Who's Up For A Circular Economy

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Who's Up For A Circular Economy" Stuff You Should Know – iHeartPodcasts Episode Release Date: August 7, 2025

In the episode titled "Who's Up For A Circular Economy," hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve deep into the concept of the circular economy, contrasting it with our traditional linear economic model. This comprehensive discussion explores the principles, challenges, and real-world applications of creating a more sustainable and closed-loop economic system.

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1. Introduction to the Circular Economy

Josh and Chuck kick off the episode by highlighting their absence from prestigious lists like Time magazine's top 100 podcasts, setting a lighthearted tone before diving into more serious topics. Chuck humorously remarks, “That's very stuff you should know, isn't it?” (02:51).

2. Understanding the Linear vs. Circular Economy

The hosts provide a foundational understanding of the current economic model:

• Linear Economy: Described as a "take, make, waste" system where resources are extracted, transformed into products, and discarded as waste (06:24).
• Circular Economy: Introduces the idea of reusing waste as inputs, emphasizing longevity and repairability over mere recycling (05:34).

Josh succinctly summarizes, “It's a very, very hard to repair or get repaired... That's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one.” (09:42).

3. Key Sectors Impacted by the Circular Economy

a. Food Industry

• Issues: Massive food waste from grocery stores and restaurants; single-use packaging.
• Challenges: Shifting consumer behavior away from disposable items.

b. Electronics

• Problem: Planned obsolescence leads to products becoming unusable quickly.
• Example: Josh laments, “Nothing gets me more mad almost...” referring to products designed to fail (10:23).

c. Consumer Goods

• Focus on items like clothing, which are often cheaply made and disposed of rapidly.

d. Construction

• Waste: High volume of materials ending up in landfills.
• Personal Anecdote: Chuck shares a story about salvaging a high-quality screen door from the trash (11:20).

4. Challenges to Implementing a Circular Economy

• Economic Entrenchment: The linear model has been a "money-making machine" since the Industrial Revolution, making transitions difficult (07:08).
• Consumer Behavior: Convincing consumers to prioritize durability and repairability over convenience.
• Corporate Resistance: Companies benefit from the linear model’s simplicity and profitability, often lobbying against changes like the right to repair.

5. Real-World Applications and Innovations

a. Ellen MacArthur Foundation

• Contribution: Pioneered the circular economy concept and champions sustainable practices.
• Inspiration: Named after Ellen MacArthur, who is renowned for her solo sail around the world, symbolizing her affinity for circularity (04:03).

b. Dutch Enterprises

• Niaga: Focuses on creating mattresses and carpets that are easily recyclable and repairable, drastically reducing landfill waste (26:10).
• Peel Pioneers: Transforms fruit peels into valuable products like essential oils, showcasing cascading use of waste (48:14).

c. Bundles

• Model: Provides high-end appliances on a rental basis, ensuring maintenance and reuse without ownership constraints (35:04).

d. Unilever

• Initiatives: Partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to reduce plastic waste, offering refillable detergent and shampoo options (24:47).

6. The Right to Repair Movement

Josh and Chuck discuss the importance of enabling consumers to repair their own devices:

• Current State in the US: Facing significant resistance from manufacturers who cite security concerns as a barrier.
• European Progress: The EU is making strides, unlike the US where such initiatives are often "squashed" (56:52).
• Host's Frustration: Chuck expresses his exasperation with manufacturers designing products that are difficult or impossible to repair, forcing consumers to purchase new items (55:36).

7. Impact on Environmental Cycles

The hosts emphasize how the linear economy disrupts natural nutrient cycles:

• Food Waste: Leads to energy and resource waste, and nutrient loss from the soil.
• Solutions: Advocating for composting and innovative recycling methods like anaerobic digestion and microbial processing (44:29).

Josh thoughtfully points out, “It's an elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted.” (44:29).

8. Consumer Behavior and Corporate Responsibility

Josh highlights the aluminum can as a success story in recycling due to its recyclability and existing infrastructure:

• Statistics: In the USA, 65% of aluminum cans are recycled, with 71% of new cans made from recycled materials (21:05).
• Issue: Despite the infrastructure, 35% still end up in landfills, indicating a need for better consumer education and behavior (22:20).

9. Future Outlook and Global Efforts

• China’s Commitment: Focusing on automotive remanufacturing as part of their circular economy strategy (58:37).
• Global Trends: While awareness is increasing, actual implementation faces significant hurdles due to growing consumption and entrenched economic models (57:26).

10. Listener Engagement and Feedback

The episode includes segments where listener emails are addressed, correcting previous inaccuracies and celebrating long-term listeners like Nick from Witchbolt, fostering a community around sustainability topics.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Chuck Bryant: “That's very stuff you should know, isn't it?" (02:51)
• Josh Clark: “It's a very, very hard to repair or get repaired... That's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one.” (09:42)
• Josh Clark: “Nothing gets me more mad almost...” (10:23)
• Chuck Bryant: “Things that you want to do, the.” (00:54)
• Josh Clark: “It's an elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted.” (44:29)
• Chuck Bryant: “They're designed that way.” (09:42)
• Chuck Bryant: “I'm down to zero grass now.” (46:58)

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck effectively outline the necessity of transitioning from a linear to a circular economy, emphasizing design changes, corporate responsibility, and shifts in consumer behavior. While challenges abound—from entrenched economic systems to consumer habits—the episode underscores notable advancements and innovations paving the way toward sustainability. The discussion serves as a compelling call to action for both individuals and corporations to rethink their roles in fostering a more sustainable future.

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Listen to "Who's Up For A Circular Economy" on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Transcript

[Noah de Barros]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Josh Clark]

There's stuff they don't want you to know. Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.

[Bob Crawford]

A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government. Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where you find your favorite shows.

[Dr. Joy Harden Bradford]

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neil Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety.

[Noah de Barros]

What is not normal is to allow it to prevent you from doing the.

[Chuck Bryant]

Things that you want to do, the.

[Noah de Barros]

Things that you were meant to do.

