49. Carbon offsetting - the good, the bad and the ugly

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James Piper: Hello. Welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast diving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one sided stories. In this episode we will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of carbon offsetting. Are Ozempic pens rubbish or not? And I have a question about the metal security stickers that you sometimes find on packaging. I'm Jace Piper, author of the Rubbish Book, and I'm joined by Robbie Staniforth, my far from rubbish friend. Good morning, Robbie.

Robbie Staniforth: Hi, James.

James Piper: How are you today?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, very good, thank you.

James Piper: Let me tell you what, I'm a bit disgruntled.

Robbie Staniforth: Really?

James Piper: Yeah. I went away at the weekend with my family.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: And my mum is obsessed with you. There's no. Really no other word for it.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay. Hopefully in a positive way.

James Piper: I don't know. At one point she asked for a life size cardboard cutout and I was like, what are you gonna do with that? I don't wanna know.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, James, Mum, my number one fan. That's great.

James Piper: This is what happens to me, right? I was walking around town with a friend. I don't know if you remember this. I was walking around town with a friend. We walked past you and he went, oh my God, it's Robbie from the Talkin Rubbish podcast. What am I, chopped liver?

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, all this fame's gonna go to my head, James. Your friend, your mum.

James Piper: I thought maybe we should do a Spotify poll. Who would you most like to meet in the streets? Robbie or James? And I thought, I just can't bring myself to experience the heartache.

Robbie Staniforth: You don't want to know the answer, mate.

James Piper: Yeah. So I have another poll in mind for this week which is linked to our review of the week, which this week is the best review we've ever had, isn't it? Yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: I mean, it's unbelievable.

James Piper: Absolutely hilarious. So you've got to stick around for it.

Robbie Staniforth: You've got to stick around for it.

James Piper: It is, it is so worth it. Yeah. Stick around for that review. It will be coming in what, like half an hour's time? It is so funny. Trash talk. So today I wanted to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of carbon offsetting.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, okay. There's some real ugly stuff in there. Is there?

James Piper: Yeah. Well, my mind went a bit all over the place to land a topic for this week because next week is episode 50. I feel I should celebrate. And we're gonna interview Mike Berners Lee and I was thinking, what could we do? And originally we were gonna do Lifecycle analysis stuff because he does a Lot of that, a lot of kind of lifecycle analysis products. And then I was having a brewdog the other night and on the side of brewdog it said, we are the world's first carbon negative brewery. And Ellie was asking what I thought of that and, and I suddenly remembered that Mike Berners Lee was the guy who did all the calculations to make them the world's first carbon negative brewery. So I thought, let's talk about carbon offsetting. That's going to be the thing that's probably most linked to him.

Robbie Staniforth: And I remember this was big in like sustainability news a couple of years back, wasn't it? And planting trees or buying forests or something. So you're going to, you're going to explain all about that, are you?

James Piper: Yeah, that's their forest. But we'll come on to brewdog towards the end I thought, first of all, let's just talk about carbon offsetting as a whole. So what is carbon offsetting? Basically it is a polluter paying money to an organisation to offset the impact they've had on the planet and they offset the impact of their own carbon dioxide emissions by funding a programme that reduces emissions somewhere else.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay. It's like a sort of trading scheme in a way. Take some from over here and give back over there.

James Piper: The best example I could come up with is a company producing cardboard boxes for Amazon, pays to have trees planted.

Robbie Staniforth: In the OG Amazon, the OG and Best Amazon.

James Piper: So what does it mean? I mean, I guess first of all it means we have to create a market for carbon. And one thing I hadn't quite appreciated was there's two types of carbon market. There is a voluntary carbon market, which is a company saying, you know, I want to do something, I want to, I want to offset my work and I want to do that voluntarily. That's fairly obvious. And then there's a compliance carbon market. So this is companies that have to offset their carbon to comply with national laws.

Robbie Staniforth: Sure. So the things that we're seeing on when we buy a short haul flight or whatever, do you want to offset your carbon tick box here, that's like a voluntary type scheme. As the sort of purchaser of the flight, you choose whether you take part in that.

James Piper: Exactly. So today we're going to talk about the voluntary market, we won't talk about the compliance one. So I guess the first question is what kind of thing creates a carbon offset? What can you actually do? That is carbon offsetting and it's sort of broken down into a number of categories. So I'll just go through these. So there's forestry.

Robbie Staniforth: I knew that one.

James Piper: We're going to talk a lot about forestry today.

Robbie Staniforth: That's the big one, isn't it? That's the one you see all the time being advertised.

James Piper: So typically people talk about like protecting a forest from deforestation. We'll come on to that. And improved forest management, that kind of thing. Not a lot of tree planting. Again, I'll tell you why I think that might be the case. So renewable energy. So installing wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, solar panels, all that kind of stuff. Renewable energy, waste management. So if you're removing methane from landfills, you know, they funnel the methane off, away from landfills and they use that to create energy that is a form of reducing carbon emissions, or CO2 equivalent emissions, we should say, because methane, methane is its own greenhouse gas, chemical processes. So collecting and destroying refrigerants that would have produces greenhouse gas emissions. One of the big ones that I was surprised is big is actually a household one. So this is cook stoves. So literally like people's ovens in their houses in developing communities, they will typically use a cook stove that uses dung or firewood as its fuel. So, you know, literally like just a thing in the middle of your kitchen that you're chucking firewood or dung into for cooking. Basically switching that to electric cookers first of all prevents deforestation for fuel. It can also reduce health risks from smoke. So switching out wood burning ovens, wood burning stoves for electric ones is seen as something that reduces carbon emissions and therefore can be used as an offset. And, and that is increasing. I think I read Cookstove's made up 15% of carbon offsetting.

