Is plastic really recyclable?
Hey. I'm Melissa.
Jam:I'm Jam.
Melissa:And I'm a chemist.
Jam:And I'm not.
Melissa:And welcome to chemistry for your life.
Jam:The podcast helps you understand the chemistry of your everyday life.
Melissa:Well, hello, Jim. How are you doing today?
Jam:I'm doing very well. How about you?
Melissa:I'm doing pretty good. I'm excited for this episode because It's the piece that got this plastic series going.
Jam:Oh, yeah? Mhmm. Wait. Plastic series, how many plastics Episodes are we gonna have?
Melissa:There's gonna be 1 next week again.
Jam:Nice. Okay. Sweet.
Melissa:So if you haven't listened to last This episode, go listen because it's about what are plastics. And this week, we're gonna be talking about what happens to plastic after we use them. Is plastic recyclable? And then next week, we're gonna talk about new things scientists are doing to Address plastics in the environment.
Jam:Nice. Okay. Sweet.
Melissa:It's kinda like the mosquito episode where we talked about why mosquitoes bite people, work and then what new things scientists are working on, what's in the current science research literature.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:We're doing something similar here. So what are plastics, What happens to plastics when we're done, and what's coming down the pipe with new plastic technology?
Jam:Nice. Dude, that's awesome. I'm excited. Sounds very, very relevant.
Melissa:I'm excited too. So this all started because I read an article from NPR that my roommate, I live the husband and wife, the husband of the couple sent me and his wife an article from NPR about Recycling. So we're we're gonna link to that here. But before I read that, I honestly had never really thought about what happens to plastic On a chemistry level.
Jam:Mhmm. I
Melissa:knew that I used it, and I put it in the recycling bin. And you should rent it out before you do that, and that was it. Was as far as I thought about it. I assumed it was recycled, and that was it.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:But there's a lot more to it.
Jam:Oh, no.
Melissa:I know, which we should have guessed when I talked about how many polymers there are in the world Uh-huh. And how many plastics there are and how it can have all kinds of different things that it's gonna be more complicated than it goes to a bin and comes back out as a new bottle. You know?
Jam:Right. Right.
Melissa:So are plastics really recyclable? Can you take the material used in plastic and reuse it? Technically, yes. Many plastics are recyclable and get recycled. Uh-huh.
Melissa:But practically, not really as much as we think.
Jam:Oh, man. Dang it.
Melissa:I know. There are some that are basically never recycled, and there are some that are really complicated.
Jam:Dang it.
Melissa:So we'll get into the details of the practicality more at the end. But first, I'm gonna tell you how plastic gets recycled at all.
Jam:Okay. Sweet.
Melissa:Okay. There's 2 types of options for plastic recycling. One. It's called chemical recycling. You take the large molecules, also known as polymers Mhmm.
Melissa:And you break them back down into their monomers or small molecules.
Jam:Right.
Melissa:Okay. That is really what I thought mostly happened. Uh-huh. The other option is, Essentially, they're just melted down because they're thermoplastic polymers, which means they become more elastic as you heat them up
Jam:Uh-huh.
Melissa:And get molded into new things. That doesn't work for thermostat polymers that will degrade before they melt.
Jam:Got it. I think I thought the same thing. I think I thought Most of them are just being melted down and reformed into something else. Like, some sort of sanitation process or something like that and then melting and then reforming. Like, I just Never thought much more about it than that.
Melissa:So you're right. That's the primary method of recycling because chemical recycling is actually pretty expensive.
Jam:Uh-huh.
Melissa:Theoretically, it's the best option because if you break it all the way back down to its monomers, you're basically starting from scratch again. It's almost if you could take a cookie and turn it back into flour. You've got your basic ingredients, and you can manipulate them a lot easier.
Jam:Right.
Melissa:Right. And for thermostat polymers, which don't melt at all, that would be the only option.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:So that is the the primary method is the melting down, But the chemical recycling, which is the more attractive option molecularly, is it very expensive? So that's what we have. We have melting down your classic recycling and then chemical recycling where you break down the physical molecules. We'll talk a lot more about chemical recycling next week.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:The thing is chemist Design plastic to be sturdy and really last a long time. You know? Yeah. So breaking them down is not as easy as we want it to be. Alright.