[Dr. Joy Harden Bradford]

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry will be here eventually, but for now all you got is Josh and Chuck. But really, what more do you need on stuff you should know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. In our world, in about two or three min, Jerry will just come in and go, hey, I'm here, guys.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sorry I'm late. I feel like she's learned not to do that. She'll just sit there on mute for a while. Really? Yeah, she hasn't done it in a little while. She's really turned over a new leaf. All right, we'll see. We'll see. We should leave it in if she does come in. Yeah, we should do that. We'll share with everybody.

[Josh Clark]

Except they'll just hear our end, so all they'll hear is, oh, God, Jerry.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, no, I think if she chimes in on Riverside, we could edit that into the final edit.

[Josh Clark]

This will be a fun test.

[Chuck Bryant]

It will be. And there's a little peek behind the curtains for everybody of how we do our thing.

[Josh Clark]

Slapdash.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. While making fun. And Jerry.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah? Hey, I just noticed we were not on the list of Time magazine's 100 greatest podcasts of All Time.

[Chuck Bryant]

What? Really? Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It was funny because I saw that list and my first instinct was, I mean, top 100, that's a lot. Like, surely, surely we cracked the top 100.

[Chuck Bryant]

They probably haven't heard of us is what it is.

[Josh Clark]

No, we're not on there. Literally all of our old time colleagues, you name it Radiolab, 99% invisible. Ira Marin. Like every podcast of note of the past 18 years, except for us, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's very stuff you should know, isn't it?

[Josh Clark]

It is. It is very fitting.

[Chuck Bryant]

We don't let that stuff get to us though, do we?

[Josh Clark]

No, it's Time magazine. Who cares?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I didn't even know they put out a stupid podcast list.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, watch. We're gonna be Men of the Year now.

[Chuck Bryant]

The headline on the COVID will be like, oh, gosh, we forgot.

[Josh Clark]

Well, no, you'll be man of the Year, but I won't be mentioned. That's how it'll work.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's what time does. They tinker with relationships by dividing.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Speaking of tinkering.

[Chuck Bryant]

Mm.

[Josh Clark]

I think we could all tinker with our worldwide economy a bit and perhaps make it more circular.

[Chuck Bryant]

What are you talking about?

[Josh Clark]

Well, Josh, I'm talking about our topic at hand. Talking about circular economy, my friend.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I got. I didn't get the reference. So have you heard of this before? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I ran across it. As far as I know, it's fairly new from the 2000 aughts. I didn't see that it was an idea that was laying around already in this exact form and then was picked up and promoted. So it's possible it was generally created by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

[Josh Clark]

Hats off to Ellen MacArthur.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So Ellen MacArthur, as far as I know, still holds the world record for the fastest solo sail trip around the entire world. 26,000 miles of circumnavigation circular in 72 days. Yeah, she loves circles. And apparently on her trip. I was reading about it. It sounds just insane. And by the way, whenever I read of, like, world sailing trips, I can't help but think of one of the best documentaries of all time, Deep Water, about Donald Crowhurst. I believe you've seen it before. I know we've talked about it. Oh, if you haven't seen it, I actually envy you.

[Josh Clark]

Is this the guy? Who, the diver?

[Chuck Bryant]

Nope, He's a sailor. There was about, like, a 1975 World Sailing Competition, so he was.

[Josh Clark]

Why is it deep water if he wasn't deep in the water?

[Chuck Bryant]

Because he's. He's sailing over deep water.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, over deep water. They should call it over deep water.

[Chuck Bryant]

You sailing over deep water. You should. Actually. I'll wait. Let's just pause recording and go watch it. It's that good.

[Josh Clark]

I'll look into that. I've been on a documentary kick lately, so I'm ripe.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is time would put this one on their top 100 documentaries of all time. Probably.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, yeah. So while she was sailing around the world, she just started. She had, I guess, a lot of time to think and saw a lot of waste and junk and terrible stuff and realized that there's a better way. And a lot of people have thought like, okay, there's a better way to do this. There has to be. And what she promotes, what she's kind of come up with, is this idea of a circular economy. And in a very short back of the envelope sketch of it, the outputs, the waste of the economy get reused as inputs.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

As basically turned into raw materials. And people say, oh, recycling, that's a big part of it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But as far as the circular economy is concerned, we idealize recycling. Like, we're like, that's the best you can do. They're like, that's actually the least desirable out of all of them. There's a bunch of other stuff we can do instead. So circular economy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, it sort of aligns with the whole reduce, reuse, recycle ethos. I think we could best explain it by maybe starting with what we generally have now, which is linear economy. And that's who helped us with this. Dave.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Dave helped us.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it smacks up Dave, but Dave calls it, and Dave didn't invent this term, but it's a take make, waste economy system where you take resources and whatever, like cotton or any kind of raw material, you make something into that to a product to sell to people, and then that thing maybe generally quickly wears out and you throw it away and it goes into a landfill. It's a very. I mean, it's kind of the worst possible scenario you could ask for. If you care about planet earth and people and the world and animals and nature. And it's linear. Cause it goes in one way. You have something, you make something, and then that thing wears out and you throw it in the landfill.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You take the cotton that you grow, you make it into a car, you drive the car into a landfill and jump out right before it goes over the cliff. That's what everybody does.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you left out. Kick back and watch the money roll in. Because that's ultimately what the biggest challenge to implementing a circular economy is. One of the biggest ones is that the linear economy that we have set up, that's been around since the Industrial revolution, is a money making machine. And it's easy to criticize when you sit there and look at all of the terrible waste and Pollution and inequality that's been generated from it. You can also say, yeah, this wealth has funded a lot of science, it's improved a lot of living conditions. Even the poorest people in America are living high on the hog compared to the poorest people in other nations. Like the wealthy nations have really done well for themselves with the linear economy. And again, that's a big reason why there's a lot of reticence to transition to something different.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. There are some, you know, notable. I'm trying to think of a term we could come up with that labels instead of a gold star, like an industry that gets the opposite of that, like a turd pin or something that you wear.

[Chuck Bryant]

I hate that word so much. Turd. But yes, that would work very well. Do you know what makes turd worse.

