64. Why is recycling so hard in America?

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Howdy y'all! Welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast delving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one-sided stories. In this special American edition, we will discuss recycling in the US of A. Our red solo cups rubbish or not, and I have a question about the definition of littering. I'm James Piper, author of the rubbish book, and I'm joined by Robbie Stanaforth, my far from rubbish friend. Good morning, Robbie. Hey James. Hello, we're back on the same time zone.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah, absolutely. Not the normal time zone, though. No, we're still in Boston. Like we've had the best week, haven't we? It's been amazing. Oh, it's been so fun. We gave two talks at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition about extended producer responsibility and all about flexible plastics and all of those collections. Lots of stuff that's bread and butter to us from the podcast. Yeah, and a big crowd, like 600 people. It was incredible.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Normally we're just talking to ourselves and then putting it out there, and lots of people listen to it, but I don't have to think about that. Whereas when I'm sat in front of them all, I definitely have to think about how many people are there.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Looking at their faces, looking up at you, saying, Are these British guys gonna be entertaining? Yeah, which I think you know, we were. We played Ethel's review, and it went down an absolute storm for these 600 people, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I have no idea who Ethel is, and she has no idea, presumably, of the impact she's having on the podcast. I mean, she must still be listening, actually. Maybe she does. So, Ethel, if you're listening, get in contact. Make yourself known. You are having a big impact on our podcast, and we uh continue to roll out your your review, which went to 600 people in America this week. That's great. But that's why we thought we'd do an American special, because we've heard so much that's worth sharing, and so much that we can kind of contrast to the UK system. So we thought it'd be worth doing that. We've got loads of notes, so we we need to crack on with it. Trash talk. So, as we said, we've been in Boston. I think I I can't remember if I mentioned it last week or not. It's been it's been a long week. Um, but I've been here, I've been here for a couple of weeks on holiday with my with Ellie and our son, and we've sort of travelled up to Portland and down to Cape Cod. We've had a really, really amazing holiday, but we have landed in Boston for this event, and uh oh, it's a lovely city, isn't it? I mean, I've been here before just a couple of times, but not for a long period of time like I have here.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, no, it's amazing. And we're staying out in South Boston. And did you know that Boston was built on landfill? I could not believe it when I found out this thing. Really? Yeah, absolutely. In the 19th and 20th century, they basically reclaimed the land. It was all sort of like marsh and bog or whatever, and they decided lots of sand and gravel, but also back then there was things like packaging, glass bottles will have gone into the infill that created this whole area that we're recording this podcast from. So totally topical and on brand, and you would not know it was a landfill site from uh, or infill, you should say, from uh how beautiful the entire area is. It's so regenerated and amazing, this whole area of South Boston.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

I guess I feel having now done a week of this conference or a few days of this conference, I feel very mixed from a recycling perspective, though. The conference has been amazing. So uh, as Robbie said in the intro, this is the SPC conference, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which is how would you describe sustainable packaging coalition, Robbie?

SPEAKER_00 3:39

It's a not-for-profit event run by Green Blue, and they're basically trying to bring together stakeholders across America to make packaging more sustainable. And gosh, they got a big job in their hands.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Yeah, and it's just it feels so well put together, engaging speakers, really relevant topics, a real focus on EPR and flexible plastic, which is what we see in the UK. It just the reason I'm divided about it, the reason I'm frustrated by it is it does just feel different to the UK. It feels like there's sort of this willingness to just go, it's too hard, so let's not try and solve some of these things. And when we try and solve them, let's try and solve them in what I would consider to be quite a limited way. And so it's amazing that with they're talking about these problems and saying visa are a big deal. We need to solve flexible plastic, we need to get our heads around EPR. It's amazing, but the way they're doing it, and we'll try and describe this today with a few of the things we've heard, just feels like it's probably five years back from where we are in the UK. And I heard that consistently. I was speaking to people who were saying, I just heard the same thing five years ago, and we're just having the same conversation. So it does sometimes feel like that in the UK, but we do, I think, move things forward.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Yeah, no, agreed. And I think the complexity of America, you know, you've got to think of it as a continent because it's so vast, it's basically the states are like countries, uh, the way that they're governed, and just how big they are and different their challenges are, are like the Europe, the individual European nations. And that's probably why it's quite hard to see what solutions will work across the entirety of all of those 50 mini countries.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

So let me give you an example of where I think that was most prevalent, Robbie, that kind of 50 state issue, 50 country issue. Uh, one of the first talks I went to, one of the panelists said glass is really hard to recycle. It's like one of the easiest materials to recycle. Why is it so hard in America? Yeah, where is this going? Yeah. And now they actually in America they recycle about a third of glass, I think. Third of their glass. I think in the UK, we're at about 75%. And it's because in glass is just so heavy. And when you have to truck glass around, you know, every mile you travel, you're losing profit. And so if you're trying to make money out of it, having to truck it around lots of rural areas to one place in a country the size of America, then you're going to have a huge issue, right? And they just can't justify that shipping. Ellie and I actually went to look around Harvard uh when we got back to Boston just a few days ago. And the general bin had a picture of glass on it. It said, put your glass in here, no recycling of glass. And you're thinking, This is like a university campus. You'd feel like they could do something, but no. And the next comment on the panel was actually, I don't know companies who make money recycling glass. That was the next comment. And that's great. So I was messaging our team because I was like, guys, what what are the profit margins for glass versus others? And and um our procurement team came back to me to say glass recyclers typically make about 20% profit, whereas plastic is closer to 3%.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