Melissa:So that's the basics, The very basics of recycling. You've got 2 options. But remember when we talked about all the different types of plastic?
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:Okay. All the different types of plastic make this harder because if you're going to do either one of those types of recycling Uh-huh. If you have 1 material to work with, that's gonna be a lot easier. Because if you melt down 3 or 4 different types of polymers and try to bring them together, Then you've got a whole mix, and it's not gonna have super predictable properties. It's not gonna be very good.
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:So Your your basic soda bottle is a polymer known as PET. We talked about that last week. Uh-huh. If you melted that down and mixed it with your Polyethylene PE from your plastic bags or your bleach bottles
Jam:Uh-huh.
Melissa:That's not gonna go very well. The overall chemical product is gonna be different than if you have one, Just one pure substance.
Jam:Got it.
Melissa:So that's why different types of plastic have to be sorted out. That's where the numbers inside the recycling symbol on plastics come from.
Jam:Okay. Okay.
Melissa:They are designated to different types of Plastic. So number 1 is PET. That's your soda bottles usually. Uh-huh. Number 2 is high density polyethylene.
Melissa:We talked about that last week.
Jam:Uh-huh.
Melissa:Number 3 is PVC. Number 4 is low density polyethylene. That's like your plastic bags. Number 5, polypropylene, which is a lot like bottles, but a little squeezier, I think. And then number 6 is polystyrene, which I think is most commonly referred to as Styrofoam.
Jam:Oh, okay.
Melissa:Okay. So when we finish with our plastic and throw all our plastic unanimously into our recycle bins, it goes to a facility and it will be sorted out Based on glass, paper, and then different types of plastic.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:Okay. And then they have to be cleaned because What we think of as just a little bit of water or just a little bit of soda left over in the bottle is really, at a molecular level, different molecules that already exist in your plastic bottle, in your PET or your polyethylene or whatever. So if those molecules interact with the melted down polymer, they're going to chemically change it. And a lot of times that can make it more brittle. Mhmm.
Jam:It's
Melissa:just not as high quality because there's other molecular interactions going on. It's not as pure. You can think of pure gold is worth more than mixed up with other stuff gold. Right?
Jam:Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Melissa:So really when we think of, oh, that's just a little bit of water, practically, it's a molecule interacting molecularly with your and that can have unwanted side effects.
Jam:Right. And if you had that a little bit in every bottle or a little bit of even just like some soda or something else that's not just straight water in every bottle. That's a huge problem. It's like a little bit And every single thing ends up being a lot if you're trying to deal with a large batch of something.
Melissa:Right. So, ultimately, That kind of recycling is hard to get just as good as plastic that you had the 1st time it was turned into a plastic bottle.
Jam:Got it.
Melissa:So in a lot of ways, things that are made from recycled plastics are not as high quality plastic as brand new plastics.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:Unfortunately, because it also takes all that work, a lot of times, it's cheaper to make brand new plastic than it is To use recycled plastic.
Jam:No. So Dang it.
Melissa:Like, breaks
Jam:all our utopian ideas about, like, Mhmm. Reuse things instead of making a new version of it. Then a bottle becomes a bottle, becomes a bottle, becomes a bottle.
Melissa:Yes. And this article that I read, I can talk a little bit more about it at the end, but basically said, we were made to believe that that's what happens to plastic to benefit people who are making new plastic.
Jam:I see.
Melissa:But here's the reality of the facts. This is taken directly from a chemistry engineering and Chemistry Engineering News Magazine.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:And that is a well respected source. It's paired with the American Chemical ID peer reviewed journal. So this is a trustworthy source. Number one type of plastics in 2012, 19.5% of the point 4,500,000,000 kilograms of that kind of plastic produced was recycled. Just under 20%.
Jam:Oh, yikes.
Melissa:Type 2, that's plastic bottles. It just gets worse from here, Jim.
Jam:Oh,
Melissa:no. Type 2, HDPE, that's laundry and bleach bottles, 10.3% of the 5,500,000,000 kilograms produced or recycled. PVC, which has a lot of its own problems. PVC is pretty controversial. A lot of people don't know that.