[Josh Clark]

Is that it's spelled T U R.

[Chuck Bryant]

D. Yes, that definitely does make it worse. Everything about that word is so bad.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, totally turtle Y. So the four sectors that are sort of the worst are food, electronics, consumer goods and construction. Food, obviously. And we're going to get into these more specifically as we go on. But generally speaking, food is a pretty terrible sector. And we've talked about food waste before. But it's not just the food waste that's like tossed by grocery stores and restaurants and stuff like that. But it's also a lot of places still are just using those single use bags and people are like, sure, double bag it, triple bag it. I don't want my tube of toothpaste to fall through that thing into the parking lot. And then all the packaging that goes into it Again, we've covered all this stuff in various forms here and there. Unsustainable farming, electronics. Don't even get me started on electronics. Recycling and electronics that are basically impossible to repair or get repaired.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, they're designed that way. We did an entire episode on that. Planned obsolescence.

[Josh Clark]

Nothing gets me more mad almost.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. When a company purposefully designs a product to break in a short amount of time, like they'll put some sort of sensor or electrical component next to something that generates a lot of heat so that it degrades faster. Like it's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one. That's a big problem. Yeah, like you said with electronics, but clothing is another one too. It's designed to just be worn. You buy it cheaply, you wear it for a little bit, you throw it away. And like you said, we'll talk more about this stuff later. But my eyes started Popping out when I was reading about clothing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's one for sure. And then construction. A lot of resources used in construction and basically construction materials anytime we've done any sort of renovation project because we live in a 100 year old house. So instead of moving, we kind of stayed and fixed it up over the years at first by ourselves and then with the help of contractors and such. And as you know, you've been through stuff like that. It's like when that construction dumpster pulls up, we do everything we can. We fight tooth and nail to give stuff away. Like, hey, can you put all these awesome hundred year old bricks out by the sidewalk? Someone will take them and you know, they will acquiesce. You know, they hate dealing with us because they just want to throw that stuff in the dumpster. But we've managed to get rid of a. You know, we're going through a little thing now. And I had this really awesome screen door and they were literally throwing this really nice screen door. It was like a good one. It wasn't just like a $40 screen door.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was like a Prada screen door.

[Josh Clark]

No, it was Gucci, I think. No, but it was from like a Craftsman company for Craftsman homes. It was sort of like an upscale screen door. And they were throwing it in the trash and I almost tackled the guy and I put that thing out there and it was gone in an hour, you know, and it just.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I bet.

[Josh Clark]

Just little things like that make me feel like, oh, God, thank. I saved one little thing from the landfill.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice work, man.

[Josh Clark]

Not for a pat on the back, but you know what I mean? It just doesn't deserve. Just kills. Our conscience is just burning up when they're throwing away even old wood and stuff. You know, I try to take that stuff to the camp and burn it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what I found? When you're dealing with contractors and subcontractors, if you want them to do something, you have to tell them directly and. And kind of an authoritative voice and then finish with chop, chop.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And also stand there and watch them because as soon as you leave, they'll just say like, whatever, dude.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you guys out there listening, probably have bloody crescent shape fingernail marks on the heel of your palms from hearing all this stuff. So just settle down, relax a little bit, because now we're going to tell you a little bit about an alternative to that. The closed loop model. Not linear, circular. The circular economy. And it basically says it takes a look at everything wrong with the linear economy and fixes it one by one. And it's like there's a lot left open. It's not like this is just a, like a completely ready to go economic model that's going to solve every single problem and it's not going to create any other problems. It's more. We're at the most conceptual stage that is being presented to people to say, hey, there's another way and here are some of the ways we can do it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And it's sort of just the opposite of everything we were just saying. Instead of planned obsolescence, there's a planned permanence, like hey, let's make something that lasts for a long time. That's one. Make something that's repairable. That's another one really kind of brilliant thing that we're going to talk about later is this idea of instead of owning something, like sharing stuff, renting things, sharing things, paying for the use of things that you don't own, like you know, splitting that up. And then if something finally does reach the end of its life, because not everything will last forever, even the most well made thing, those components then you can take down and hopefully most, if not all of that can be recycled or remade into something else.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And if you'll notice, reduction of consumption isn't an emphasis of this. I didn't see that talked about much at all. So no one's saying like, hey, you can't keep growing. It's just that the stuff that you're creating needs to last much, much longer. And the greatest thing you can do is to keep it as close to the consumer as possible. Right. So let's say you have a hammer. Everybody knows a hammer breaks like the second time you ever use it.

[Josh Clark]

Would you hammer in the morning?

[Chuck Bryant]

More the evening for me.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I would do it all over the land. All right, so when you take a hammer, I was kidding about it breaking, but. But if you have a hammer and you don't use it a lot, the best you could do is give it to somebody else who is going to use it more rather than throw the hammer away. That's a terrible example. I know people don't really throw hammers away, but keeping it reused so that there's no inputs or very little inputs, that's the ideal. The more inputs necessary, taking it apart, transporting it somewhere, putting it back together, refurbishing it, that is the least desirable, even though that's still within this scope that we currently have in the linear model, that that's like the best you can do the, the, you know, like recycling. Recycling is the last thing you want to do.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and hammer's not the worst idea, my friend, because I'd say 99% of the people out there, if their hammer handle breaks. Let's say you have a wooden hammer handle and that breaks people just throw it in the trash and you can fix that. One of my favorite things to do is I follow a few Instagram accounts where people fix things in front of your face like that. Just simple everyday things. And it's incredibly rewarding to see someone take something that would normally be in the trash. And they're like, all you need to do is get another piece of wood, get that other piece of wood fully out of there and shape it like the broken piece. And then you've got another hammer.

[Chuck Bryant]

How do you shape it like the broken piece? What tools do you need for that?

[Josh Clark]

Well, I mean, these people do this for a living, so they may have a lathe or something, but like, it doesn't even have to be pretty. I bet you, you give me a broken hammer, buddy. With my limited tools and skills, I could make that hammer new again if I really wanted to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, here's a challenge. I challenge all Stuff youf Should Know listeners to mail Chuck your broken hammers and he will fix every single one of them for you for free and mail them back out of his own pocket.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Send it to top 100 podcaster at 123 Lane, Atlanta, Georgia. Should we take a break?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's take a break.