Robbie Staniforth: Really? Wow, that's a totally new thing to me. There must be some complicated calculations going on in the background as to how much the electric oven is better than a cook stove.

James Piper: Yeah, it was completely new to me. I did not realise how much of the market that made up. And then finally that you've got things like carbon capture and storage. So from industrial processes, you're collecting up carbon, you're storing it or using it for energy. So all of those things could be used to create a carbon offset. Just to put it in perspective, to capture one tonne of CO2 emissions, you would have to grow about 50 trees for a year.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, so that could be a mature tree continuing to grow for a year. Is that what you're sort of saying?

James Piper: Yeah. Now this is where tree planting is complicated. So we, as ecosurity, we had our 20th anniversary, didn't we? In 2023. And to celebrate, we planted 20, 23 trees. And I said to our sustainability team, oh, we could say we're carbon offsetting with our own trees, wouldn't that be amazing? And our sustainability team was like, no, no, we can't do that. Because actually there's a number of reasons why you can't do it. First of all, you don't know that tree is going to survive.

Robbie Staniforth: So.

James Piper: So if you say I planted 20, 23 trees and only 2000 of them survive or 1800 of them survive, then you've got completely the wrong carbon calc.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: And also it takes a while for the tree to be like carbon neutral and producing more carbon than it's cost to plant it, grow it, all those kind of things, because obviously you're using equipment to plant. So trees are absorbing CO2, obviously when they're young, but the older the tree, the more carbon it absorbs and the better it is. So that early stage of tree planting actually is not that relevant. And you need to wait till much later in the tree's life before you can start carbon offsetting with it.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay. And if you, if you offset at the beginning, you've got no clue what the lifespan of that tree is going to be and whether it did or didn't make it into a carbon positive position.

James Piper: That's exactly it. And we use ecology to help with our carbon offsetting. I did actually reach out to Ecology for this section. I didn't give them much notice, so I'm not surprised they haven't come back. But, but I think if we do hear back, I will add to this because Ecology, a really interesting company, doing a lot of great work in carbon offsetting, but they don't recommend tree planting for exactly this reason. So we planted this trees and we haven't, you know, we haven't claimed that anywhere. So how much actually is a carbon credit? The average in 2023 was about $7 per tonne. So this stuff, I think that's really cheap a tonne.

Robbie Staniforth: Seems a lot, doesn't it, for only $7.

James Piper: 50 trees. Yeah. Grain for a year, it could. There was a forecast, a view that it could be as high as 25 to $30 by 2030, which I think is probably more where it needs to be. And they felt that would be due to increased demand. So more and more companies saying we want a carbon offset would drive up the price and it might get 25 to $30. That is definitely not what's happening at the moment. And I'll explain why in A second. But bear in mind that we're talking about the average here. And I did find a report from the World bank that said prices could start from $1

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James Piper: and go as high as $119.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay. What, as in there's good ones and there's bad ones?

James Piper: It's based on quality, what the offset is actually doing. Absolutely. But they did say this World bank report that over half of credits are $10 or less. So carbon offsetting all sounds good in principle. You're a polluter, you're putting bad stuff on the market or you're creating carbon emissions. You say, well, actually I want to do something good somewhere else to offset what I've done in principle. That sounds good. It has become clear over the years that that comes with a number of problems. So I've broken this down into good, bad, ugly. So what's the good stuff to do with carbon offsetting? What's the bad stuff? And then for ugly, we'll just go into some examples where the market has turned.

Robbie Staniforth: Really?

James Piper: Okay, in terms of the good. We're funnelling billions of pounds into projects to cut carbon emissions.

Robbie Staniforth: Wow, that's a lot of cash.

James Piper: It is a lot of cash. The voluntary carbon market peaked at about $2 billion in 2021, according to Ecosystem Marketplace. Now, we're going to come back to this because why did it Peak in 2021 is one of the questions. We'll come back to this, but it is not peaking now, it is worth saying. So first thing is loads of money going to places that need loads of money. That's got to be good. Companies have to do data and ultimately be exposed to how bad they are. You know, you can't carbon offset unless you know how much to offset. So when Brewdog say we're the first carbon negative brewery, they have to know how much carbon they're using in the first place to make sure they are. And it's likely that we'll enter the boardroom. It's likely a report saying, this is how much carbon you're using. We'll enter the boardroom and directors will see it and they might go, oh, my goodness, why are we so bad compared to every everyone else? So there is some logic to that. Do you remember we used to talk about the Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme?

Robbie Staniforth: Yes, yeah, yeah, I remember. We helped some companies with it, didn't we, to try work out what their opportunities to save energy was.

James Piper: Exactly. It was a very weird piece of legislation. I'm going completely off on a tangent, but it's like It's a good example where all the legislation required you to do was get a report saying how you could save energy. So you didn't actually have to do anything, you just had to get a professional to come in and say, if you switch to all these light bulbs, to LED light bulbs, you'd save £1,000.

Robbie Staniforth: Exactly.