Melissa:It has some toxic byproducts. 0% of the 900,000,000 PVC that was produced in 2012 was recycled. The plastic bags, LDPE, 5.3% of the 7,400,000,000 kilograms of LDPE that was produced in 2012 were recycled. Type five, the little squeezy bottles, 0.6% of the 7,200,000,000 kilograms of those were recycled. In polystyrene, number 6 on the recycle chart, 0.9% of the 2,200,000,000 kilograms were Recycled.
Jam:Man. Dude.
Melissa:Yes. So I added that all up. That's 28,000,000,000 kilograms produced in 1 year. Mhmm. And at most, at best, at the 20% number, that's about 5,000,000,000 kilograms.
Jam:Oh, man.
Melissa:So that leaves 23,000,000,000 kilograms that are out in the environment. And because scientists made really good plastic that doesn't break down, It doesn't break down in the environment for a really long time.
Jam:So they recycle some of it, and the rest of it From the recycling center place, they just send over to the landfill or what?
Melissa:Mhmm. They Yeah. I think things that are Not worth being recycled because they won't produce as high quality products are just sent to the landfill, but also a lot of people don't recycle. Some people don't have the option.
Jam:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Melissa:And I don't think that touches on the thermostat plastics at all. I'm not positive, but there are thermostat plastics Used in automobiles and windmills and other structures that usually are just thrown away after they're used because they're not Really reusable.
Jam:Got it.
Melissa:So those numbers are pretty sad.
Jam:Very much so. Dang it.
Melissa:Very dark. I I'm was sad to read this and even more sad because I knew that this was my these were my people Mhmm. That made these.
Jam:We did this.
Melissa:We that was. I was thinking, this is chemists. This is chemistry that's doing this to the world.
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:But for the things that are recycled. Even the ones that are lower quality products, they're actually usually melted down. And unless it's really clean, they're melted down and melted down until they can be spun into thread.
Jam:Mhmm. And
Melissa:they're used to make clothes, carpets, furniture, and that is polyester. So p e t from your soda bottles is chemically the same as polyester. It's just been melted down and reformed into a lower quality. It maybe had some impurities, And it's turned into clothes and fabrics and stuff like that.
Jam:Got it. Okay. Weird.
Melissa:Once it's turned into that, it can't really be recycled again. It's being it's called being downgraded or downcycled.
Jam:Got it. Got it. Yeah. It'd be hard to get like, usually, those are part of a blend of fabrics. I'm sure it'd be hard to get The polyester part out of the cotton that they blended it with or whatever, it'd be like, this almost impossible to do that.
Jam:I'm sure.
Melissa:Right. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff that happens with plastics. And sometimes, I think it is pure enough to be turned back into bottles or maybe slightly lower quality bottles. Don't know this for a fact, but some water bottles are not as good as, for example, a Sprite bottle or something. You know?
Melissa:They just feel a little less good, so it's possible. So that's kind of what happens with plastic. A lot of it just gets thrown away. Less than 20% of the Billions of kilograms per year
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:That are produced get recycled. And when they do get recycled, a lot of times, it gets downgraded into something else But something usable. So a lot of our shirts used to be plastic bottles.
Jam:Yeah. Yeah. Dang, dude. Okay. That's so heartbreaking.
Jam:Like
Melissa:It's so heartbreaking.
Jam:It is kind of is like this thing that I always kind of had in the back of my mind if, like, gave you a little piece about plastic stuff because it was like, Well, at least it can be recycled. And we are are fortunate enough to live in a city, both you and I, that has Mhmm. Like, a municipal recycling center and stuff and has Yes. A separate recycling dumpster. It's a lot easier for us to recycle than it would be for some other towns and parts of the country and parts of the world, At least, in the part that is our responsibility to, like, separate it out and stuff, and then not know what happens after that.
Jam:But even though we're fortunate enough to live in that kind of situation, I've so that's kind of been my my saving grace about Feeling worried about plastic stuff, just thinking like, we we've got this. We've our city, at least, is doing its part, and we're good. You know?