[Josh Clark]

All right, we'll be right back.

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[Bob Crawford]

American history is full of wise people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Walt Whitman said something like, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is glory.

[Noah de Barros]

Those founding fathers were gossipy AF, and.

[Chuck Bryant]

They loved to cut each other down.

[Bob Crawford]

I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.

[Bob Crawford]

Listen to American History Hotline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noah de Barros]

I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would like your cousin would, if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now, you know, with Noah de Barrasso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means. For the rest of you, it's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. When I'm watching everything, sheesh. Majority of the youth 18 through 24 say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to fund the economy.

[Chuck Bryant]

You kidding me?

[Noah de Barros]

Politics is wild, and I'm definitely not here to tame it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to now, you know with Noah de Barrasta on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

This is sys.

[Chuck Bryant]

Kiss.

[Josh Clark]

Kiss. Kiss.

[Chuck Bryant]

The purpose of this record is to. So okay, so far, basically, what we've been saying are all good ideas. Very few people are like, no, I want to throw my hammer away. I get the deep satisfaction throwing that broken hammer away. Most people just don't want their hammer to break, which again, is addressed like making products planned for permanence, making them just better rather than cheaper. But all of this stuff, like, is going to take a complete shift in how we view economics, how we view growth, and also how we view consumer behavior, because we're in a linear model right now, and the basis of the linear model is making it as easy as possible for you to Buy and use and throw away. Get rid of whatever product it is you're buying, whether it's potato chips, a hammer, cotton for a car, whatever.

[Josh Clark]

You're going to get me every time, by the way, if you keep going back to that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but you know, there are examples of things and companies that are and have been doing this. You know, Dave looked down on his kitchen table and saw an aluminum can was like, hey, there's a good example right there. Aluminum is a, a very recyclable thing. And thankfully it's being recycled at pretty good rates. It depends on where you are. If, like you're in Brazil, that's about 100%. If you're in the USA, about 65%. But the average aluminum can that you're gonna purchase in the United States is made from about 71% recycled materials. So we're doing okay there. That's a good example.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're doing great. It's a great example. It's probably the top example. As far as the United States goes. People tend to recycle cans and they're easy to recycle. So we have a process in an infrastructure that makes the whole thing fairly low hanging fruit. And because aluminum cans are light enough, but also compactable, you can transport a bunch of them. So it's worth your while to transport them from a pickup site to like an actual recycling center. There's. It's just checking all of the boxes. Even still, though, you see, with as easy as it is, 35% of those aluminum cans just get thrown away in the trash.

[Josh Clark]

Who's doing that?

[Chuck Bryant]

A lot of people. I mean, a lot of people do that. Yeah, I know it's kind of nuts, but that is the case. So that right there just kind of goes to show you, like that's where the consumer behavior needs to change. Everything else is basically in place for us to recycle all of the aluminum cans that we have. We're just not doing it. So that's like kind of one pillar or an example of one of the pillars that has to be adapted to go to a circular economy. Making people more thoughtful, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Good luck, buddy.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. I think that's probably more than anything what makes this a. A pipe dream, I should say. The most cynical side of me says.

[Josh Clark]

That is getting everybody on board with a single idea these days is not possible, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because all it takes is one schmo to throw his can away in the trash and you just lost your 100% recycling status. And then everybody goes, what's the point of a circular economy anyway and goes back to the linear economy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But the stat they could throw out then is 100%. Except Gary.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it would be a Gary.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I'm sorry, Gary's. You know, it's true.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Not all Gary's are bad, but all bad people are Gary's.

[Josh Clark]

There's a stuff you should know shirt. Not all Gary's. Just. That's it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

There are also some examples of companies that, you know, I'm a big Shark Tank fan of that TV show. And it seems like more and more companies are coming through there that are small. And obviously they're small cause they're on Shark Tank and looking for initial investments, but they're trying to do the right thing here. Getting corporations on board is the big problem. But I've seen a lot of companies come through Shark Tank where they're like, hey. And the reason I mentioned this is because Unilever is one of the examples of a corporation that's partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They're reducing plastic waste and they sell a ton of stuff. But like, when they're selling detergent and stuff like that or shampoo now, they have programs where you're like, hey, send in your empty shampoo bottle and we will fill that thing up and send it back to you, or get it in concentrate, stuff like that. And there. There's a lot of, like, Shark Tank companies that are doing similar things, including cleaning products, where they're like, hey, there's a better way to do this where you're just not. Even if you're recycling that plastic, just burning through these things on a daily and weekly basis and tossing it in the recycling or worse, trash for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And I think, like, entrepreneurs creating small businesses and focusing on, like, one thing that is sustainable, reusable, whatever, that's how larger corporations start doing that stuff. Because they buy those smaller corporations for that idea and implement it company wide, hopefully. So that's great that those people are out there.

[Josh Clark]

Or they squash it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, or they squash it. Good Lord. I just want to tell everybody we should say hi, Jerry. Jerry's here, everyone.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I was wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I saw that. There are. I did not see a single shampoo refilling station in the US I found them in Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines and Pakistan so far.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, that's even better because then you're not mailing stuff because that's another type of waste is just mailing the empty bottles and having that mailed back.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you're going to the store already and they're like, they're attractive little shampoo refilling centers. And. And I guess if you were really hard up, you could go just put your head under the nozzle and do a little squirt and then run home and wash your hair.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, they've been doing that with the big five gallon jugs of water forever. You know, most stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. I thought of that too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's a good thing. Cause those things are huge. And just swapping those out and refilling them just. It only makes sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. There's also, there's a Dutch company called Niaga, which is again, backwards. You'd never know that unless someone told you or you happen to be wearing a Niagara T shirt in front of a mirror.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it is the word again. I think just the way you said that might be confusing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm sure it was confusing. Can't you just hear like a time podcast monitor going and like checking some box that keeps us off the list?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like 100. 100.

