One Landfill's Trash is the Future's Treasure

0:00:04.5 Paul Matzko: For most of your life, you’ve carefully separated out your plastic bottles and containers, placed them in the recycling bin and felt a little sense of satisfaction when the recycling truck comes and picks it up.

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0:00:21.4 Paul Matzko: Maybe your empty bagel bag will become a trendy reusable tote or all those water bottles will become a hip winter coat. In a small way, you feel like you’ve been part of the solution and not part of the problem. No turtles are gonna get stuck in your six-​pack plastic rings, and don’t worry, no turtles were harmed in the creation of this episode. Unfortunately, your well-​intentioned act didn’t turn out the way you thought it would, because for the last quarter century, huge, truly mind-​boggling amounts of recycled plastic hasn’t been given the second chance at life as foot flops or running shoes. They’ve just been dumped in the ocean, floating on the waves until they link up with the Great Pacific Ocean garbage patch, where they gradually degrade into tiny pieces of micro-​plastic. This swirling vortex of plastic is at least the size of Texas, though it’s just a small part of the roughly 10 million metric tons of plastic annually dumped into the ocean worldwide. And most of that plastic is there, not in spite of our recycling program, but precisely because of it.

0:01:41.5 Paul Matzko: Instead of safely burying our plastic waste in the ground in landfills, we’ve been shipping it abroad to countries that dump their waste in the ocean. It’s a perverse thought that the most environmentally conscious people, the most careful recyclers are the ones doing the most to contribute to oceanic pollution.

0:02:03.6 Paul Matzko: And yet, that’s how it works. The good news is that we can change that. It starts with a bit of reframing, we’ve got to stop thinking of trash as, well, trash, instead think of it as a valuable potential resource. We’ve all heard the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” and if we do a smarter job disposing of our trash, it can help us build a greener, healthier and more prosperous future. I’m Paul Matzko, this is Building Tomorrow, and I want more landfills.

0:02:40.9 S?: I want some more.

0:02:41.5 S?: More.

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0:02:43.2 S?: More.

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0:02:44.4 S?: More.

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0:02:46.1 S?: It’s time for more more and more.

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0:02:47.8 S?: More.

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0:02:49.1 S?: More.

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0:02:50.0 S?: More.

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0:02:51.7 S?: More.

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0:02:52.8 S?: More.

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0:03:07.3 Paul Matzko: But before we get into that, how did we get here? Well, here’s a hint.

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0:03:29.8 Paul Matzko: That’s right. Our story starts with Captain Planet.

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0:03:37.1 Paul Matzko: If you were a child of the ’90s, the wildest Saturday morning cartoon you could watch bar none was Captain Planet; the environmentally friendly super hero. The plot lines were insane, but each episode was a brilliant little encapsulation of a message from one generation of environmental activists to the next, like the episode where the Fire Planeteer gets knocked out while surfing, classic Wheeler, and ends up on an overpopulated island of sentient cannibalistic rats. It’s like Jonathan Swift dropped acid before writing Gulliver’s Travels with the goal of convincing everyone to adopt China’s one child policy and it was for kids. Man, [chuckle] the ’90’s were wild. What you might not know is that Captain Planet was the pet project of the wealthiest environmentalist of the 1990s.

0:04:30.9 Ted Turner: Of all the things that I did, I’m really proud of Captain Planet.

0:04:35.0 Paul Matzko: CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner.

0:04:39.5 Ted Turner: Look around, if we save this world, it’s gonna be partially because of Captain Planet.

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0:04:47.3 Ted Turner: Because Captain Planet taught you about environmental stewardship didn’t it?

0:04:49.7 Paul Matzko: Turner was brilliant, eccentric and cared deeply about the environment.

0:04:55.3 Phil Harnage: Ted Turner came up with the idea for Captain Planet and for having a group of kids called the Planeteers, and I think he had this vision that there would be Planeteers all over the country.

0:05:07.3 Paul Matzko: That’s Phil Harnage, the head writer for Captain Planet during its award-​winning run from 1990 to 1992. Harnage shared Turner’s apprehensions, especially the fear that we were consuming too much, that we were strip mining the earth’s resources in order to just consume, consume, consume, and soon we would end up choked with toxic fumes and stumbling through garbage-​filled streets.