Melissa:Well and I did look up our city's recycling center, and they do seem to be doing good. And they actually are making enough money on it that they're considering going back into parts landfill before recycling was done and digging up old recyclable materials and you and selling that to make money. So they are actually Our city, I think, is pretty faithful in their attempts to recycle.
Jam:Nice.
Melissa:But the reason you feel that way And the reason I'm so mad about this situation Uh-huh. Is something that was sprung on me in that NPR article that my roommate sent me.
Jam:Uh-huh. So,
Melissa:essentially, the reason we all believe that it's gonna be okay if we use plastic, I mean, this is really kind of, generalizing, but Uh-huh. That was forced on us by oil companies. Oil companies remember, oil is what creates plastic.
Jam:Right.
Melissa:And this article did some digging, and I you can't know everything for sure. Every article has a Every every author has a history and a background in something they believe, so you have to be really careful.
Jam:Mhmm. This
Melissa:article essentially stated that oil companies, they started to realize that people weren't using plastic as much as they had hoped, invested in recycling ads, and started setting up recycling programs with no real Infrastructure to actually implement these recycling programs to the extent that they should be implemented to make People feel better about using these single use items so that they could believe that they could reuse them and it wouldn't sit in
Jam:the industry. My god. That is crazy. So When did that happen? When did they start doing that?
Melissa:It looks like it was in the eighties, and we'll link to this article. And I looked up other sources to confirm that that is really what was happening, and it really seems to be true. I don't know a 100%. I didn't do my own investigating, but It was first on an NPR article, the NPR podcast, Planet Money, and then this article came out recently in September of 2020.
Jam:Wow. Jeez.
Melissa:And so even though we have these ads that look like, oh, yeah. Recycle, recycling, It's gonna be great. We're gonna be able to use this plastic and put it right back into the environment. They did that really knowing that it was cheaper and better For the plastics industry to just keep making more plastic.
Jam:Yeah. Well, dang it.
Melissa:I know. I'm so I was so mad about it that I texted that article to every single person I knew. Be and I was mad because it was chemist. Chemists Harness the use of polymers for plastic. Yeah.
Melissa:Chemists work intimately with the oil company. There were chemists who were in charge of some of these recycling centers, And they let this happen. They use their powers for evil. Yeah. It's the dark side of chemistry again.
Jam:Yeah. Dang it. That dark side. There's all that power. You know, all that power that when you unlock the mysteries of the universe like euchemists do.
Jam:It's that power That leaves people astray sometimes.
Melissa:It reminds me of there's a episode of Radiolab called The Bad Show.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:And they talked about a chemist, Fritz Haber, who created the I think with another chemist, created the Born Haber Cycle, which Fixes nitrogen from the environment
Jam:Uh-huh.
Melissa:Which is very important from the air to fix nitrogen because there's a lot of nitrogen in the air, Not very much in the ground, and nitrogen is important to grow crops to feed people. Uh-huh. So the reason we have enough food to feed the number of people on the earth is because of this person, But he also did some really terrible things with his chemistry. Yikes. And so I think it just kind of reminds you of that.
Melissa:To be able to Take molecules and manipulate them and harness them and force your will on them comes with a very big responsibility. Yeah. So I was heartbroken. I was really sad.
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:And I was also very mad, and I like I said, I Angry wrote this. Uh-huh. 1 afternoon after reading that article, I said, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna tell the world about this. Okay.
Melissa:Yeah. So that's that was my initial response. But while I was doing my research, there was a line that gave me a lot of hope from the chemistry and engineering magazine.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:Was a direct quote. I'm gonna read it to you.
Jam:Perfect.
Melissa:The world's mounting plastic trash crisis is hard to solve because it has many dimensions, Social, technical, and economic. But because chemistry brought the problem into the world, it doesn't seem unreasonable to look to chemistry for a solution. And that's from an article we'll link to from Chemistry and Engineering News magazine, and it really gave me a lot of hope because I was also feeling and thinking Chemistry brought this problem into the world.
Jam:Yeah. Yeah. But
Melissa:So Right. We're gonna talk about that next week. So I'm giving you the dark stuff, but then it's gonna be A new hope. Star Wars, a new hope.