[Chuck Bryant]

So if we're lucky. So this company, they're Dutch, they targeted carpets and mattresses and those are two of the worst offenders as far as. At least as far as textiles go. But maybe as far as all products go.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because they're big. They're essentially impossible to recycle. They're very, very hard to recycle. And people throw a lot of them away. I think 20 million mattresses are thrown away in the United States alone, 30 million in Europe. And we toss about 2 billion pounds of carpet away every year in the United States into landfills. Only 5% of carpet gets recycled. I couldn't even tell you where you would recycle carpet.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. Is there a place called Recarpet? Maybe that's what it should be called.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Or carpets again.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or all of that backward.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, the other reason those two, they're targeting those two A is because the people of the Netherlands are great. And hey, if you live in the Netherlands and you would go see a live podcast of us there in Amsterdam, let us know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Let's go ahead and just say that we're putting out feelers for Europe. So we'd love to hear from people about where we might could get an audience.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Is that okay to say that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we should probably tell everybody it won't be for two years.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. We're targeting 27, but we're going to get back on the road next year. Coming for you, Canada in a big way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. So you better close the borders.

[Josh Clark]

That's a little. Well, they might. I hope we'll be welcome. We'll get a pass, I hope.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's up in the air.

[Josh Clark]

But long way of saying the reason that they are targeting those specifically is not just the lifespan, but they actually have a name. They're called Medium Life Bulky products. This stuff lasts about 10 years and they're just full of nasty chemicals. And so all of that leads to them being two of the worst offenders. Mattresses and carpet full of chemicals don't last long and they're fairly large.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Especially if they're stained mattresses.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Yeah. Good luck recycling that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I saw 80 to 120 years for a mattress to degrade in a landfill, which actually seemed a little fast for me, but you know, it's still not fast enough. So this, this company is like, okay, we're actually going to make this stuff out of recyclable materials. But even better than that, we're going to make it so that every part of the mattress is replaceable.

[Josh Clark]

Imagine that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or repairable.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you're like, I got just a gallons of urine staining the COVID of my mattress. I need a new mattress cover. Rather than throwing out the whole mattress and waiting 120 years for it to degrade, you just call up Niaga and you say, hey, send me another mattress cover. And they say, hey, we didn't know that you could call direct from the United States to the Netherlands, but that's new for us. We'll send it to you straight away. And they send it to you, you put it back on and there's no urine whatsoever until the next time it happens.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. But they say, what's the magic word? And you have to go again, like a two year old again.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's actually do that.

[Josh Clark]

It's great. And we'll look at other Dutch companies because they're doing the right thing. It seems like in a lot of ways one key to all of this is design. If you have a linear economy, which we do, like we said, it's purposeful. It's designed in such a way to make it either obsolete or just a mattress that can't be recovered or whatever. So you have to start with design. It has to start on the very conceptual phase of like, how could we make a mattress that could last you forever? And then you design it that way because it's possible.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And design doesn't just apply to products. Although that's the easiest thing to do, is to say, okay, how can I design this product to fit into the existing recycling infrastructure? Or design it to be reusable or repairable? That's the easiest one. We also, though, need to design our recycling infrastructure to make it easier to recycle products that aren't designed to be recycled. So there's a lot of design that has to go. But you're right. Like, it has to be a conscious choice. And Dave points out something I think is important too. Waste is a conscious choice too. Like when your little, like, mini bag of lay's potato chips, when you're done with it, you throw it away. It was designed to be thrown away. Like, that was a decision that was made by the package designers. They didn't do anything to try to make it recyclable. They decided that the best thing for you to do with that package is to throw it away. And as much as you hate it, you have no choice. Your choice is to buy those, those lay's potato chips, or not buy them. And some people are starting to, based on the packaging. So people, so some companies are starting to wake up. But for the most part, people are like, I don't want to think about the packaging that my potato chips come in. I have so many more bigger pressing issues right now that if you can just make it so that the people don't have to think about recycling it, then you're onto something.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, a hundred percent.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I was talking about myself. I don't want to think about what I'm supposed to do with potato chip package. And I'm not being judgy. Like, I'm including myself in this. Like, I, I mean, I, I, I would like to think I'm more conscientious than, say, the average person, but I'm certainly, I'm not at, like, Chuck level.

[Josh Clark]

I'm not like the Emily level. You know me. I'm on her coattails.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, when I was a kid, we had the Charles Chips driver come around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I remember that.

[Josh Clark]

And we would give them our. I mean, if you're of a certain age, you might remember this. There was a literal potato chip delivery company. They were called Charles Chips, and they came in a big metal tin, and you would finish with that tin, and your chip person would come by and you would give them the tin of empty chips, and they would give you a full tin of chips.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they'd reach in with the cuff of their shirt, wipe the tin out, put the chips in the tin Sometimes I saw. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And obviously again, there's still waste with the delivery truck and stuff. So save the emails. But we're talking about, you know, we're not idealizing it as perfect, we're just saying like it's a better thing than what we're doing now, which is those little foil bags sitting in landfills for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

And yeah, that's another thing too is because this is kind of conceptual and not every issue is being tackled right out of the gate with it. Like energy use is a big part of it. So they obviously are like, well, we need more renewables. That's kind of a no brainer. But it's important because not everything can be done with, with renew. With renewable resources. Some stuff just requires fossil fuels, some stuff say requires nuclear. So you have to be able to design those power plants or those industrial smokestacks so that that stuff's being captured and reused as an input somehow.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. And you talked about educating the consumer and it's not educating the corporation because they know this stuff. They do it on purpose for a reason, like you said. But it's more about companies coming along where the end user isn't the single focus. They take a more macro view and say, well, there's something bigger at work with these products we sell and that's Planet Earth and Mother Nature. And while the consumer is important and we want to give them a good product, we can start from the beginning and design something that has less of an environmental impact, designed to fit within these recycling networks, like, you know, aluminum like you were talking about, like once those are up and running. And a big one that I didn't think of that Dave pointed out was like, do you need this new product? Does the consumer need it? Or is it just like, hey, I think we could boost sales in Q3 if we released a slightly different version of this dumb same thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So you kind of mentioned something where like using something like leasing or renting something can also be applied to things we don't normally think of as what we lease or rent. Right, right. One of the, again, a Dutch company called Bundles is basically they, they come to your house, they'll bring you your dishwasher or your washing machine or your dryer or your coffee maker or you can bundle it all together, hence the name, and they're going to bring you a really high end Mila sustainably manufactured appliance and you're going to have this thing in your house and you don't have to lift a finger other than to use it, this company brings it, they install it, they come by and maintain it. When it's done, when you're done with it, say you're moving and you can't use it anymore, they're going to come pick it up, they're going to refurbish it, they're going to bring it to somebody else. It's, like, really circular. And the way that you are charged for it is by the number of washes you, I guess, carry out. I guess that's how you talk about laundry. You carry out a wash. It is called a paper wash model, and the whole basis of it is wifi. Like your washing machine is connected to their servers, so they're tracking how many times you're washing. And then from what I can tell, you get a monthly bill based on the amount of washes you did, the amount of use you did for that, or you use for the washer or the dryer or whatever.