James Piper: And you had to get it signed by a director. And the logic was, if a director signing a report that says you could save 20 grand, they are just going to go, guys, can we just implement all this?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: So the legislation was just get a report and get it signed by a director.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. To be able to see what the opportunity was and then hopefully that would speak for itself and you'd go on to implement things. And I think things were then implemented. But it was a very strange way to go about it.

James Piper: Yeah. And it's sort of the same as this. You do a report on carbon and you start asking questions about how you can produce that and why it's so high. So not necessarily a bad thing, I don't think, to have to do that data. And I guess one of the biggest pros for me of carbon offsetting is you can do something now. And I can speak for eco surety here, because we are working super hard to be net zero by 2030, which, by the way, is really, really, really challenging. And we'll do an episode on that, I think. Talk about net zero very different. We are working really hard to be net zero by 2030, but carbon offsetting gives us an opportunity to do something now. So we've got the data because we know how much carbon we're using because we need it for net zero. And then you get that data and you go, I want to do something now, I don't want to wait till 2030. And so you reach out to a company like Ecology and you say, right, can you get me some, you know, carbon offsetting that's high quality and it means we can do something now.

Robbie Staniforth: You're sort of not always in charge of your own emissions. You know, there's certain parts of your calculation of how carbon efficient your company is that you're not in control of. Whereas actually finding one of these schemes and saying, look, I can take this direct action like you're talking about and do something now, just speeds things up and I suppose heightens the fact that we do need to get to a position where we're valuing carbon a lot more, or carbon CO2 equivalent a lot more than we currently do in society.

James Piper: Completely agree. But it's a good example of like doing something now versus leaving it till 2030.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. And I don't think coming back to our greenwashing episode a few weeks ago, it's about are you taking the correct action and doing the right thing? And that's ultimately what the activity is rather than, look, I don't need to change anything else in my business's operations because I paid for a few credits over there or a few people to have a different stove in a country miles away.

James Piper: Exactly. I guess the biggest bad thing, it means companies

00:15:00

James Piper: don't have to make meaningful change, you know, so to meet climate goals, CO2 emitted needs to equal what is absorbed. You know, whatever we're emitting into the atmosphere, we need to counter with absorption. If you go, okay, my company is going to continue emitting whatever I want, but somewhere else I will pay to have some CO2 absorbed. You are still doing the bad thing in the first place. And eventually we've run out of carbon offsetting and we've just got loads and loads of companies polluting and no way of absorbing the CO2 they're polluting. So unless you reduce your CO2 that you're emitting, we'll never get to meeting the climate goals. Yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: And the big picture is that it's about a mass balance equation across the whole of the planet rather than quite often people in the developed world, the sort of global north continuing to do whatever they normally do to use up lots of carbon and then finding niche schemes and projects in the global south to try and offset what they're doing. It's not going to balance across the whole of the planet.

James Piper: And that's why for me, like ecosurity carbon offsetting now, but working towards net zero works really well because you have both. It's like I'm working to be net zero. That means I'm making meaningful action. I'm reducing my carbon significantly at the same time I'm offsetting. If you do both, you can sort of make it work because you are reducing your carbon alongside your offsetting. If you're just offsetting as some of the big companies are, then you're not really making any meaningful difference.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. The other thing I would say, probably not ugly, but it's definitely in this bad section. Is there's that because of these credits, is it you as an individual who needs to be offsetting your activities or businesses that should be, or businesses doing it on behalf of you as an individual? The whole water gets quite muddied in terms of who gets what Credits and what activities should you be looking to offset? Because I know, you know, having previously ticked the box because frankly it was only paying 1% more on my flight or whatever, or less than in some cases it seems a worthwhile thing. But what you don't want is for people then to think, oh, I can just fly wherever I want a ticker box, pay 1% more and I can sleep well at night.

James Piper: Exactly. And I'm calling that the moral offset. You know, this, like I have offset it so I can now do more. And that definitely happens in companies where they go, oh, if we offset them, we can do, then we can produce more carbon. So, you know, that's definitely a bad thing. Most carbon offsets don't actually reduce emissions, so they might be projects that were going to be built anyway. So you already were planning on building your solar farm. Oh, wow, suddenly I can get some carbon offsetting from it. Well, you were doing it anyway. You were doing it for commercial and financial reasons. And one of the things that's quite bad is there's different methodologies by different companies. We've sort of touched on this in the value of the carbon offset, you know, the fact that it can range from $1 to $120. Different methodologies mean not every carbon credit is created equally. And it's sometimes difficult to know whether you've got a good one or a bad one. Yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: And I suppose that the only way that the average person could try and work that out is by how much they pay to offset a tonne. But then that means you could just sort of charge more and make out like it's a good one, when actually it's not. You know, there's a lot of, what's the word? Mystery behind how is that credit actually made up?

James Piper: It's definitely a two sided coin. You can see how supporters of the industry feel that carbon offsetting provides essential funding and how critics can argue that it is just elaborate greenwashing. Both sides of that coin are true, depending on how you look at it. And it's worth noting that in 2022 everything was looking good for the carbon market. There were lots of initiatives coming to market that were boosting credibility. I found one report that said it was estimated the market could be worth 250 billion by 2050. Bear in mind it was 2 in 2022. And then everything crumbled. Companies were accused of greenwashing that led major organisations to step back from buying carbon credits. So let's talk about what caused this. A section I am referring to as the ugly. So in January 2023 there was a report by the Guardian on carbon credits that were verified by Vera. So that's V E R R A.