0:05:36.4 Phil Harnage: I think we just wanted kids to really look at this and think, “Gosh, is that something that I’m gonna grow up seeing where the garbage becomes so enormous that nothing can be done about it,” and unfortunately that’s true of a lot of things that we try to address. I kind of, in my more pessimistic moments, really worry about the future for my daughters.

0:06:07.5 Paul Matzko: So Harnage and the other writers wrote an episode titled The Garbage Strikes. Our profit hungry villain, Sly Sludge, voiced by none other than Martin Sheen…

0:06:17.6 S?: This Helix guy sure knows how to waste a beautiful oil spill. I’d have found a way to make money off of it. That’s why they call me Sly Sludge.

0:06:28.6 Paul Matzko: Takes advantage of a naive techno-​optimist scientist and unleashes garbage-​eating microbes on a small French town with a trash problem.

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0:06:40.8 Paul Matzko: It all seems like a good idea, until the microbes rapidly evolve into giant insatiable blob monsters that threaten to devour first the town then the Eiffel Tower then all of France and finally the entire world. But then just when all hope seems lost, Captain Planet shows up, collects all the glass from the town’s trash, which the garbage monsters can’t eat, and creates a giant container to scoop up and contain the monsters. The day has been saved by the power of recycling. The story ends with the chasen Scientist Dr. Helix regretting trying to find a quick fix and acknowledging…

0:07:26.2 S?: But maybe it’s better if we all just recycled our garbage.

0:07:30.0 S?: I agree. Conservation may not be easy, but it’s the safest way.

0:07:34.7 Paul Matzko: The show’s message was prescient. Ending with a call to action for the viewer to remember the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and to stop using single-​use plastic packaging or plastic bags. Those issues are hot today. Captain Planet would fully support your state’s plastic bag tax. But Captain Planet was on that corner decades ago. Now, it’s true that Captain Planet was merely a kids show and as Harnage put it…

0:08:04.5 Phil Harnage: You know, Ted Turner’s idea of having a card carrying bunch of planeteers out there, never really materialized.

0:08:13.5 Paul Matzko: Then again, even if the planeteers didn’t become the next Boy Scouts, Ted Turner’s vision has since become mere cultural consensus. Today we’re all planeteers in a sense. Existential dread about environmental crises is the new normal. Public support for policies to reduce, reuse and recycle are now robust.

0:08:33.3 S?: Now, it was time for the rest of the world to take note, especially the next generation.

0:08:40.3 S?: I am Captain Planet.

0:08:42.4 S?: A little cartoon character that does good rather than going around blasting people.

0:08:46.7 S?: It’s the answer to Rambo path…

0:08:46.9 S?: No, it’s Mighty Mouse of the ’80s or what…

0:08:48.2 S?: He uses mind rather than guns.

0:08:50.0 Paul Matzko: And yet perversely our recycling system itself became a pipeline for dumping massive amounts of plastic waste into the ocean. It’s a reminder of why it’s important to not just care about the environment, we have to be smart about it. The goal should be to promote effective environmentalism, not mere conspicuous conservation, its virtue signaling cousin wants removed. Indeed, there’s actually a term for it, green washing.

0:09:20.3 Thomas Kinnaman: Green washing is a process whereby a company or a government or a person will promote a product based on its environmental signature, that may be false.

0:09:30.5 Paul Matzko: That’s Thomas Kinnaman, a professor of Environmental Economics at Bucknell University.

0:09:34.5 Thomas Kinnaman: The image I have is this dead tree that someone really just painted green and said, “Hey, look at this great environmental asset we have,” but it’s a PR campaign that is trying to persuade people of the environmental integrity of a product or service, which actually may be the opposite, and so I would even think recycling plastic is a big green wash. It’s touted as being good for the environment, not so sure it is.

0:09:55.5 Paul Matzko: And our entire recycling system is built upon just such a lie, that’s because the plastics industry invented it. When you look at the plastic bottle or container, you’ll see a little stamped triangle with a number inside it. The number indicates which one of 10 different common varieties of plastic that item was made out of. It turns out plastic isn’t just one thing, it’s a bunch of things. In theory, the system is supposed to help sort recycling, but it was really created as a marketing ploy by big plastic, think Exxon, Chevron, DuPont, which funded a series of ad campaigns in the ’90s, encouraging recycling.