[Josh Clark]

You know, my takeaway here is.

[Chuck Bryant]

What?

[Josh Clark]

You've never washed your own clothes, have you?

[Chuck Bryant]

That is not true. I'm actually kind of good at my own clothes. I had to get good because I don't know how I do it. But there's not a day that goes by that I don't get a spot on one of my T shirts. So I've gotten good at salvaging T shirts.

[Josh Clark]

Same, same. It's incredible how stained my T shirt gets on a regular basis. And I do believe you can carry out a wash like nobody's business.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do you use Shout? That's what I use. I shout it out. It works really well.

[Josh Clark]

I use and I hate having to use it. But my friend that has been working in wardrobe departments in Hollywood for 30 years said Zout is the one.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've not heard of Zout. Why do you hate to use it? Is it made from coal?

[Josh Clark]

It's just one of those disgustingly smelly products.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is it naphtha?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. But no. I mean, they mask it. It smells like, you know, just really, really, really, really heavily fragranced. I gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And, you know, we're not down with that. So it gets out of spot, but it'll taint. You gotta wash it by itself. It'll taint your whole load.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take a break? Yeah. All right.

[Josh Clark]

We'll take a break and be right back.

[Unknown]

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[Bob Crawford]

Restrictions may apply American History is full of wise people.

[Chuck Bryant]

What woman said something like, you know, 99.99 of war is diarrhea and 1% is glory.

[Noah de Barros]

Those founding fathers were gossipy AF and.

[Chuck Bryant]

They love to cut each other down.

[Bob Crawford]

I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hamilton pauses and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.

[Bob Crawford]

Listen to American History Hotline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noah de Barros]

I'm Noah, I'm 13 and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would, if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barrasso is a show about influence, who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it when I'm watching everything.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sheesh.

[Noah de Barros]

Majority of the youth 18 through 24 say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to fund the economy.

[Chuck Bryant]

You kidding me?

[Noah de Barros]

Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to tame it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to now youw Know with Noah de Barrasta on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

This is Syskis all right, we're back. I did want to mention one thing. We had to take a quicker break. We were laughing too hard. But on bundles and that renting appliances, you have to do a lot of education in the United States to overcome the perception of what rented appliances means.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Because we grew up in, you know, it's probably still the same way as Gen Xers where, you know, appliance rental was something like you did if you couldn't afford to buy stuff, like you rented your TV or whatever, right? You're like, oh, man, that means you don't have much money to buy a tv. But there is a better way. And I wish they had this here, man, because we've had some really bad appliance luck. And it makes me so mad because this stuff's expensive. I would love to rent washer and dryer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I'll rent you mine.

[Josh Clark]

I've heard they can carry out a heck of a watch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's part of the American dream to own your own washer and dryer.

[Josh Clark]

Not me, man. I hate those things.

[Chuck Bryant]

The government can take it from your cold, dead hand if they try. Yeah, it's definitely part of American cultures. You own your stuff, it's yours.

[Josh Clark]

Let's talk about food, though.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay? You own that too. If you buy that, you own it here in the United States. Not sure what it's like in other countries, but food is a huge problem. We've done an entire episode, I think, on food waste before. I know we've talked about it extensively, because I remember. And what's sad is we've been talking about this for decades now, and the stat remains the same. A third of all of the food grown in the world gets thrown away every year. About a trillion doll worth and mindless amounts of water and fertilizer and labor inputs just wasted. Not just in the face of all that loss of, like, money or resources, but it doesn't even get diverted to the poorest people in the world who are starving.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. And that's a great episode. So I encourage you to go listen to those. But one thing I, I don't know that we've covered on any of these shows while we were beating those horses. What, dead horses?

[Chuck Bryant]

Skinning those cats?

[Josh Clark]

No, is the nutrient cycle. And obviously wasting food is a moral problem and ethical problem. But one thing we haven't talked much about is that it disrupts that nutrient cycle. If you look at nature, the system they have is a closed loop system. They're, you know, things grow naturally out in the woods. And it is from soil that is being, you know, if it's just literally out in the forest, just being treated naturally by the natural processes of Mother Earth, and then an animal eats that thing and then poops it out and that poop goes back into the soil and feeds the soil. That animal falls over dead one day, hopefully a very old age. Then their bodies decompose and release those nutrients back into the earth. And it is a, dare I say, elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we make food part of our linear economy where the food waste doesn't just get tossed on the ground and biodegrade into it. You don't want to do that anyway. Just annual psa. Don't throw apple cores and banana peels on the ground because that's not a good thing to do. What's the best thing to do is to compost them. And to some degree or some way, the worst thing you can do, though, is to throw them in a trash can and have them taken to the landfill. Because then those nutrients that were put into that food have been taken out of the nutrient cycle for Earth, at least for however long it's going to take for that entire landfill to degrade, which I can't even imagine how long it takes an entire landfill to just turn back into nutrients and stuff. So it's disrupted in that way. Then we also disrupt it because we don't tend to collect our waste for reuse. It's an output, pure and simple. We don't. We don't put it back into the system. So there's two ways that we disrupt the nutrient cycle with our. With the way that we treat our food.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, totally. This may be part of a suite, like a playlist one day. Because I just realized we've done things on sewage recycling or sewage treatment plants. We've done them on landfills. So maybe we should do like a little green playlist one day.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we got one on permaculture. That was pretty great.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, totally.