So Yeah, there's definitely money in recycling glass in the UK, and for all of the ills of the UK system, it must be set up with PRNs and other things uh to be viable.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Let's come on to this 50 mini country state thing, but we'll do that in a second. I just wanted to highlight today. I think it's worth us focusing, similar to the conference on EPR and flexible plastics and the difference between the UK and the US. Uh, there was lots of interesting stats on things like recycled content that's also worth us covering. We'll just do that towards the end. And and we would like to do more of this. We really like tapping into some of this international stuff. So if anyone is from another country or experiences another country and thinks, wow, this is worth talking about, but some interesting things here, just get in contact, let us know what you've seen, and we can go and have a look at it and and dig into it and then report back. Um, we have a section on our Discord called International Observations. So if you want to go onto our Discord, just go to that subcategory and you'll be able to just put anything in there that you want us to look into. But if we start with the EPR, so extended producer responsibility, and we don't really we're definitely not gonna have time to go through the UK system. We're gonna spend time on the US one, but um, so make sure you've gone back and listened to those episodes. The um EPR episodes will be things like who's really paying for our recycling and is this the end of glass packaging? Those are the two that are really linked to EPR. Just going back to that 50 mini countries point, Robbie, because that is the most important bit. Each state is releasing EPR in their own time frame. And mini country is disingenuous because there's actually 10 states that have a larger land mass than the UK. Wow, okay. I mean, I can believe it. It's huge. That the UK is actually smaller than 10 states. So I can understand why this is difficult. And Alaska, which I think is the largest, is I think five times the UK size. Gosh, yeah, they're struggling to recycle glass, I can bet. I think it is fair to say that the states are very divided, and there is a big divide from what we've heard and what we've experienced between recycling ambition and politics. A lot of democratic states will lean more towards the recycling and environmental policy, and a lot of the Republican states will lean towards not environmental policies or not restricting companies, I guess is a better way of putting it. Just to give you an example, I was chatting to someone yesterday and I couldn't believe what he was telling me. I think it is true, that there are democratic states that have bans on plastic bags. Okay, that tracks. So that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

And there are Republican states that have bans on plastic bag bans. They banned a ban. I'm not making this up. They have banned the ban. And this is because of the way the US system works, some cities could ignore their state law. So some cities in Republican states could say, well, we don't agree with Texas's view that we should have plastic bags. So as a city within Texas, we're going to launch a ban on plastic bags. And so states have stopped cities being able to do that by literally creating legislation that bans bans. Isn't that mad? That's crazy. Gosh, I mean, that takes a lot of unpicking for sure. And this person I was speaking to actually lived in a Republican state and said his state had a ban on bans. So I'm pretty confident this is true. The challenge with EPR is that each state is launching one by one. And I think California, which is a third bigger than the UK, just in case you're interested, is the only state to have gone live. And there are currently seven states, I believe, kind of in process with the legislation. This is not like EPR like the UK, where it's like EPR's coming, start paying your bills, start getting registered. This is EPR's in California. What do we do about California? Oh, there's seven more coming. What do we do about those seven more? Oh, then we've got another, you know, 42 to think about, but let's not worry about those yet.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

And when it comes to like going live, it depends what your definition of going live is, doesn't it? It's like there's reporting coming in, there's uh legislation going through parliament, there's go live dates, when will the first bills hit? It's actually very, very complicated to get your head around what all of these states are doing. And you could just sense the kind of general air of panic and confusion among lots of the attendees. And these are people who work in the industry and are trying to get as close to it as possible, but to track it all just seems an absolute nightmare.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah, I think for me, I was trying to work out if you've got 50 states going live over a period of time, you know, it's going to take many years, and some will never do it. But let's imagine you had 50 laws kind of governing your country. So you are Coca-Cola selling product in California, Texas, Oregon, etc. etc. And you're like, okay, the rules in this state are this, and the rules in this state are this, and the rules in this state, and they're all different. Once you overlay those 50 circles, I do kind of think, well, what can you actually put put on the market? That was kind of my concern going into this conference. It was like, by the end of it, you might just have like an unprinted cardboard box that's the size of a shoe box or something, and that is the one thing you're all allowed to put on the market. And we'll be drip sipping our Coca-Cola from a cardboard box. Let's hope not. Yeah, but the thing that stops that happening, because there is something that stops that happening, is the graph of if you imagine this graph of like the earlier. So one axis is like time that you launch your EPR um laws, and the other axis is complexity and cost. And I think there is a strong argument to say the earlier you release your EPR laws in the US, the more draconian you're gonna be. You know, the ones at the end, the ones who are last are just gonna be like some form of tax or fee or something, but it they won't restrict any packaging. Whereas the first one, because they're like, I believe in EPR, I believe in environmental issues, I want to make this amazing, because so we're gonna go first, they're gonna put in the worst rules. And I guess that's where that there is some optimism that what I've described won't happen, because as long as you meet the California rules who have gone live, you are likely to meet everyone else's rules who come after you.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yeah, no, that's totally right. And I think what we're gonna see is that every each state will look at the previous state and see what worked, what was more difficult to implement, what slowed things down, and then make a decision. I think there's also a little bit of uh they they will all want to be slightly different from one another just so that the politics of the day and the politician of the day can celebrate some first state to do X. So it's gonna become an absolute jumble, I think.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