Robbie Staniforth: Funnily enough, Vera got in contact with us once. Yes, in the early 2020. So maybe it was just before this crash

00:20:00

Robbie Staniforth: and they were exploring whether we could get carbon credits by. By we, I mean in my role as eco surety on the Flexible Plastic Fund, because it was collecting plastic, recycling plastic and then saying, oh well, there's got to be a carbon benefit to not using new plastic. And had a couple of conversations with them and was like, no, this sounds sort of spurious and it never went any further.

James Piper: Interesting. So there was this investigation by The Guardian in January 2023 and this investigation found that more than 90% of their forestry credits did not represent real emissions reductions, a term they referred to as phantom credits. So Vera are based in Washington D.C. and from what I can tell they had issued more than 1 billion carbon credits at this point. And I think I read that they made up three quarters of the voluntary carbon market.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, wow.

James Piper: So they were massive. Massive, yeah, absolutely massive. Essentially what happened is they'd inflated the impact of those carbon credits so 94% of the credits should not have been approved. The threat to forests have been overstated by 400% and credits from 21 of 29 projects had no environmental benefit. And I read lots of reports about this, you know, the kind of thing. So for example, what people are doing is they're buying up a piece of land and saying, you know, these trees were going to be cut down on this land and by buying it I've saved it and then therefore I've saved it. Which means that carbon should now be part of the carbon credit scheme. And there's sometimes that land wasn't going to be deforested and you've done nothing. And that's that kind of threat to forest being overstated by 400%. It is that kind of thing. And so there was this investigation. Companies like Gucci, Salesforce, Shell, EasyJet, Leon, the band Pearl Jam were among the dozens of companies and organisations who were buying these offsets. And it is worth noting that Vera, who are still very much in business today, disputed these claims. You know, they said, look, the way they've done this, the studies they've done are wrong. So they definitely disputed them, but unfortunately the damage was done in the market. It caused a lot of major companies to go, hang on, I'm paying some money to offset my carbon. And now I'm getting bad press for it. I might as well not pay the money because I don't want the risk of there being bad press.

Robbie Staniforth: Well, it definitely sounds very sort of questionable, doesn't it? Like assuming forest is going to be cut down, that land is going to be used up for some high carbon intensive activity and then saying, no, no it's not, we're just going to leave it fallow. It doesn't quite sound right, does it, as a positive activity we should be doing those things anyway, not paying for them to happen through a carbon offset.

James Piper: I completely agree. And it wasn't the end of the bad news. More recently, in July 2023, there was a study which estimated only 12% of all credits constituted real emissions reductions. And cook stoves, which I mentioned make up 15% of the market, was overstating climate benefit by a thousand percent.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh no. Wow. So that's why that obviously someone somewhere did a clever calculation, didn't they? And then everyone thought, yeah, cook stoves is where it's at, let's go implement loads of that. Because you can, it washes its own face and we can get these carbon credits as a consequence.

James Piper: Yeah, basically it's really messy. And when money is involved and overstating carbon claims means you get more money because you have more credits to sell. I think we can all guess why this is happening.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: So I guess it's no surprise that companies did not want to be accused of greenwash. The market shrank. It went down from that high of around $2 billion in 2021 to about 700 million in 2023. So that's again according to Ecosystem Marketplace. And in terms of the amounts traded in that time, so the number of credits, it fell from 5 tonnes to just over 100 million tonnes.

Robbie Staniforth: Wow. Okay. So it has shrunk significantly a quarter of the size it was.

James Piper: Absolutely. And as I said, like, I have reached out to ecology who I know do some good work in this space. We, we have used them. They're a Bristol based carbon trading company. There will be others who are doing really good work in this space, possibly including Vera. You know, they probably, I suspect, learned a lot from this Guardian report. Thought actually we need to be more accurate. So, you know, I definitely don't want to discredit anyone.

Robbie Staniforth: Discarbon credit.

James Piper: Discarbon. The joke's better. I don't want to discarn credit anyone and I certainly want to, you know, be fair. So if any companies listening who does carbon offsetting and wants to, you know, counter some of this or discuss it. We'd be very happy to do that. And as I said, I'm sure I'll hear back from Ecology very

00:25:00

James Piper: shortly and I will build on this in our editions and corrections. Maybe we'll do an interview in the future. One thing I have noticed is that AI does seem to be driving the market back up again.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, we did talk about how much carbon was used, didn't we, when we were searching using AI?

James Piper: We did. And a lot of these companies have committed to be carbon negative and suddenly they're finding that their carbon emissions are significantly increasing because we're all using them more. And so Microsoft have built a huge quantity of credits just in the last few months. So from what I could see, this included over 3 1/2 million carbon credits in January in a deal with regreen. So that's January 25th, 1.4 million tonnes from Living Carbon, one and a half million tonnes from Chestnut Carbon. And I found an article from May 2025 where Microsoft were buying 18 million credits from Rubicon Carbon which is one of the largest single agreements ever made. So I suspect this market might rebound. I suspect actually with a lot of these tech companies getting involved and needing to carbon offset, they will drive the market back up again.

Robbie Staniforth: Well, in a way, with some of these exposes, maybe that means that the market cleans up its act, so to speak, and that the carbon credits are issued against sort of more genuine activities.