[Chuck Bryant]

Before we move on, I should say some of that, those what are called biosolids treated sewage, it does get reused in some cases. Have you ever used milorganite?

[Josh Clark]

Why do I know that word? I think we've talked about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a miracle fertilizer. It does wonders for your grass, especially if you pair it with an inch of water flooding your grass. But it's these little particles and they smell, but not smell the way you would think, because they actually are treated. Sewage from Milwaukee's municipal Sewage system. But they. It's like a nitrogen boost for its fertilizer for your lawn. It's insane how well it works. It's cheap. And you're reusing waste from the good people of Milwaukee.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's great.

[Chuck Bryant]

And you can get it almost anywhere. It's very abundant and easy to get. And I highly recommend it.

[Josh Clark]

I'm down to zero grass now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, you could use it on basically any plants. So if you have plants that like nitrogen, you can toss a little milorganite on there.

[Josh Clark]

I'll pass that along to Emily. I'm sure she knows about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Zero grass. Is your entire lawn just. Or your entire yard just covered with high end antique screen doors?

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a good look. I'll bet it is. I'll bet they. It's a little wobbly though, right? Walking around?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or are they just for looking?

[Josh Clark]

No, no, no. You walk on them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

So Ellen MacArthur's foundation is looking to correct this and making like, basically investing in the biological cycle of the circular economy, like making this a part of it too. And composting is an obvious one. But one of the things that is pretty amazing is called cascading, that is reusing food waste to make other things. And there's a. What a Dutch company called Peel Pioneers. Because, you know, in fruit peels like orange and lemon and stuff like that, the best stuff is in that peel. The zest of those things and the essential oils that you get from those peels, like, that's the gold man. And people are throwing that away or composting it, which is okay. But how about taking those essential oils and actually making other products out of them? And that is what Peel Pioneers out of the Netherlands is doing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's. I mean, you can find cascading in a lot of different food companies. But that's a. That's a great example because those. That orange essential oils in particular are used in a lot of different other products, so.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You can have a pretty successful business just harvesting the scraps off the floor of an orange juice processor, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Converting stuff to biofuel is another pretty obvious one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then anaerobic digesters. I'm putting a lot of like, hope on anaerobic digesters in the future where we just figure out the microbes that eat this stuff or these microbes eat this kind of plastic, these microbes eat this kind of oil, and like just unleash them on all sorts of stuff and then reuse their byproducts as inputs. I really hope we reach that future. That to me is like the greenest of green.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we've talked about that too. I can't remember what episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

I can't either. We'll have to use that stuff. You should know. Transcript search tool to find.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I feel like it was like something. Someone was using worms to do something. Doesn't that ring a bell?

[Chuck Bryant]

It might have been a biofuel app.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, maybe.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we'll look it up.

[Josh Clark]

Can we talk about fashion?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. This is just crazy to me. I think we should do an entire episode on fast fashion. But we can hit some high points, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Fast fashion is sort of an environmental nightmare and a humanitarian nightmare because they're made in sweatshops for very little pay by people, you know, making very little pay. They are sold very cheaply. Cheap synthetic materials are used. So all the inputs are bad, they don't last long. And it's an environmental nightmare, basically. I think the fashion industry is the second largest consumer of water. That has to be behind the factory farming, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it produces 10%. The fashion industry produces 10% of the global CO2 emissions total.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And 85% of all the stuff that the fashion industry makes ends up in landfills. Not recycled landfills. 85% of all the clothes made in the entire world. There's another issue with it too. When you wash, just washing, just using these things, washing them in your bundles. Leased washing machine. You're releasing microplastics into the ocean. Because a lot of clothes, even recycled clothes, are made from plastics or contain plastics and those things get flushed out. And it's a huge plastic pollution problem too, which is, I mean, it's ironic. Like Patagonia is always held up as a great example of a company that tries to make sustainable circular clothing. And one of the things that they do is their, I think their line of responsibility. T shirts. Super cute. They're made from fabric scraps. Cool. But also plastic bottles. Also cool because we want to recycle plastic bottles. But the problem is that plastic gets transferred to the ocean. So it's one of those things where it's like we're so far from figuring this stuff out that even the people who are trying to do something are still having inadvertent effects that, you know, I'm sure keeps them up at night.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. And you can also, man, you can send a 10 year old pullover to Patagonia that had a collar that ripped or something and they'll fix that thing for you probably for nothing. And you can send stuff back to them that they will resell, and you can buy gently used things from Patagonia online. They are also working with a startup called Infinitid Fiber. And what they're doing is they're working on the waste on the front end. It's a process to recycle that textile waste, because it's not like, all right, we've got this much cotton, and every single fiber goes into making that T shirt, and there's zero waste.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or that car.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, sorry about that. That car. There's gonna be some textile waste on the front end. And so what they're doing is they're taking that stuff and they're recycling that textile waste into a new fiber called Infini.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that stuff is 100% recyclable. So eventually, over time, if this loop were allowed to really kind of take hold, eventually all the cotton would be put into or transferred into the Infini circle. And since it's 100% recyclable, you could conceivably never have to put new cotton in again.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. I'm just saying, conceptually, that's kind of how this stuff works.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's even compostable.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is. So you would have to put some new cotton in once in a while because Gary would go compost it just to be a jerk. Right. But, yeah, for the most part, you could. Once it really kind of took hold and got going, it could overtake the existing cotton stocks and make them 100% recyclable. And then you wouldn't need more cotton stocks, which is, again, an issue we'd have to deal with, because then all the cotton farmers are out of work.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. And we have no more new cotton cars on the road.

[Chuck Bryant]

But one other thing that I found that really got to me, Chuck. I found a stat that said that most of the returns, like, if you try something on, like, a clothing, especially if it's mailed to you and you try it on and send it back. Right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Most of those things are thrown away into landfills. Yes.