I spoke to someone who said the real difference at the moment with all the planned legislation was in aerosol cans. Oh, yeah. Um, I again, and I'm not sure about these numbers. The person I was speaking to said in one state it's one dollar per pound of aerosol cans, and in another it's ten cents. I I don't know if those numbers are accurate, it's really confusing using pound as a weight when that's our money. I don't know my pounds from my kilograms, to be honest. They can't be doing things in pounds, can they? But anyway, this is what this person told me. But I think we can assume that in one state aerosol cans are ten times more expensive than in another, because that is the number that's been given. But we can use that as a point to hypothesize, because if that's true, I guess there's a question of how will you decide how much you've sold in each state. Some of these brands sell to national distributors, national distributors don't really know kind of where it came from versus where it's selling. It's all gets a bit complicated in the US in terms of tracking a piece of packaging right to its point of sale just because of the size of it and the different states, the different jurisdictions. And someone was telling me this might lead to people starting to guess, you know, using population densities and things to try and work out how much packaging they sold in each state. And you start getting to a position where, but you could then start seeing fraud because someone could say, Well, I sold a lot more in Texas than I did previous year, which has no EPR law. I didn't sell very much in California, you know. Unfortunately, they don't like my drink anymore. And it starts becoming a bit of a fudge because each state is asking you to report and the states aren't talking to each other because it's not federal law. I can see this getting really complicated really fast. Yeah. And um I I raised this with someone yesterday who said it they said that's unlikely to be fair. They said, look, you know, these systems will talk to each other in all likelihood, and fraud will be harder, but I still believe it could happen. But what he did say was recycle it is more likely to move to countries that have higher EPR bills. So what we might suddenly see is recycling that has been collected in Texas being shipped to California to get additional money from its EPR law. And now we're gonna massively increase carbon by moving all this recycler all over the country.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Oh gosh, yeah. In the mass balance of things, all of the recycling ends up happening in the states where it really must happen because recycling targets have been set through EPR. Oh, that's really interesting. I heard that same thing that lots of companies are just struggling to split out their sales by state. They're just not set up in that way to capture the data. Uh, USA is a common marketplace, obviously, and so um people just don't know, companies don't know whether it's sold in one state versus another. And we've got a very similar thing in the UK, it hasn't quite come in just yet, but Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland want to see what was sold and placed onto the market in each of those uh individual nations within the UK. And at the moment, many retailers, many uh brand owners just don't know. So Mars will sell the chocolate bars onto Tesco, who will then distribute them across the whole of the UK in whatever fashion they see fit, but no one, Mars wouldn't be tracking where does that end up, they wouldn't know whether it was sold in a uh a Welsh macro store, one of the Tesco's extras, or a tiny little convenience store in Northern Ireland or whatever. So it's a very similar issue that they're finding here in the US to the UK, but just on states that have introduced legislation, there's 12 now, and I bet you by the time this goes out, it's out of date. This whole thing is totally um moving really quickly. So 12 have introduced legislation, and seven have bills that have passed in the US, and I think that's just ticked over to an eighth. So I think literally in the time of gathering the information around this, things are happening in in their parliaments all the time across each of these states. So just tracking how much legislation there is is really very difficult. And when it comes to the issues that companies are finding when these are being implemented, the first one is who in the company is actually responsible for reporting all these EPR costs? They've never done it before. So who is it? Is it a sustainability manager? The company might not even have such a job title. Is it someone working in the warehouse who knows how many, how much of the product goes out of the warehouse? Is it the finance officer, the CFO, who's looking at what are these bills going to be? So the first issue that they're finding is just who has responsibility for it. And it's quite difficult when it's a cost of doing business for people to come forward and say, yes, I'm going to own this thing, because you're essentially owning a problem. We like to think of it on the podcast as an exciting solution that's going to make the world a better place ultimately because we get less single-use packaging placed onto the market. But in individual companies, this is seen as a problem. And then the next issue is who does the modelling and the costs? How much money is it going to be? And that's absolutely not clear when these bills get passed. So people are doing guesswork. And that's exactly what we've had in the UK over the last five to ten years is people constantly asking, how much is it going to cost me though? And it's very difficult up until now when really the bills are starting to come in the next few months to actually know how much it's going to be. And then finally, just the data. We mentioned it before, don't know what you're selling state by state, but also the data, the granularity and the accuracy of data about what actually is this packaging, and also the coverage of data saying, I just don't know anything about this. So I'm going to take a small sample size that I do know about and I'm going to infer it across all of my other packaging types. And that's really one of the big kind of issues we're seeing. And here's another example of how complicated it is. So they have Circular Action Alliance, which is like the producer responsibility organization that's operating in many of these states. And they gave this great talk about how Oregon is modulating fees using things like life cycle analysis. And it doesn't really prioritize recyclability or recycling. Whereas California are doing it totally differently on source reduction, so reduction of actual unrecyclable materials being placed on the market, but also having reuse and refill elimination targets that might help you to get a lower EPR fee. And then Colorado are doing it a different way again to California and Oregon. And suddenly what you get is the fees modulated in these states. This is paying more for bad packaging, paying less for better packaging, that generally in the UK we would say is more recyclable. Well, they're using a whole plethora of different factors to vary and modulate fees. Now, what that does is it leaves the individual businesses thinking, uh, I don't quite know whether I should make my packaging more recyclable or more carbon efficient or less water usage. And so it really doesn't set a clear mandate. And again, looking across to what PAC UK, the scheme administrator in the UK, have done, is they have wisely, in my view, just picked one factor. It's not the be-all and end all recyclability in terms of modulating fees, but at least it's simple to understand, and then means that it is actionable, that the brands can do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Okay, that's EPR. Let's talk about flexible plastic. So we had the opportunity to present Flex Collect, and I would say I think it's the biggest audience I've ever presented to, as I said, about 600 people. Um, and on again on the first day, another panel, a speaker said about flexibles. I would like to see a good, consistent market before they're collected. And I said to the audience, I work the other way. I'm a field of dreams kind of guy. If you collect it, they will come. Absolutely. It's mad to go into this saying, Well, when all the recyclers are there, we'll start collecting it. Because that's not how the world works. No one's going to invest in recycling on something that isn't collected.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Oh, it's absolutely crazy. So the the reality of what we were doing and what we were talking about is Look, you've got to collect this stuff, prove it's viable, send it to a few places to test, and then they will scale up their operations to say, look, there's more of it bec coming because it's mandated.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

