  

Deadbeat Dads vs. Deadbeat Consumers

Hauling garbage to somewhere else and covering it properly is actually a sustainable solution for the near future.  Except:

• It gives people mental problems related to consumption.
• Hauling trash around runs on diesel, which is filthy poison.  

The Garbage Series - Part 2

The Crying Indian

Recycling has nothing to do with the environment, it has everything to do with profit and marketing.   Those working to reuse waste are the unspoken heroes of humanity but they are not trying to save the planet.  They are looking to make a profit off of trash not solve problems, especially environmental ones. They are making the best of a bad situation and should be commended for their ingenuity and hard work.

Recycling if filthy work, especially recycling plastic.   

The main takeaway from recycling research is that recycling anything other than metal is bullshit.  It's an unsustainable solution. Paper can only be recycled once and plastic only a few times. Metal recycling is different because it can be done infinitely.  This means it might be possible to stop mining for new ore and just use the metal we already have.

Plastic recycling is trying to piggyback on metal like it's the same thing.  It's not, not by a long shot, and we need to invent something better than plastic or have a plan for making this whole planet disposable.  Putting ourselves before the planet is the humanist approach, but it has to last long enough for us to figure out a way off of it. The marketing behind recycling is making people forget that the planet is going to eventually wipe us out anyway.  The marketing is so over the top it's making people fanatical. Recycling fanatics are like "well we should use old dish towels as roofs." That being said, we are still a ways off from migrating to another planet so we should take a hard look at plastic.

A perfect example of the marketing behind recycling is the crying Indian commercial from back in the day. Several decades ago when people started feeling guilty about all the trash (aka plastic) they were tossing out the plastics industry launched a campaign to leverage our guilt.  Just like the recent straw ban nonsense. They put a sad Native American on our screens and they said "Don't litter you filthy heathen!" So we stopped littering and then we felt better.  But the plastic kept coming and kept showing up in Oceans and shit so an upgraded marketing ploy was needed, enter "recycling". Except this time it doesn't increase our guilt instead it makes us actually feel better about throwing things away.  Like smoking "light" cigarettes. Recycling is "Light Garbage".

Recycling is a marketing tool.  Stop to think about the shit they are pushing, it becomes clear:  They don't push you to recycle your car (aka metal). They want you to recycle some bullshit (aka plastic). Anyway it's it's high time they stop blaming the consumer and figure out a different product.  Figure it out you fuckheads. Maybe put milk into something that will degrade at room temperature just like milk does. Maybe also stop making bullshit that is almost impossible to recycle. Like notebooks made out of metal, plastic and paper.  Like milk cartons made from plastic and cardboard, the list goes on and on. Don't come at the consumer with some crying actor and say some shit like don't litter or use straws, and don't say "please recycle" like somehow you figured it out what the solution to all this plastic everywhere.

One Ton of Cell Phones contains 10 ounces of gold.

The Backhaul

The realities of the recycling symbol.  Round and round it goes, running on the diesel engines that power massive ships.  The foundation of the US China relationship is the scrap trade. It's cheaper to ship a container to China than it is to haul it over the Rockies. Make no mistake recycling is a filthy business that is typically can only be made economical through cheap labor and lack of regulations. China receives the bulk of it because it's so cheap to ship there.  That is the backhaul. The ships are going back there anyway. Innumerable ships sail for our coast full of cheap goods and electronics and then go back with our trash that can be recycled into something else to sell again.  Christmas tree lights are shredded for the metal and the rubber is made into slipper souls. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of scrap. See why it's so important for us consumers to have a therapeutic tool like "Recycling"?  It does two things: it nets free labor, we separate and give away our valuable trash and, more importantly, it allows us to make peace with our consumerism. The American consumer is a valuable commodity in the global economy and needs mental tools like "oh, I recycle" to cope with our aggressive trash creation.

So as Americans, our value to a good part of the world is creating trash.  Problem is, we are not the only ones anymore. China is catching up to the point that can create their own trash now!  That's why you hear about them saying fuck off to your plastic and other imports. They don't need it. Their people are consuming too, they need not send as much to us….hence not as much backhaul….Now what?  Well first of all it is wildly inefficient to ship trash and trinkets back and forth over an ocean so ending the cycle is a good thing. Maybe we will invent machines that are better at recycling our own trash, maybe find someone else to sell it to...or god forbid invent something else other than plastic.  Plastic is not the solution, it needs a solution, and recycling isn't it.

Enough about plastic let's talk about real recycling, metal recycling.

The Insight

How to shred cars 101

We scrap 14 million cars a year.  Even Henry ford new it was going to be a problem and tried to build a disassembly line for old cars but it was cost prohibitive. "Labor cost to much." is the age old American problem. Cars are the biggest thing we buy. If you consider "things" as the weapons wielded by American consumer cars are one of the most powerful.  They are useful, can be marketed so easily a complete moron can do it, and they require mountains of materials and labor to produce.

The catch of course is that you can't easily throw them away.  Leading up to the mid 60's abandoned cars were a huge problem because the success of the 50's made the labor needed to dismantle cars for scrap to expensive.  So cars sat around in huge junkyards or in some cases front yards. We would compact them, not recycle them. The government wanted to start programs to hide them but it was a private citizen named Sam Proler who figured out a better solution.  Shred them. Shredding cars and running them through a magnet is a fantastic way to get the iron out of them and sell it to China. Attempts to shred cars wasn't new but it was reserved for mammoth machines built to run off old battleship engines.  It wasn't until the invention of "The Insight" that smallers companies could popup and shred cars. "The Insight" was simply a method of feeding cars slowly into swinging hammers to destroy them piece by piece. Even what is left after the magnets is sent off to be separated and sold using foam, including the millions of dollars in space spare change that can be found in them (about $1.68 per car).  Cars are already basically 100% recyclable and can efficiently turned into new cars. Assuming we could create an autonomous fleet of cars and don't have to keep growing the number of cars with the population we could recycle the current fleet of cars for ever.

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Our Garbage Part 1 podcast summary: Download Summary

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These are some stories about the people who deal with our trash. They have fought the good fight or are continuing to fight the good fight even though we really have no hope when it comes to winning the war on trash.  It gains ground on us everyday, we have no chance at stopping it, all we can hope to do is contain it.