Jam:Next week.
Melissa:That is The basics of what happens to our plastic after we use them.
Jam:Okay. Dang.
Melissa:So I have some Tips for things you can do in the face of this dark side of chemistry. But first, do you wanna tell me What your main highlights and takeaways were from this episode? Because it's a little bit different than normal.
Jam:Yeah. It's not like a one main chemistry idea to just Describe back or have an analogy for or something like that. But
Melissa:Right. Right. Right. It's a little bit of a different type of chemistry for your life.
Jam:Yeah. And definitely very much for my life. Like, this is as relatable as it gets. I mean, we're all using Mhmm. Plastic every day.
Jam:So, for me, some highlights are the fact that one, We already talked about how many types of plastic there are, and that is a huge contributor to just The the difficulty that comes with recycling.
Melissa:That's definitely true.
Jam:2 would be the fact that because we use these plastics For many things, we fill them with soda and water and soap and all kinds of other things. And so then to try to recycle them and completely clean that out and try to get rid of all that is Is it nearly impossible to completely rid a plastic container or say millions of plastic containers of Some what would you call that? Of some impurities to then melt it down or something to reuse it. It's just so hard. So it's gonna be lower quality plastic if it can be reused at all.
Jam:Mhmm. And then the fact that there's kind of those 2 kinds of recycling, either just melting it down, which I think me and a lot of Other laypeople would just assume is what happens. Mhmm. Melting it down to be reformed into something else. And the other type, which is returning the plastic to its taking the Large molecule, the polymer, and breaking that apart to return it to its Small molecules that made it's made up of to return that to basically a much more simple Building blocks to be remade into a different kind of plastic.
Jam:And that's just a way more complicated type of Recycling that did you say, like, it cannot every type even be recycled that way, or is it wish way too expensive? Like, what's the main drawback of that one?
Melissa:We'll talk about that more next week.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:But there are There are some drawbacks to it. It's more expensive. It's more difficult, time consuming.
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:But there are people who are working on that. So
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:There's that as well.
Jam:The big takeaway for me, which obviously is tough because it's hard to know all the exact details and facts. But just the fact that The promise of recycling in general as it was introduced to us as a public was a little bit of A false promise to some degree. Mhmm. And a lot of uncertainty about how How much you could actually succeed at all and that it was introduced knowing that the people who introduced it really actually preferred And would profit most if recycling didn't take off and didn't work great, and if people just continued Buying and making new plastics rather than reusable ones, that's, like, such a mind blowing and also very frustrating, A bit of news for me.
Melissa:Yes. I took that very similarly, and I I recommend we'll link to the article. I recommend to everybody who can go read that article, who has the time to go check it out because it's really Eliminating. And from what I could tell, it seemed to be accurate to the best of my ability. I mean, you have to know that every single news source has some kind of agenda.
Melissa:Mhmm. And every single person is influenced by their own history, but
Jam:Mhmm.
Melissa:It did seem Like, other sources are backing up, but that is kind of how it went down.
Jam:Mhmm. Dang.
Melissa:Which is really heartbreaking. So Yeah.
Jam:So this
Melissa:is In the meantime
Jam:because Oh,
Melissa:go ahead.
Jam:I was gonna say, those are my main obviously, you said you said a lot, but those are some of the main takeaways that I think are gonna stick with me Half this episode.
Melissa:Also, you can look at the bottom of your bottle or whatever and see what kind of plastic it is, which is kind of cool. Now you know what those numbers really mean.
Jam:Yeah.
Melissa:They are different types of polymers that have to be separated out to recycle properly.
Jam:Right. Right. I've known those, and I've known that, like, you know, some recycling programs will say, we take 1, 2, 3, and 4, but not 5 or whatever. But now I'll actually know what those are, which is cool.
Melissa:In the meantime, You should know that aluminum, glass, paper, those do get recycled. Not a 100%, but they seem to have better numbers Mhmm. And it's a little bit easier. Mhmm. So that's a good thing.