And we loved getting the opportunity. I think we it was quite fun actually, because we had this day one of quite a lot of pessimism, in my view, around flexible plastic recycling. And then we got the opportunity to say, look, this is flex collect, this is what's happened. We've collected 450 tons of plastic and we've recycled it. And in 2027, it's going to be at every household. You could see people visibly shocked that they were like, How do we do this in the US? And I like to think that was a bit of like a, okay, come on, guys, you can do this. You can actually you can move a lot faster than just kind of hoping that at some point a recycler is going to build something. That's not really how the world works. What was funny is there were UK people in the audience who were coming up to me going, I didn't know we were going to have flexibles collected from 2027. So it's like the government needs to do a much better job at getting people excited about this because yeah, I think we're surprising a lot of people with that info.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah, the message hasn't got out there yet. But to be fair, you know, it's not quite coming yet. There's still another 18 months or so to go. So hopefully people will be ready by the time it rolls around in 2027. But in the US, what they're doing is store drop-off, aren't they? And it's kind of where we were several years ago in the UK, with just store drop-off being the only option for your flexible plastic.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Well, and where we are now. I mean, our flex collector's only done 160,000 households, which is a lot, but for everyone else, store drop-off's what they do, right? Um, and I saw it, you know, as I was driving up and down the coast, stopped in large supermarkets to have a look, and a lot of them did have flexible bins, which is great. Uh, they had a survey they were releasing at the conference, so I'll just give some of these stats. They were saying 73% of consumers in the US are aware that store drop-off exists, which is really high. That's very, very good. That is high, yeah. Yeah. But because of the size of the country, that meant 90 million people were unaware, which is bigger than the size of the UK.

unknown 24:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

That puts the scale into perspective. The stat that was really interesting is of those 90 million, half believed that you could recycle flexible packaging at curbside.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Which is just totally not true anywhere in the US, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 24:20

So that'll be like 10% of people, I think, if my maths is right, like 10%, 12% of people putting flexible plastic in curbside. I mean, that is a huge contamination rate. So I think they're seeing quite a lot of that. Now, they did find a big change in behavior once the consumer had been made aware of flexible plastic collections. Around 53% of those people were then likely to engage with it. So doing these surveys actually is a good eye-opener for people to go, oh, I didn't know that was there. Okay, great, I'll start using it.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Yeah, and one of the big changes that they made when I was chatting to Paul, who was one of the organizers of the conference, he was saying that actually they had to change the label, their version of the on-pack recycling label, the how-to recycle label, looks very similar, often has that kind of chasing arrow symbol on it. Um, the actual chasing arrows came off the label so that they could make clearer exactly what you do and have more of the label to look at return to store and say, this is not just chasing arrows, which people think, oh, I can just throw it in my recycling collection at home. And they had to be very deliberate with the way that they were communicating and getting feedback, I suppose, from American citizens for what they understood from their label, so that they could really direct people towards a different bin, a store drop-off bin.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Those chasing arrows come up so much when you talk to people from the US because so you know when you have your resin code, your number one to seven, we talked about it on an early episode. That that's normally surrounded by the three chasing arrows. So hopefully everyone can imagine what that looks like, the three arrows kind of going in a triangle. And in America, because everyone likes suing everyone, I think there's been like lawsuits around those chasing arrows because people are saying it's implying that this thing can be recycled. And that's not what it means. It's never meant that. It doesn't mean that in the UK either. And what we're seeing in the US that's a bit different to the UK is people are starting to remove the chasing arrows from the resin code because people are getting sued for claiming that things are recyclable, even though that's not what the symbol means. Um let's talk about recycle content, because actually that's a link to that recyclable thing. And and there was a really interesting talk on recycle content. So just as a reminder, because we've talked about the confusion around recycle content and what and what it means, but I think there's probably more confusion around it in the US than I'd expected. So the recycle content is having recycled material in your packaging. So you've got a bottle that's got a 50% recycle content, 50% of that bottle is virgin, 50% of it is made from old bottles. In America, 48% of people thought recycled content meant the product can be recycled. So gosh. But that was so confusing because what they were saying is like if you said 50% recycle content in this bottle, they thought 50% of the bottle could be recycled.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

It wasn't it's just that just doesn't sound logical to people who've understood this for a long time, does it?

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Yeah, so they were saying if you have less than 10%, because a lot of his talks were to brands, so they were saying if you're a brand, if you have less than 10% recycle content, it's not worth shouting about. It opens up more questions. And the sweet spot was 25 to 75% where you would get a brand lift from recycled content. And I guess that's sort of in line with our taxes and our views on the EU. Quite similar. What I did not like, really did not like, is they then spent a lot of time saying the good thing about recycled content is consumers felt, and here's the quote, the good had already happened. So oh no. They were saying a lot of consumers in the US don't want to recycle, they feel the brands should do the work, not them. And recycle content gives them that kind of, oh, the brand's already done the work and it's got to me. That's great. I don't need to recycle it. And the panel that I witnessed was leaning into that discussion. They were saying, hey, if you put the good has already happened on your packaging, people are really happy with that. Oh, that is so depressing. Because you would hope that you could have recycled content and then recycle it, you know, and that would be a nice message. But um, you know, they were saying 75% of people believe that the brand should take the responsibility for the end of its life, not the public.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Yeah, that's crazy, isn't it? Like everybody has to do their part, otherwise, the thing's not gonna work. The recycling is not gonna end up in the right place to become recycled content.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