James Piper: Yeah. So let's talk about Brewdog because that's how it's all started. They, it said on my beer we are the world's first carbon negative brewery. And I wanted to look into that. Now it turns out they've actually stopped doing this. So what they were doing is taking their all their emissions. So we call those Scope one, two and three. We don't really have time to go into that. We'll talk about that on another day. But basically all their emissions of them and their suppliers and what they were doing is working out all their emissions with the help of Mike Berners Lee I think, and timesing it by two. So they were doubling, they were carbon offsetting, double their operations and emissions, which is really, really impressive. But in their 2024 sustainability report they announced they were stopping it.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay.

James Piper: And they have been funding forestry management, mangrove restoration, tree planting. But they decided that the market had become unsustainable and they stated that there had been a flood of low quality schemes that are dirt ch but where the carbon benefit is highly questionable and maybe even non existent.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh dear.

James Piper: I Think it was partly a reputation decision, sort of linked to everything we've discussed today. I also think it was a financial one. I mean, they did say it's got more and more expensive. Now I didn't agree with them on that because from what I can see the average price is decreasing because the demand isn't there. But. But that's what they said. And they were getting in trouble with the asa. And what does the ASA stand for, Robbie again?

Robbie Staniforth: Advertising Standards Authority.

James Piper: You sure? Okay, we'll talk about that in a second. That actually upheld two complaints against them for claiming they were carbon negative when it was actually offsetting. So they were getting in trouble with the asa. They thought, well, this isn't worth it, you know, we're spending all this money and people are just interrogating us. So they said they're now instead focusing on their own forest, which is definitely a story for another day. And they did say they would phase out the labelling. I did wonder why the box that I bought last week, which at its earliest I think based on expiry date was brewed in January 25, still had it printed on. I do. There is just this theme we sort of touched note of Alice, that companies do have a tendency to print very quickly positive news and very, very slowly remove that positive news from their packaging. They do. It is funny how easy it is to change a printing press when you've got good news. So what do we think, Robbie? I mean, it's a tricky one, isn't it? It is interesting that there's a market that funds things. But as always, we would urge people not to overblow claims. And I don't want to blow our own trumpet too much because I feel like we've done that a little bit. But I love what Eco Surety does in this space. You know, focus on Net zero and how to get there and use carbon offsetting as something you could do now, but without taking your eye off that destination. Additions and corrections. So, Robbie, in episode eight, we're going all the way back to episode eight, we talked about receipts.

Robbie Staniforth: Ah yes, I remember. Scratch them and if a mark appears, it's not recyclable.

James Piper: That's it. Well, I was in Sainsbury's the other day and I just noticed that they've started this thing where you have to take your receipt and scan it on the way out to open the barrier, you know, at the self service checkout.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, yeah, I've done it at ikea.

James Piper: Yeah, IKEA started doing it, didn't they? Yeah, I just wanted to observe how frustrating that is. I live in a world where I don't want a receipt. Yeah, don't make me have one to leave the store. I don't want to be locked in. So 11.2 billion receipts are used a

00:30:00

James Piper: year. Let's not, you know, let's not do this.

Robbie Staniforth: Come on, guys, don't make us take a receipt. I've got another addition. I got a great email from someone who operates one of these Smurfs material recycling facility. That's a callback to earlier episodes. And he really loved our new podcast Tile because he claimed that we were advocating for all recycling to be collected together. That is being showered onto our umbrella and then bouncing off into two separate bins, so being sorted at a later date. Just a clarification to that listener who emailed in, our artwork is in no way an endorsement of a particular collection methodology. Some are great when you collect it co mingled. Some are great when you do source segregation. We're remaining agnostic on that topic.

James Piper: Just for clarity, I'm not. I love a curbside saw. That's my preferred. And last week I think I said we hadn't had any corrections for a couple of weeks. So I was absolutely delighted when Robbie's dad emailed. You may have noticed a little bit earlier, we chuckled when I asked Robbie for the definition of asa. And that is because Robbie's dad emailed me. So this was during episode 46. Now, I have mentioned this email to a few people who also went, oh, yeah, that really wound me up.

Robbie Staniforth: That really wound me up as well. Yeah.

James Piper: So I think quite a few people were really annoyed that you kept saying Advertising Standards Agency as opposed to Advertising Standards Authority. And I sort of listened back to it. I knew you'd done it. I thought, I've got no way of fixing this. I'll just put it out there. But there is a large portion of our listeners who got very annoyed at you. So let me read your dad's message to the. To our listeners, I was prepared to accept the first mention of Advertising Standards Agency by your co presenter, Robert David Staniforth in your recent greenwashing episode as an honest mistake. However, given the second mention, a correction is in order as Robert David Staniforth is old enough to do better. It is a family tradition that full names are used when chastised. Is that true? That's a family tradition, apparently.

Robbie Staniforth: Apparently it must be. Yeah. I didn't quite know that was. That was vital. But then I. We subsequently talked about this. Didn't we. And someone else said, yeah, no, James corrected you and then you kept using it anyway, so I haven't listened back to it. But apologies. I do appreciate it is advertising standards authority, not agency apologies, dad.

James Piper: I'm sure he accepts it. Who knows? And I'm just acknowledging we've had lots of messages about this Starbucks cup. You know, you did the news, Robbie, you said, hey, you know, Starbucks have this new cup. I said I thought it was pretty good because I'd spoken to some recyclers. We have had a. A lot of messages from people asking us if that's true and is it actually good. And so luckily the cup manufacturers who are based over in Wales, reached out to me to say if I ever wanted to visit, they would be happy to accept us. So I'm going to try and see them next week.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, great.