[Josh Clark]

What?

[Chuck Bryant]

£9.5 billion of just clothing returns alone were put into landfills in 2022.

[Josh Clark]

Unconscionable.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the reason why is because companies are like, I'm not going to pay somebody to fold this thing back up, put the pins back in it, put it in the plastic, and make it new again so that I can sell it. It's cheaper for me to just throw it away. And there are programs that divert that stuff to, like, developing countries so that those clothes are donated. But I guarantee that's not as cheap for the company as it is to just throw it away. That's a huge impact that the fast fashion industry has on. On the planet. It's. That's crazy to me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I haven't been this upset about something I've heard from you in a long time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh. And I say some upsetting stuff.

[Josh Clark]

I know you usually text them to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Me, but those are upsetting pictures.

[Josh Clark]

All right, one last thing we can talk about is the right to repair movement, which we talked about in the planned obsolescence episode. But you know, it's exactly what you think. It's, hey, we need to be able to repair our whatevers, our small appliances. That's a big offender. A lot of companies are saying. Because, you know, I don't know if we covered this part, but. Cause I don't remember why companies didn't do it or at least why they say they don't do it. One thing they'll say is like, oh, you know what with electronics, if we publish, like, how other people can fix these things and basically give repair companies repair manuals, like, it leaves people vulnerable to hackers if they can get information from that electronic device. And I just call foul on that. That sounds like a bunch of BS to me.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're like, don't forget hackers. Hackers are going to get you.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because you want your. Whatever, your iPhone fixed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And you can't. I have a Acer Swift laptop that I love, but I've tried to replace the battery before and it's designed to not replace the battery. You cannot replace the battery. And obviously the battery is the first thing that goes out.

[Josh Clark]

It's infuriating.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is infuriating because it's like they made it so that you have to get rid of your laptop and get another one. It drives me nuts. So if you put all this together, Chuck, like electronics companies successfully lobbying against right to repair laws, companies using planned obsolescence left and right. People like Gary just throwing their stuff away to be jerks. Like, how can this even be implemented? I can't see it happening. At least in the United States. I know the EU is really taking some strides toward this stuff, and hats off to them, but in the United States, I can't. In the foreseeable future, like, as far as I can think out, I can't see this being implemented.

[Josh Clark]

No, I mean, Certainly not now with what's going on in our country. And I'm not trying to get too political, but that's just a fact. It's not only not a priority for our current administration to invest at all in something like a circular economy, but it's not even on the radar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Or it's outright being squashed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Even more disturbing is that even outside of the United States, globally speaking, recycling or secondary materials being put back in as inputs is actually on the decline by significant numbers.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we're headed in the wrong direction, even though Dave points out that social media posts and articles about circular economy have tripled in the last five years. So there's more awareness, but we're going in the wrong direction as far as actual feet on the floor kind of stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And consumption keeps growing and growing and growing. Apparently from 2018 to 2024, we consumed 500 gigatons of material. That's everything. Raw material, finished material, fossil fuels. And that is 28% of the total amount we consumed in the last 125 years. So it's just growing exponentially. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to overcome. You might say it would take like, an authoritarian government to implement this kind of thing. And it turns out China has committed to creating a circular economy for themselves back in the 2000s. And apparently they're. They're focused right now on automotive remanufacturing, which is essentially taking old cars and refurbishing them and their parts, selling them like new at a discounted price because they're refurbished.

[Josh Clark]

Huh.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, so I guess keep an eye on China and the EU to see where things go. Chuck laughed a little bit, but his laugh was dripping with, okay, let's go to listener mail. So he just unlocked listener mail.

[Josh Clark]

This is a correction on a correction. So we heard from quite a few people about the most famous Brant Forte in. People wrote in and said, Alexander Graham Bell, forget Gretzky and Phil Hartman. Alexander Graham Bell was not born in Brantford. So this is from Joel. Hey, guys. Probably not the first person to say this, but I'm correcting your email correction. They claimed Alexander Graham Bell was born in Brantford. He certainly lived in Branford, So they claim him. He was born in Scotland and moved to Brantford as a young man. I guess at one point in his life he would definitely say he was from Branford, but that's not where he's from. Love the show. That is from Joel Dawson.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very nice. So I guess Phil Hartman moves back up to number two.

[Josh Clark]

I guess so. And you know what? Whenever someone sends in their business or something and it seems pretty cool, we like to tout them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

And Joel signed his with free spirittours Ca. So I'm looking now. It looks like paddling and stand up, paddle boarding, caving, forest therapy, awesome wine tastings, woodness wellness.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow. Also, I want to shout out Witchbolt again. Did you see which bolt got in touch with us to say thanks for the mention on the Alchemy episode?

[Josh Clark]

I did not see that.

[Chuck Bryant]

They did. He did. I should say. He got in touch to say, hey, you guys want some T shirts? Thanks a lot. He's been listening for 15 years. His name's Nick. He's been a listener for 15 years. Witchbolt has. Remember the dungeon synth guy?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he wrote in and I was like, I'm actually a little starstruck right now. So there's like this big circular love fest going on. Not a circular economy, but a circular love fest going on between stuff you should know and which bolt right now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Joel or which bolt, you can send us an email to. Send it off to Stuff podcastheartradio.com.

[Josh Clark]

Stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

[Chuck Bryant]

Apple Podcasts are.

[Unknown]

Wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Josh Clark]

There'S stuff they don't want you to know. Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.

[Bob Crawford]

A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government. Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

[Dr. Joy Harden Bradford]

I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls PO podcast, Dr. Angela Neal Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety.

[Noah de Barros]

What is not normal is to allow it to prevent you from doing the.

[Chuck Bryant]

Things that you want to do, the.

[Noah de Barros]

Things that you were meant to do.

[Dr. Joy Harden Bradford]

Listen to Therapy for black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Our iHeartradio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas, September 19th and 20th, streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade Chlorilla Jelly Roll, John Fogarty. Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, the Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com get your tickets today AXS.com this is an iHeart podcast.