And I guess just to summarize this section, um, because we could talk for hours on what we've heard, right? And we there were all sorts of things around AI and small items. AI came up a little bit. But sort of for me, when uh again, one of the panels I was at, they said, Oh, uh, is AI going to be used in Murphs? And everyone laughed. And I was thinking, yes, we're using it in the UK, but clearly the US does not believe AI is gonna be used in Murphs. Someone actually said robots are not going to replace manual labour on our line. So I was like, Okay, uh come and see Sherborne. It's very AI heavy. Go sit and talk to Grey Parrot. Yeah, it's super interesting. And when they talked about small items, they said smaller than a fist, but then they'd always say two inches. And I was like, Oh, we're in inches, not centimeters. I don't know how this works. So uh there you go. Our podcast is all about being hopeful and optimistic and seeing the possibilities and not trying to get bogged down in kind of the how depressing recycling could get. Okay, occasionally we have episodes like that, but we're trying really hard to create quite a positive environment. And I think you know, that is where I felt like the US could potentially just slightly adjust its kind of mentality into what can we achieve rather than what's kind of the minimum we can get away with, which I don't think is necessarily what we were hearing on the panels, but it's sort of the subtext of everything. You know, people don't want to recycle, so let's just put more recycle content in the packaging. It's like how do you get people to recycle?

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Change is really, really hard, and you just got that feeling they've got a big old change to go through, and that is going to be difficult. Additions and corrections.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

So I have a lot of UK additions, which like normal, but I have bumped them to next week because I feel the need to addition our US experience, Robbie. It's a USA special. Let's not talk about all the UK stuff. Uh so let's talk about things we've noticed from our time in America. As I said, we both decided to make our flight more sustainable by combining it with a holiday. So I've been experiencing things as I've gone up and down the coast. Robbie, when you arrived, you headed over to New York.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Yeah, no, I saw lots of interesting things in New York when it comes to waste. There was chained up wheelie bins, and I was thinking, who's stealing these wheelie bins? Everyone was very protective over them. Uh, and some of them use for recycling, so that was good to see. They definitely used the bag, you know, the plastic bag. So we were really worried about flex collect and having to give a bag for your flexibles. Well, they had two bags that I saw in Astoria, one of the suburbs of New York, a clear bag for card, and then sort of a bluish tinge one for cans and plastic. So you saw these on the street all the time being thrown into trucks. On the go, it was few and far between in terms of recycling. You did sometimes see a mixed paper bin, and sometimes again bottle and cans, but honestly, that was only in the very, very busiest parts of Manhattan. Often there was no on the go recycling. We think we have it bad in the UK. It definitely was not as good in New York. And in terms of litter, that's definitely not just a UK problem. Parts of Astoria, you could really see just the single-use item over consumption and littering around the place. But at the same time, we did see different types of packaging, and and the paper bag is definitely still uh more popular for like takeouts and things like that in the US than it is in the UK. You know, that traditional grocery bag of a big paper bag, um, we did see a lot of those. So some things very similar, like you know, littering is a worldwide problem, definitely in Western society, and um recycling, but some very different things in terms of how much actual recycling provision there was around the place.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

And back in Boston, I noticed so on the littering front, I actually felt like the city was very clean. Ellie said she noticed bits of litter, but I found it quite hard to see lots of litter, which was great. And they had loads of bins, like absolutely loads of them, but all the bins here are sponsored by cannabis delivery companies. Have you noticed that? I have seen they've all got pictures of like weed and you know, get your cannabis from us. Is this our future? I was thinking, do we get an increase in on the go recycling bins by getting them sponsored by like cannabis when it's legalized? Is that the way to go? High recycling rates driven by high people. Maybe that's where we're heading. Littering is always an issue, as you said, but I think uh we saw most of it in Boston, not much as we were in other areas, and Cape Cod particularly felt very, very clean. And as we were driving down one of the main roads in Cape Cod, I noticed a sign that said if you litter out your car, uh you could get a ten thousand dollar fine. So whoa, that's serious. That seemed to be working, that's pretty serious. Yeah, um, no one wants that. Yeah, and you've talked about kind of paper, and they were take uh I've had takeaway cups in every hotel room I've stayed in. Plastic straws, plastic straws are back.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Oh my goodness, plastic straws are everywhere, yeah. And and you have to say in advance, I don't want a plastic straw, and just assume you're about to get one with your soft drink. And then in terms of corrections, I did have one correction from my flight over. We were talking about the headphones on the flight and the fact that I carry around this two-pin adapter. Well, actually, on this plane, it was a single pin, a normal headphone jack. So you could just plug in any old headphones, no need for the single-use ones. But unfortunately, so I use my podcast ones, put them in for my partner. I only had a spare pair that was two-pin. Uh so we did have to take a single use pair because it was like a standard uh headphone. So it seems it depends what plane you get on as to whether you have this two-pin or one pin. You need to come prepared for all eventuality.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

As always, we'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, EcoSurety, who are 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 organization looking to make smarter packaging choices, check them out at ecosurity.com. And what we would love is you to share our podcast with your friends and family if you're enjoying it, and if you really enjoy it, to leave us a review. And if you leave us a review, you could be Robbie's review of the week.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Yeah, so this week I've got one that comes in from ESA, which was a five-star. The headline, best quirky learning source. Love the quirkiness and also how clear the podcast is. You're making my pivot towards sustainability and circularity a lot more enjoyable. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

That's a lovely review.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Quirky is a lovely review.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

I think we do we like quirky. It's a great word. I think we like quirky. Yeah, no one's used that yet. So thank you very much for that, Lisa. Love it. You can follow us at rubbishpodcast on social media. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. Also join our Discord. It's the easiest way to engage with us and listeners of a show. A link to all those things can be found in the show notes, as is the link to our petition, which is about banning the word compostable on dog poop bags, which can't be composted. Please take a second to go and sign it. Fully anticipated to explain my plan for this petition today, and I'm looking at the clock and I'm like, oh my goodness, we've done it again. Rubbish or not? What could be more American than the red solo cups?