James Piper: If you want to come, we can both go.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, let's find a time in the diary and we'll work out whether this Starbucks cup really is that great.

James Piper: I've got my list of questions ready, guys, and I'm going over. So in the next couple of episodes, you'll hear me doing additions and corrections of this Starbucks cup and we'll get into the detail that everyone's been asking about. As always, we'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Eco Surety, who carbon offset and are working towards net 00 by 2030 and are also on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary packaging. They help brands navigate the tricky world of extended producer responsibility. But that is not all. They also collaborate on some incredible recycling projects and consumer awareness campaigns for those tough to recycle materials. If you're an organisation looking to make smarter packaging choices, check them out@ecosurity.com and as promised at the beginning of the episode, it is time for the best review we have and will ever receive.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, so we've got Robbie's review of the week. It is an absolute cracker from Ethel42. And honestly, we've spent so much time chuckling about this. I hope you enjoy it too. Top line, not for everyone, but some of us will love it. And this is a four star review on Apple. There are some things that I'll happily recommend to everyone I meet safe in the knowledge that all sane people will love it. This is not one of those things. Unashamedly nerdy dives into the detail of a supremely unglamorous everyday industry. James makes terrible dad jokes and Robbie has a laugh that will make some people want to rip their Ears off.

James Piper: Let's pause there for a

00:35:00

James Piper: moment. Say, guys, I have headphones on. It's straight into my ears every week, that laugh GRATING this is not all.

Robbie Staniforth: I'm only halfway through. So Robbie has a laugh that will make some people want to rip their ears off. But I love it. I have even grown an affection for Robbie's laugh. If anything, I wish it was a bit more nerdy and had more scientific, rigorous. But for now, it brightens up my week when it drops on my podcast feed. If you have an interest in what happens to your rubbish once you put the bins out and a gap in your life for the scintillatingly dull, then give this a go. You might love it too.

James Piper: When we decided to do Robbie's review of the week, I never thought we'd get a review that says, Robbie's laugh makes me want to rip my ears off.

Robbie Staniforth: There's so many good bits in it. Unashamedly nerdy, scintillatingly dull. But it's a four star review and it seems like they really love it.

James Piper: Yeah, we'll take it. Thank you, Ethel. So the question is, and this is the poll for this week, so if you're on Spotify, answer this poll. Have my dad jokes got worse since I actually became a dad? So this is since episode 21. Has anyone noticed a big difference between the the pre 21 James and the post 21 James? That'll be on Spotify. If you wish to address that poll, you can follow us at Rubbish Podcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcastmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. Also join our discord. It's the easiest way to engage with us and listeners of a show. The link to all those things is in our show notes, as is the link to our petition, which is about banning the word compostable on dog poo bags, which can't be composted. So please take a second to go and sign that so we can start sending that off to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Robbie Staniforth: Yes, you forgot now.

James Piper: I had to check. I'm not sure. I've got so confused.

Robbie Staniforth: Advertising Standards Authority. I'll never make the mistake again, dad.

James Piper: Very good. And feel free to leave us a review. And look, if you think I'll just leave them a review where I talk about ripping ears off, please don't, because Apple doesn't know we're joking about this. So please leave us nice reviews, not jokey ones. I don't think Ethel's is a joke, but let's let's not all start this trend of like, let's talk about how bad the podcast is, but give them five stars.

Robbie Staniforth: No, I think the take home point is put as much effort into your review as clearly Ethel did. It was absolutely brilliant.

James Piper: And do you know, Robbie, and this is something I haven't actually talked about in the podcast before. Before Eco Surety, I actually worked at a recycling facility. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I quit my job there. I. I can't believe I threw it all away. That's for you, Ethel. That is for you. Rubbish or not. So we had Ian on Discord ask about Ozempic pens. This is a big topic, isn't it?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, I think so, yeah. This is the kind of weight loss drug, isn't it?

James Piper: Yeah, very obviously there's lots of different brands, but Ozempic is the one that seems to get the news and I think Wegovy is the other one.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, that's a brand name, is it? Ozempic? I didn't even know. I thought that was the material.

James Piper: Stephanie. A brand name.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, it's a brand name.

James Piper: So, Robbie, what do you think? Rubbish or not?

Robbie Staniforth: I think rubbish, isn't it? I mean, it's just. The pen's just a needle as far as I can see.

James Piper: I think in the main it is rubbish. I actually found an article from businesswaste.co.uk that predicted 6 million Ozempic pens might be heading to incineration or landfill each year, which is nearly 100 tonnes of plastic. So, yeah, as you say, the pens contain needles and needles need to go in a sharp spin. I can't stress this enough. It is illegal to put needles in your general waste bin, is that right?

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, that's news to me. I mean, it totally makes sense but. Glad you're doing the research on this.

James Piper: Yeah, I think it's the Environmental act that says you mustn't do that. And so what you need to do is take the needle out of the pen and put that in a sharp spin. Now you can just buy a sharps bin on Amazon or wherever you get your sharp spins from. It's a bit different to like wherever you get your books from, isn't it? You could just buy a sharp spin anywhere, really. Just look them up online or most pharmacies GPS will have one, all those kind of things. So you can actually just take that somewhere and take the sharp bit out the plastic casing. I think you did find an opportunity to recycle it, didn't you, Robbie?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, I did. So this Scheme is Pen Cycle at Boots and it's funded by Novo Nordisk, which is one of these big global companies that make Ozempic pens and others. It operates at Boots. So you can take it back to a Boots pharmacy through this pen cycle scheme. But unfortunately you need to remove the needle, so you've got to dispose of it in whatever that normal

00:40:00

Robbie Staniforth: way is that you just mentioned.