Melissa:That's a good piece of information. 2, you can look up your local recycling program, and you can see how to contribute to making it easiest to recycle. So I did that. I looked up because I suspected maybe we just all put our stuff in a landfill. But Denton actually does seem to have a good recycling, unless they're just totally light on their website, a good program, and they said for our town, the best way to ensure your bottle gets recycled is if you rinse it out and then Squeeze the air out of it and put the cap on.
Melissa:So you might your local recycling center might have things that will make it easier.
Jam:Mhmm. Nice.
Melissa:And then, ultimately, what you can do is use less plastic, Especially use less one time plastic. It's all around us, so it's really hard to cut out completely. I've really been conscious of that since I've been writing these episodes, and it's Very hard to cut it out completely. Yeah. But things that you can do that are a lot easier is bringing reusable bags to the grocery store.
Melissa:Mhmm. I always forget to bring them in, so I just don't bag my groceries, and I bag them up in the car outside, which seems to work pretty well for me. It takes a little bit more time, but I feel better about not using the plastic bags. And then you don't have all those pesky plastic bags at your house, which is the most annoying thing.
Jam:Yeah. It really is.
Melissa:You can try to use washcloths, in your house instead of using paper towels, which come packaged in plastic. A lot of things come packaged in plastic. So if you can buy something to reuse instead of buying a new thing every time, a disposable item, that's gonna be better. Mhmm. You can reduce your food waste.
Melissa:There's a lot of packaging that comes in food. There's a lot of Not only plastic, but other waste that goes into wasting food. So if you use as much of your food as possible Mhmm. There's gonna be less plastic wasted for no reason.
Jam:Right.
Melissa:You can bring a water cup or a water Water bottle with you instead of using plastic bottles for water. And a lot of those plastic water bottles are really just Bottled tap water. So if you're really worried about what's in the tap water, get a filter pitcher.
Jam:Yeah. Yeah. But A
Melissa:lot of bottled water isn't necessarily better, so do your research on that as well. Yeah. Another thing you can do is when you have guests over, Use reusable silverware instead of plasticware, and I know that is hard because there's more cleanup or maybe you don't have as enough silverware, but you can go to Goodwill or Walmart. Walmart's probably not the best place to give your money to, but you can go to other places and get a lot of silverware for pretty cheap.
Jam:Mhmm. And
Melissa:then you don't have to keep buying the same plastic stuff over and over again.
Jam:Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa:So those are some of my ideas. You can also compost because it can break down more easily in a compost. There's a lot of options for you to be environmentally friendly and try to save plastic. So what I wanna do today, instead of talking about a happy thing from our week, Is jam I want you to tell me a way that you think you could reduce plastic in your life.
Jam:Okay.
Melissa:I'll tell you something that I wanna implement, And then I want our listeners to also be posting about ways that they can reduce plastic and use in their everyday life.
Jam:Nice. Okay.
Melissa:You can either tell me something you already do or a new practice you wanna implement.
Jam:Okay. One thing I already do, and Not to pat myself on the back, but I think it also has worked out lifestyle wise. It ended up being not that hard for me. And I know it'd be pretty challenging for some people, but I think It's, hopefully, this will just show you how possible it is, and maybe it it doesn't seem that unattainable to you, or listeners, and and, Everybody's a little different, but I don't almost ever need to get a Plastic cup or straw or paper cup, even those have some problems because they're coated with some Like, a thin layer of wax kind of plasticky stuff. Mhmm.
Jam:This is all kind of pre COVID, but I just very, very, very rarely needed to do those for the past few years because I bring a water bottle with me almost everywhere. And Mhmm. I just bought a Metal mug that has, you know, like vacuum layer or whatever that does with hot and cold coffee. And So I would just use that anywhere I possibly could. And a lot of places would accept them to just put your coffee or whatever in that instead.
Jam:And so I just noticed that it didn't take that much space in my bag as it was on the go to have a water bottle and a mug with me. And Yeah. I just got to reuse it everywhere. And and I kinda ended up preferring it over time Because it was easier, and it just if you're talking coffee, my mug would keep it hot a lot longer. So it was, like, there's actually a lot of benefits to it, and it just felt a lot A lot easier.