SPEAKER_00 36:38

The solo bit is new to me, isn't it? So these are those beer pong cups, yeah, that you see in like the American house party. Exactly. The red cup, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Solo's the company that makes them. But okay. Yeah, the infamous party cups, as I said, made by the solo company, invented in the 1970s. I'm not sure if there's anything more iconic. There's actually a very popular song called Red Solo Cups by Toby Keefe. So okay. I'm not 100% sure if I can read it. I was gonna read some of the lyrics and then and claim fair use, and then I've sort of delved into copyright law, and I'm like, I'm not actually sure I'm allowed to read the lyrics. So um, because I don't want this episode to be taken down, because that'd be a real faff. I'll just say that it's part of the song. Toby thinks plastic is fantastic. He rhymes disposable with decomposable. Very good. He hates that they crack. So have a listen. It's probably not that suitable for our younger listeners. There's a few it's not too bad, but there's a few choice words in there that I couldn't say if I was reading out the lyrics. But um, it's quite funny. I'll have to go check that out. Oh, song about a cup. Toby Keith. Yeah, isn't it? And Ellie and I listened to it yesterday because I was preparing for this, and I thought this is an awful song. And then we found ourselves humming it like two hours later.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Ah, catch it. Solo cub.

SPEAKER_01 38:06

It's real country, South America. You'll love it. It's so funny.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Anyway, Robbie, are they rubbish or not? I just think they're probably gonna be rubbish. I'm not certain what material they're made from, so hopefully you've done the research to know which type of plastic they are, but I just cannot believe that these you can put in your recycling at home and they'll go off with plastic. So I'm gonna say rubbish. Am I wrong?

SPEAKER_01 38:29

It's a real shame because actually, you know, they're rigid plastic in the UK. You would expect these to be recycled. There is one thing that would stop them being recycled in the UK, and that's if you make them with polystyrene, and they are made of polystyrene.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Oh no, okay, so the one rigid plastic that no one wants.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

We always get people right in saying polystyrene isn't the worst, it's great, blah blah blah. Yeah, it's great as a material, it's super cheap. It's like I know why they use it to save money. It's awful for recycling. We don't collect it. That's why yogurt pots are moved from polystyrene to pee pee. It keeps the cups cheap. Party organizers, I'm sure, would rather spend their money on booze. That's what keeps them popular. Yeah, it's a real pain. Now, when I started getting into these red sailor cups, though, they've got ridges down the sides. Can you imagine? Yeah, you've seen them presumably. Turns out those ridges are perfectly aligned to measures that you would make cocktails with. Oh, there's one at like five mil, ten mil, twenty mil, or something. I can't remember the the mils, but um, you can use them as standard measures, the ridges on the club. The company said that is not their intention, they're there for strength, but obviously that is what students do. Okay. Um, it's a good way of tracking how much alcohol you've taken on. Now, on their website, they said these can be recycled, but you will need to check with your local recycling centre. From what I can tell, polystyrene is not collected from the curbside in the US. Some states do offer like drop-off locations, some of them are sponsored by the manufacturer, the cut. But I think you're right that we would say this is rubbish. In the UK, it would be thrown in the rubbish bin, and I don't think the US is taking them and recycling them, and I think drop-off points aren't frequent enough for us to say this is recyclable. I actually am shocked that it's made of polystyrene. I thought maybe this is out-of-date information, so I've been going to shops looking at the red cups and trying to see the resin codes and realizing that they are all still polystyrene.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Yeah, well, it shows that the UK moved quite quickly over the last decade, really, away from uh polystyrene, uh, particularly for yogurt pots, but also for other rigid plastics, and maybe America's yet to go through that change. Sounds like it.

SPEAKER_01 40:42

I found 13 states that have actually banned polystyrene in some form. Okay. But this is particularly for food packaging and it's foam packaging. So it's like you're you know, like those burger cramshells, expanded stuff. So actually the red cups are not banned in any state, I don't think. Interestingly, I've noticed a lot of restaurants that in the UK would do paper lined cups like McDonald's, Shake Shack, lots of places like that that would typically use a paper-lined cup in the UK. They are using plastic cups, you know, very similar to the red cups. I've been trying to find out what they're made of, but I haven't had a McDonald's over here and I haven't checked it, so I don't actually know. I noticed the one in Shake Shack, I think, was made of PP. So I actually think the ones in restaurants might be made of polypropylene, but it's just an observation that they're not using paper-lined cups as much as we do in the UK.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Yeah, no, I would agree. Yeah, I've seen pl plastic versions of cups around the place.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

Rubbish news. So our conference, I've tried to find American news, and actually they released some at the conference. So the SPC of the Sustainable Packing Coalition really released some news. So I thought, hey, this is perfect. Like you're launching something at the conference, I can use this as my rubbish news. So they were launching the retailer forum, which was bringing together Amazon Walmart CVS, which is a big sort of like pharmacy out here, but they sell lots of stuff, um lots of like food and things like that. But uh sort of like boots, I think, if you were to compare it to the UK and Target. So Amazon, Walmart, CVS, and Target, and initially they're working together to scale sustainable, flexible packaging films, and they have deliberately put in the words low barrier requirements. So this is not films like chocolate wrappers, crisp packets that need a barrier, it's things that are wrapping like veg and fruit and stuff like that. Um, and what they've done is they've launched a um an intent to work together pre-competitively. Okay, so they're basically saying we would like a more sustainable version of film, a flexible film, and we would like to align on what that film is so that recyclers know what to expect. So whether that's recyclable, compostable, reusable, refillable, they want people to apply to proposed formats to them, to the four big retailers, and these are the biggest retailers in the US. Say this is what we want to do, and they're hoping that will unlock kind of a standardized material that goes out to the market. So between now and the end uh middle of December, I think suppliers can submit those formats, the proposed formats, and then they will look at that and decide what they're gonna take forward. I think it's interesting, I think it's great that the you know, four large retailers have come together and said we're gonna work pre-competitively to try and put something consistent on the market. I thought that was a good news.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