James Piper: And this is what they said on the website. They just said, remove the needle and dispose of it in your normal way.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, what? That's literally a quote.

James Piper: I was like, what are you talking. What does that mean? You know, and I think this is one of the challenges. What Ozempic has done is, you know, before people would use pens with needles in if they had diabetes and so they would learn from a very early age what to do with the sharps and the pens.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, yeah.

James Piper: Now as MPIC and we go via starting to come into the mainstream, it's not coming with that education. So these companies are like putting on their websites, remove the needle and dispose of it in your normal way. Because they think they're communicating to someone who's been using an insulin pen since childhood.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, fine.

James Piper: What they're actually doing is talking to someone who's come into a pen at like 40, 45, who has no idea what to do with the sharp.

Robbie Staniforth: What the normal way is. Yeah.

James Piper: So the normal way is find a sharp spin or buy one.

Robbie Staniforth: But then the pen that's left, the plastic casing can be done, dropped into this return box in these pharmacies or there's also a postback scheme too. And then that plastic goes and is recycled.

James Piper: Yeah, absolutely. I had a look at Bristol to see how I would get a sharps bin collected. And they do arrange free collections of sharps waste. You just have to fill in a form and the sharps bin are sent for incineration. They have to be incinerated at quite a high heat, I think. So they are sent off specially. Quick search on Reddit on this shows people have no idea what they're doing. So just like a. It was a Reddit of, you know, what should I do with my old Ozempic pens? And I had a look, you know, on Reddit they have like upvoting, so you can sort of tell what people like and don't like. So top comment, they go in the trash. Upvoted by three people. Someone then responded to that with the correct answer, as in our answer here, remove the sharp, put it in the pen cycle bin or post it back. That was downvoted by three people.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, God.

James Piper: And then the original poster responded saying the pens do not need to go in a sharps container and that was upvoted by six people. So we're competing with people who think they just belong in the trash.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay, fine.

James Piper: So I do think this is bad. As I said, I think pre filled pens used to be used by a minority of people with genuine need for them. And now we have a product that in my view is similar to disposable vapes. It's extremely complicated to recycle and is becoming mainstream and the general public do not know what to do with it. So if you're using Ozempic or Wegovy, then make sure you dispose of it in the correct way. And if you know someone who is, remind them that it is illegal to put their needles in the rubbish bin. Rubbish news. This is my opportunity just to rant about Bristol a little bit because North Somerset are introducing flexible plastic collection and recycling and at the same time they are introducing three weekly general waste collections.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, very good.

James Piper: Oh, I'm so jealous. I genuinely am so jealous. All I want for Bristol is three weekly bin collections and flexible plastic collection and recycling. That would be so good. So North Somerset said moving to three weekly general waste would help them cut costs and improve recycling rates.

Robbie Staniforth: True.

James Piper: To make this palatable, as I said, they've introduced soft and flexible plastic recycling at the same time. I quite liked that. Everywhere else, I think that has rolled out flexible plastic recycling. Correct me if I'm wrong, they provide like a roll of bags to the household and say, use these plastic bags.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, most of them do. There was some trialling with not doing it, but it was generally seen as better to provide a bag.

James Piper: But North Somerset are not doing that. They're saying use an existing bread bag or carry a bag to contain everything. And for me that makes so much sense. That's what I do at home. Last year, North Somerset Council estimated the black bin contained nearly 20% recyclable material and 27% food waste. So there's a hu huge opportunity to increase recycling and food if you reduce the general waste frequency. The reason I'm jealous, and by the way, for those not in the uk, North Somerset is next to Bristol. The reason I'm jealous is I just don't think they did a consultation. They just did it. Yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: They just use the experts to do the right thing. Yeah.

James Piper: Oh, my goodness. In Bristol we've got consultation that's been sort of politically hijacked. It's Become a political divide now and everything's just so slow. So, you know, I am now surrounded by cities and counties that have gone to three weekly bin collections. I think we've got Somerset, East Devon, Mid Devon, North Somerset now and South Gloucestershire's just been announced. Have gone to three weekly general collections. I mean, that's almost everyone.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, we're surrounded by it. So my news this week was not quite global, but at least between two nations of the uk, so a bit further out than Bristol. And that's a headline that's been circulating over the last week or two, that Scotland's waste will be trucked to England.

James Piper: Oh, yes.

