Alexander Clapp
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
So that's something that's actually really interesting about the waste trade. It is not the garbage that you think is doing great damage to other parts of the world. It's, in fact, the stuff that you're recycling, by and large. The waste trade occasionally operates by sending a cargo container full of municipal trash to a poor country and dumping it on a beach somewhere.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
But often it's much more nuanced than that. It's the stuff that you think is... perhaps not harming the planet or maybe even helping it, stuff that you're recycling. So things like plastic, things like Tetra Pak or Styrofoam, the stuff that you thoughtfully discard into a recycling bin, this is the stuff that is getting shipped around the world disproportionately to poorer countries.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
The United States alone sends 100 million tons of recycled plastic to poorer countries. And what do they do with it? That's a really good question. That's what I spent the last two years attempting to understand. The thing about plastic is that best case scenario, it is not truly recyclable. You can't form a circular economy out of plastic.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Most plastic can only be recycled three, perhaps four times. So the act of recycling plastic is never actually preventing final disposal. It's actually just delaying it. So best case scenario, we're sending thousands and thousands of tons of sequestered carbon to those very countries that cannot handle their own waste outputs.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
The best case scenario, as I said, is that some of this might get recycled, but a lot of it, the fate is to get burned in a field or just dumped in a river.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
So for 30 years, between about 1990 and 2016, half the plastic placed in a recycling bin anywhere on the planet ended up in China, which is an extraordinary fact if you consider it. In 2016, China came to the recognition that this was causing far more pollution than it was doing any good. And so it stopped. It put up a ban against imported plastic waste.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
after that there began a kind of mad scramble this weird game of kind of whack-a-mole whereby rich countries needed a new country a new frontier to be sending all this plastic to that they insisted was being recycled even if its true fate was far from clear and so you had countries like vietnam or india or the philippines especially turkey for instance which suddenly started receiving overwhelming amounts of plastic from countries like the united states or european union countries
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Yeah, it's a sort of hot potato game whereby Western waste exporters are constantly searching for the next frontier with which to send this stuff. And increasingly, one by one, these countries disproportionately across Southeast Asia are coming to the realization that while there might be a small amount of advantage or profit in accepting Western plastic waste, This comes at a huge consequence.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
These are countries that, again, as I said, they cannot handle their own domestic waste outputs.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
So the idea that a country like Malaysia, which is currently the greatest recipient of American plastic waste on the planet, this is an absurdist, illogical industry that is based off a fundamental premise, which is that we overproduce plastic by extraordinary quantities and the stuff constantly needs a place to go because in truth, it cannot be efficiently or profitably recycled.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
One thing that's really interesting that's emerged over the last five or 10 years is that journalists have been digging into the meeting notes of the plastic industry in the 1980s, especially the late 1980s. And what they've come to acknowledge or realize is that the plastic industry 40 years ago knew that plastic recycling didn't work. They knew that it wasn't profitable.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
They knew that functionally plastic cannot really be recycled. They knew that there was no circular economy here as there is with paper or steel.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
And so regardless, the plastic industry, because it had a mounting reputational crisis at the time, because people were discovering microplastics, for instance, in all sorts of places, pushed this recycling narrative because they wanted to shift the onus of the burden of disposal onto consumers themselves rather than having to handle it themselves.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
themselves having to handle it, just as plastic was facing this huge reputational crisis, that something really interesting happened. And that's that the Berlin Wall fell. And so suddenly the plastic industry, which had this huge waste disposal reputational crisis on its hands, suddenly half the planet opens up.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
And what you have in the early 1990s is that you have countries in Western Europe which begin shipping their garbage to Eastern Europe, often just dumping it on the side of the road.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Or in the case of China, it theoretically is getting recycled, but so much of the plastic that was heading to China at the time was too dirty or too cheap, too flimsy to actually be recycled, that its true fate was just to get burned or to get dumped.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
I think it's pretty simple. I think it's remarkably profitable to produce. The thing about plastic is that it's produced from the byproducts of petrochemical refining itself. So basically all our energy results in something that itself can become plastic.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
So for the petrochemical industry or for plastics producers, this stuff, the building blocks of plastic are getting manufactured regardless of what they do. So this stuff is scandalously cheap and profitable to produce.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
I think it's important to keep two things in mind. The first is that within living memory, there wasn't all of this plastic. I mean, going back to the 1950s or 1940s, plastic didn't really exist, or at least not in these quantities. The second is to understand that certain things do need to be made of plastic. For instance, medical plastic is important, but there are a lot of things.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
In fact, the vast majority of things that are made of plastic, single-use plastic, they can be made of paper or they can be made of wood. They can be made of things that are genuinely recyclable.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
And the irony is that glass is genuinely recyclable. When you recycle glass, it will become a new glass bottle. The same is not true of plastic.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
I think there's growing recognition. I mean, they've also found plastic in our brain cells, for instance, in our bone marrow. I think there's growing recognition that this stuff not only can't be recycled, not only as a huge pollution pandemic, but it's probably killing us as well. And so I expect over the next years or perhaps decades, much more pushback against the plastic industry.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
It makes several arguments, one of which is that plastic is in fact ecologically better for the planet than, say, glass because it's lighter and it's easier to transport and it's easier to move around and therefore spews less carbon into the atmosphere. There are all sorts of rhetorical acrobatics that are used to defend plastic.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
And again, this goes back to the 1980s when this myth of plastic recycling was concocted in the first place.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you. Okay.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Most plastic can only be recycled three, perhaps four times. So the act of recycling plastic is never actually preventing final disposal. It's actually just delaying it. But a lot of it, the fate is to get burned in a field or just dumped in a river.