Yeah, no, I agree. And I was looking across for American news, but I could not overlook this bit of UK news that's happened in the last week, and that was on extended producer responsibility. It's the biggest topic we heard about over here in the US. It still rumbles on in the UK. This was news from the British Retail Consortium that they anticipated. Passing on 80%. So these retailers in the UK passing on 80% of the EPR costs to customers. So they think these will be baked into the bills of the average person who's buying goods off the shelf. And I suppose, yes, this might lead to inflation in food prices, along with other things like we have heard all about the national living wage and national insurance contribution increases and things. But really, this is sort of what it's supposed to do, isn't it? It's supposed to say, look, more packaged goods are going to be more expensive. Those that are packaged with less packaging, those that have more recyclable packaging will be cheaper alternatives. Now, this is going to take a long time, I think, to flow through, but it's really interesting that the retailers have come out and said, Yeah, we're not going to swallow this cost. We're going to absolutely bake it into the average price that you and I pay at the checkouts.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

Yeah, and this is where I get frustrated at these news stories that are like, oh, the reason we're not profitable is because of EPR. But you're going to pass that on to customers. You've said that. And 80% of that money is going to get passed on. So it won't hit your bottom line, it won't affect your profit. And dressing up a packaging tax as the reason you're not profitable is not particularly helpful. Now I think there's a lot of truth behind that because of the timing, as you've said. Yeah. But you know, this is a consumer cost that's going to be born in it. I think people are um what's the variance? I've seen some people say it inflate affects inflation 0.1%, and some say 0.5%. Um and I uh stupidly and this look, this is the big faux par at the conference, isn't it? We did a panel on EPR, or we did a you and I did like a trash talk on EPR. And I stupidly I can't even remember what I said, but it was something like you know, 0.1%. It's not great, but compared to other costs that are increasing, you know, like national insurance and all those other things, it's you know, it's just one of many things that are happening, which is why it's causing such a big impact. But actually, it could be more expensive, and I, you know, I don't think it's like I don't even remember what I said. Something like that, you know, it's not as expensive as it could be, or something, some words to that effect. Anyway, get to the end of it. So I've said this in this little room, you know, closed room, good audience, but not as big as our audience for the flexible plastic, which was the 600 people. In the evening, all the 600 people are there, sat in a stage, and they put up a picture of me with the quote underneath, EPR is not expensive. The two of us laughing with a beer in hand. Oh my goodness, I cannot believe it. And like the this is this is a classic gotcha media moment where it was like, and the I was sat next to a guy from Koorig who was like, What? Really? I was like, oh no. Hashtag not how I feel. This has just been pulled out of context, you know, where I'm like, EPR needs to be expensive, so that's basically the same things I said a couple of weeks ago. EPR needs to be expensive to have impact, and somehow that had been turned anyway. The guy who created that image came up to me after went, Oh, did you like that? I was like, no, I didn't. Rubbish question. I saw a very interesting question on Reddit. So this wasn't directed at us, I just saw the question and thought, you know, I don't know the answer. I'm gonna go and do some research. Which was if I'm walking along the street and I have a can or a cup with some liquid in it, and I choose to pour the liquid out, am I littering?

SPEAKER_00 47:46

It's a deeply philosophical question, this one, James, that we've been pondering all week in America, and I'm still not sure I've got to an answer. If a cup pours in the forest, does anyone hear it?

unknown 47:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

Now, littering is obviously a big issue. We'll do lots of episodes on littering, I'm sure, in the future, but Key Britain tiny estimate that two million pieces of litter are dropped each day, and the cost of a taxpayer of street cleaning is over a billion a year. Really? Littering is a huge issue. That's huge. Um, in the UK, dropping litter is a criminal offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, with penalties including phones up to two and a half grand or prosecution in court, but you will more usually will get a fixed penalty notice, uh, which I think I read as a minimum of £75 and a maximum of £150. So that's likely to be uh the issue with littering. Uh, this was then supported with some legislation later, so the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

So clearly not as much in the UK as in the US with that $10,000.

SPEAKER_01 48:45

$10,000 in Cape Corn, yeah, absolutely. Now, litter is not specifically defined in law, which is strange. You would think it would be. But there is guidance from DEFRA that states that litter is best defined as something which is improperly discarded by members of the public in an area. It includes sweet wrappers, drinks, containers, cigarettes, gums, apple core, fast food packaging, till receipts, and small bags. So those are the Defra guidance. So it will include things like uh rinds, banana skins, apple cores, those kind of things. Okay, that is litter. That is litter. Liquid is a bit different. There were also I started going down this route of there's like a difference between litter and detritus, and I think the fruit was detritus, but I I at the end of the day, what you have to do with this stuff is look at whether anyone's been prosecuted in the past and say, okay, well, that sets a precedent. You've been reading through the journals, have you? I was trying to find whether someone in the UK had been prosecuted for tipping a drink somewhere. Okay. And we did have one precedent. So Sue Peckett was fined £80 in 2015 for pouring her coffee down a drain in West London. Really? Oh my word. She is about to get some big support from Talking Rubbish because she was quoted as saying she did not want the litter to sorry, she did not want the liquid to contaminate the bin. So she decided to pour it out before putting the cup in the bin. And we a hundred percent agree with you, Sue. Liquid in a bin is bad. You should absolutely pour your liquids down the drain before you put your rubbish in the bin. And if you get fined, send it to us. Oh wow, that's it. Are we gonna pick up those fines, Robbie?