Jam:And so those are ones I've done the past couple years that I've just noticed has meant that I've had just way, way fewer, like, Very quick single use plastics, in those areas that I normally would actually use a lot of them. I drink a lot of coffee A lot of coffee shops, and so I would be be a pretty high waste producer of
Melissa:Yeah.
Jam:You know, coffee cups and straws and stuff like that. So that's one area that And in water bottles, like, I just not bought a water bottle in who knows how long.
Melissa:Those are those are some really good ones, some simple ones too for your day to day life. And I know COVID does have it to our sometimes we just have to use more disposable things. Unfortunately, we were talking about how going out to eat has so much Generation of plastic now because everything is takeout.
Jam:Mhmm. But we
Melissa:don't eat at restaurants anymore where you can reuse silverware and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of a bummer. Yeah. But
Jam:Yeah. I
Melissa:definitely think that's something. Well, I already mentioned I've tried to switch to be using reusable bags at the grocery store, and Our house is working on not using paper towels. I mean, the paper towels themselves, I don't think are recyclable. They're compostable. The brown center of them is definitely recyclable.
Melissa:But using washcloths instead, I think That's the one I'm gonna go with because it's been hard because you have to keep up with washing them consistently. So at at first, it was pretty hard to not just We didn't just have in our mindset that we're gonna use this reusable washcloth and wipe it up, and we can wash it later. We we're always thinking of and reaching for something you could just throw away.
Jam:Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa:And so we kind of had to shift our mindset in our household, but it actually now I think we're getting to be more used to it. Mhmm. And it's a small thing, but I feel like it contributes overall to my mindset of I don't just need to have things that I use once and offer a paper bag over a plastic bag, a big carbon footprint to recycling a a paper bag that you get at the grocery store or you know, there's still there's drawbacks to everything, but one of the best things we can do is just use what we already have. Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa:And so having that mindset that I don't need to buy a new thing for this. I already have things that I can use this for has really helped a lot. So That's been one thing that seems small, but really has changed a lot of my mindset. Yeah.
Jam:That's awesome. That's really cool. I could say that'd be hard to make that change, but there's so many scenarios where it'd be, like, just fine. It'd be like, Oh, yeah. Why did I what's the point?
Jam:What's the real value of using a disposable thing just to wipe up some, you know, water I spilled? It's just like, oh, yeah. Right. We're just kinda in the habit of using disposable stuff where it isn't even that beneficial and doesn't make it easier on us at all, really.
Melissa:And that was inspired by my sister. So thanks, Renee, for being such a proponent of the environment. We appreciate you here at Chemistry For Your Life.
Jam:Amen.
Melissa:So that's what I have for this week. I'm sorry to be kind of disappointing, but I feel like knowing can empower
Jam:us. Mhmm.
Melissa:And we could make better decisions, sort of like with the cast iron and Teflon. So there's a dark side of chemistry, but we can do our part Yeah. To improve upon the world. So thanks so much for coming and listening and learning about chemistry this week, Jam, and thanks to all of you listeners as well. I hope you are Maybe encouraged to try to minimize your plastic use, but also don't worry because there's hope coming.
Melissa:There's we can see the light of a clear blue morning in the words of
Jam:Dolly. Well, Melissa, thanks so much for teaching us and, for guiding us through some Somewhat discouraging topics, but still really important ones anyway. So if you have ideas or questions or concerns and these Things that you wonder about chemistry wise in your life, we wanna hear your ideas. So so please send those to us on Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook at chem for your life. That's chem, f o r, your life to share your thoughts and ideas.
Jam:Some of the best episodes we've had have come for people's ideas, so please don't hesitate. If you'd like to help us keep our show going and contribute to cover the costs of making it, go to kodashfi.com/chem for your life, and don't at the cost of a cup of coffee. If you're not able to donate, you can still help by subscribing on your favorite podcast app and rating and writing a review on Apple Podcasts. That also helps us to be able to share chemistry with even more people.
Melissa:This episode of Chemistry For Your Life was created by Melissa Colini and Jarem Robinson. References for this episode can be found in our show notes or on our website. Jim Robinson is our producer, and we'd like to give a special thanks to s Flint and m Quapel who reviewed this episode.