Robbie Staniforth: This is basically because

00:45:00

Robbie Staniforth: of a landfill ban on biodegradable municipal waste. So this kind of includes the kind of black bag general waste, things like wood, paper, textiles, food. And it's coming in on December 31, 2025. And I remember talking about this at conferences in Scotland years ago and I went back and looked at it and originally the ban was cited for 2021, but because of COVID and various other things, there's been a delay of four or five years. But in the meantime, they haven't built any energy from waste facilities or got more of that waste into a recycling system. And it means that they've got a lot more waste than what they can deal with. There's still inert material allowed in their landfills, things like rubble and ash, but they don't have their own energy from waste plants. So that waste is going to be trucked down to England to be dealt with. So David Balmer, who's a waste expert from ERS Remediation, said, you're looking at the equivalent of 80 to 100 trucks minimum, running seven days a week to take this material to a facility in England or abroad. So it's a huge amount of waste that they don't have a solution to. So, good forward thinking about banning biodegradable waste going into landfill. It's an environmentally negative practise, but you then need to find out your own solution rather than just look elsewhere for it. So this is temporary and apparently there's plans for new incinerators over the next few years, but currently there's only a handful of those incinerators. And it just made me laugh this because any football fans will know that England have been sending their old rubbish up to Scotland for years and now Scotland are getting their own back.

James Piper: Rubbish question. So someone was asking on Instagram, I think it was from someone called Passion for Pass Jack, who's got lots of Passion for packaging. And they were asking whether we need to remove the security tag on packaging. So, you know, sometimes you buy like, I don't know, something expensive, like a pack of bacon. It's got that little metal square on it that would go off if you walked past the security scanner as you left. So I was pretty confident you didn't need to remove this, but I wasn't sure. And I was going to reach out to a load of recyclers. And then I was lucky enough to get invited to Bristol Waste New Smurf just this week, actually. And I did not expect this to answer my question, but I was stood at the conveyor belt where they manually sort, and I saw one whiz past me, a security tag.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, that's lucky.

James Piper: Yeah. So I quickly pointed at it and said to the person who was chaperoning me, is that allowed? You know, does that need removing? And they said, no, it'll get removed as part of the process. So I thought, this is great. This is investigative journalism again.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, well done. I'm very fortuitous. So. But basically, it. Because it's a sticker, other sticker type things are removed in the washing process. That's what they're saying. It's just think of it as a sticker. It gets.

James Piper: Exactly, yeah. We don't need to worry too much about it. It'll come off in the process. I think they are stuck a lot stickier than stickers, but apparently not too much of a problem.

Robbie Staniforth: It's a sticky sticker, but it's fine.

James Piper: And do you know, Robbie, when I was at Bristol Waste, I spoke to a guy who was a can crusher. That was his job.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, wow.

James Piper: Yeah. I asked him what he thought of his job and he said it was so depressing. Hey, Ethel. So finally, residual rubbish. This is something that has happened to us this week that has made us laugh or cry. I was at a Costa Express machine coming back on the Eurostar, coming back from France, and I was at a Costa Express machine and the person in front of me got their drink, they got a coffee and they came back and said, oh, I just need to grab a stirrer, and proceeded to grab a paper straw instead because they were just, like, not paying attention. I then watched them just stir their hot coffee with a paper straw.

Robbie Staniforth: Did it disintegrate?

James Piper: Like, mush started disintegrating. And I was like. All I was thinking the whole time was, why the h*** do these Costa Express machines have straws? And I think it's because they serve Iced drinks.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, it must be, surely.

James Piper: I think so, but. And I must admit, the logos are not obvious. I don't know if anyone. If you go and look at a Costa Express machine, they've got like a. The logo for the stirrer looks like a fork, it's got like three prongs. It's not obvious, it's a stirrer. So I was just thinking, I wonder how many paper straws are used for the stirring purposes of your hot coffee.

Robbie Staniforth: And people are already fuming about these

00:50:00

Robbie Staniforth: paper straws when they're used for their normal purpose to be stirring hot coffee with it. It's not the one.

James Piper: That's how you're going to get PFAs. Don't do that.

Robbie Staniforth: And the thing that made me laugh this week at myself, not for the first time, it must be said, I was at a local festival at a city farm in Bristol, quite near my house, and I literally spent, I don't know, maybe it was about 20 minutes to half an hour eyeballing the bins because I wanted to get a great shot of their source, segregated recycling. But people were sort of sat around them. So I didn't really want to be taking a photo of people around because, I mean, maybe they didn't want to be in my photo, but also they would be asking me, why the h*** are you taking photos of these bins? So I was chatting and listening to some music, but I was always looking over my friend's shoulder as to when the. The. The waves would clear, the hordes of people would clear. So I could get a great photo of these bins at St Werburg City Farm. It was brilliant. Cans, glass, plastic bottles, food waste. Huge. Kind of like tonne bag bins. And it just made me think, I really, really am that sad.

James Piper: That's life. Taking photos of bins. That's what we do. As to all the people on Discord, which is a lovely way to remind people to sign up for Discord. The link is in our show notes and as always, you can use the link in our show notes to get in contact with us. You can email talkingbrubbishpodcastmail.com you can WhatsApp us or you can follow us on social media. ObBishPodcast. Please rem to sign our petition and everything we have discussed today is on our link tree. So thank you so much to everyone for listening. Thanks for another great week. Next week is episode 50. Robbie.

Robbie Staniforth: Whoa.

James Piper: A milestone.

Robbie Staniforth: Huge milestone. Can't wait to speak to Mike. It's going to be great.

James Piper: Yeah. And before we go, Robin, one thing I really want to start doing is a business that helps recycle chewing gum.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, yeah, that's really. I mean, recycle it, though. Yeah. Okay.

James Piper: Yeah, I'm having a hard time getting off the ground. One last one for you, Ethel. I hope you enjoyed today's episodes. These are true dad jokes. See you next Bing Day. Bye.

Robbie Staniforth: Bye.

00:52:28