SPEAKER_00 50:27

I'm not sure we can stretch the budget, unfortunately, James. I'd like to agree to that, but I don't think there's anything in the coffers for it.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

So, yes, as Sue was about to displace her cup, she was approached by two litter officers who issued the fine. However, there was a however to this. After much publicity, the fine was dropped, and Ealing Council said it would investigate why it was issued. Oh, so we think it was wrongly issued. I think it was wrongly issued, and the BBC had a quote from a barrister to Dr. Michael Ramsden, who told Panorama it's pure greed on the part of the enforcement officers. Under no stretch of the imagination could you say that liquid from a coffee cup is cross-contamination when it's going in a sewer, and she did place the coffee cup in the bin. So I'm confident that there is precedent to say actually you'll be okay if you pour the liquid in in a drain. Now, in the USA, because we're in a USA special, I thought I'd have a look and see if I could look for equivalent stuff in the USA. It's a bit different. So if you throw or pour a drink onto the ground in a public place, it will still count as littering in many jurisdictions, especially if it leaves a mess, a sticky residue, or could attract pests. Okay, so it's open to interpretation about what the liquid is by the sounds. Sort of, but I did find a quora thread from the USA where someone said they'd been fined for pouring out water. And a former cop responded to say in almost all states there are two exceptions for littering. So two things allowed to be deposited on public roads: clear water and feathers from live birds. Presume because trucks are driving around with turkeys in and the feathers are going everywhere. That is weirdly specific. He explained, which I thought was really interesting, that if you didn't allow water when snow melted off your car, that would count as littering, and no one would be able to wash their sidewalks, which I must admit appeared to be a very common thing in Boston. A lot of the parking signs here say, don't park this Thursday because we're washing the street. And I spent I saw a lot of hydrants open, you know, running huge amounts of water down roads and washing it. So that does seem to be a very common thing in America.

SPEAKER_00 52:38

Okay, fine. So if a glass of water gets poured out, and whether a litter officer is or isn't watching, it is not litter.

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Yes. So I think we've decided in America you can use clear water, that's okay, and that won't be littering, but anything else might be if it leaves a sticky residue. And in the UK, I think we're okay with you pouring stuff down a drain if it's avoiding contaminating a bin.

SPEAKER_00 53:03

And if you have a problem, write into talking rubbish and let us know.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Residual rubbish. This is something that has happened to us this week that has made us feel like an emoji. I despaired this week, absolutely despaired. I decided to take my son out for a walk. I've been doing that kind of every morning just to try and burn off some of the portion sizes in America. We've been trying to do lots of walking. And I um he needed a toy, and he's been we were in an Airbnb where they had like lots of mega blocks, you know, the giant Lego. So I'm pushing him down the road in the pram. One thing I've noticed in rural America in the place we were staying, which was just in Cape Cod, they don't really have pavements. You know, there's like everybody drives, you're just walking on the road. And I'm pushing him along, it's like a little bit dark. I'm a bit like, oh, this is a bit nervous. I'm along the road. Anyway, we're going along, and just as a drain appears, and I I mean, literally, these drains are like every 200 meters, he just takes the mega block, drops it, and it slips straight down the drain. And the drain opening is literally the size of a mega block. So I'm just thinking he's done this deliberately. There's no way. I mean, these trains are so far apart. I took Ellie out later and said, look how far apart the trains are. And this mega block's gone. Uh I mean, he has littered. That is littering. If anyone wants to find us, if anyone's listening from the US, I'm happily happy to pay the fine for the discarded megablock. I've also had to fess up to the Airbnb owner. You know, I was like, we've lost one of your mega blocks. I'm really sorry. Did you tell them the whole story? I just thought this was a really funny story. I was literally like walking along going, oh God, I'm doing a whole thing on littering today, and my son is there throwing megablocks down a drain.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

Oh, and my one this week, the emoji was definitely sort of uh embarrassed, big smile, I think is kind of the vibe. Because we had someone come up to us, James, at the conference, didn't we? And say, Hey, you guys are like rock stars. That talk was amazing, so inspirational. And then he asked for a selfie with us, and we were both like polite British guys, like going, Oh my god, what the heck is happening here? And uh, yeah, it was very embarrassing, but also very nice and very sweet. So, yeah, that was very fun and interesting to see how well we were received over in the US. I think a lot of it's just because they like the British accent, isn't it, James? You you go a long way just with the voice.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much, and I'm sure he is listening because he was he was like, You've got a fan, I'm gonna listen. I'm so excited to see it. He was great. Thank you so much. Um, thank you so much for coming up to us. As always, thank you all for listening. Thank you for the reviews and engagement, and we love getting the opportunity to do this podcast, and we're so excited because we'll have loads of new American listeners. So make sure you join our Discord, follow us on social media at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Robbie, do you have a learning from this week? Oh, well, it's gotta be don't use those red solo cups. They're made from polystyrene, they're not recyclable. Those people at home, yes, they might look fun at parties and Americanize the whole experience, but really they're not good for the planet. Try use reusable cups instead. And tell all your friends that you heard about that on Talking Rubbish.

SPEAKER_01 56:33

And just because Americans like lawsuits, I will balance that by saying always use the Red Solo Cups and thank you to the Solo Corporation for making such a distinctive and iconic cup. Please do not sue Talking Rubble. And everything we've discussed today, including a link to Red Solo Cup, should you wish to purchase those lovely, lovely cups, can also be found on our link tree. The details of all those things are in our show notes. Other than that, there's nothing left for me to say other than see you next trash day. Bye. Bye.