0:10:40.0 Thomas Kinnaman: They were facing a lot of PR from parts of the country that were gonna ban plastic, and this was, of course, unnerving to the plastic industry, so internally, they created this numbering system to say, “Look, our product doesn’t have to go in the landfill, it doesn’t have to go in the ocean, it can actually be recycled, and we’re gonna help you guys, if you ever wanna do this, we’re not gonna get involved in it, but if you ever wanna do this, it’s one, two, three, four, five… ” and they created the number system, they created the symbol with the arrow going around, this is all an industry created and actually…

0:11:10.7 Paul Matzko: Having those numbers made consumers think that every type of plastic could be recycled and big plastics plan worked like gang-​busters. It’s just that recycling generally doesn’t. You see, only the first two of the 10 types of plastic are worth recycling, and even then only under ideal pristine conditions. Most plastic that you put into recycling bins, over 90% just eventually ends up back in the landfill or in the ocean. Why? Here’s what really happens.

0:11:44.8 Paul Matzko: You throw a type one plastic water bottle in the recycling bin, it gets compressed into a giant cube of plastic and shipped to China or Indonesia or another developing country with a high demand for raw materials for manufacturing, and a low cost of labor necessary to cost effectively sort and process the plastics.

0:12:04.1 Thomas Kinnaman: So the stuff shows up on a Chinese… I’m gonna mention China, ’cause that’s where a lot of it was going, other countries will go to as well. Sometimes they open the container, the big, huge container, like a container ship, and they can look in it and they can see in within 10 seconds, that this is all not good. So this is all targeted for domestic waste disposal, some of it ends up in the ocean. Ocean dumping is something that’s not banned by every country in the world, it’s a part of Waste Management process, and so maybe traditionally waste was more organic in nature, or at least paper, wood, those kinds of things, and so that wasn’t a big issue but with all of this imported plastic that’s unwanted, some of it made its way into the oceans, and so we have these Ocean islands out there. So it’s kind of hard for a somewhat environmentally conscious household to think they’re doing the right thing and deciding whether to put their plastic bottle in their waste container or the recycling container, they put it in the recycling container, they feel good about it, but that plastic bottle, I would argue, would have a greater chance of ending up in the ocean.

0:13:05.7 Paul Matzko: Wow, that’s not great. No one wanted recycling to work like that. But recycling isn’t the only system that doesn’t work the way we were told it would when we were children, back when we were watching shows like Captain Planet. We might feel warm fuzzies when we think about recycling, but it’s the opposite when we think of trash. By the 1970s, the public had started to worry that we were producing so much trash that we were going to fill up the landfills and then the trash would just start collecting everywhere, in streets, on sidewalks, in parks. Soon, we’d live in a dystopian, trashy hellscape. Listeners of a certain age might remember an infamous 1971 anti-​littering ad titled The crying Indian in which an American Indian paddles down a polluted river in a canoe, then walks along a car-​choked highway where some jerk throws a fast food wrapper at his feet. The camera then slowly zooms in on his right eye as a single tear rolls down his face.

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0:14:13.3 S?: People start pollution, people can stop it.

0:14:20.8 Paul Matzko: But the ad was as artificial as the sentiment. The actor was actually an Italian-​American man and the sponsors who paid for it were several of America’s biggest packaging and soft drink companies. If at this point, you’re wondering if there’s a reduce, reuse, recycle movement that doesn’t have a sordid secret industry backer, well, I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you.

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0:14:47.1 Paul Matzko: In response to public worries about the trash problem, Congress created new rules for landfills.

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0:14:53.6 Thomas Kinnaman: Before 1976, every little town had their town dump which was counted as one of those, and those were all… By law, you cannot operate this anymore, you don’t have the lining, you don’t have… You’re not doing this according to the new 1976 law and so these things were closed down and then they’re replaced, instead 10 little municipalities is a big regional landfill that probably had more capacity than all 10 of those little town dumps. What you started seeing, and even the newspaper started carrying this, is the number of landfills in the United States, and you saw this downward line went from like 10,000 to 5000 to 3000. That came out and that was scaring the hell out of Americans because this… We had no place in the country to fit this garbage, it was thought that we were running out of space within the lines going down, it was… And so we had to start recycling our plastic is what came out of that and we really haven’t done a very good job of it in the 40 years since.

0:15:43.7 Paul Matzko: Ironically, that law only heightened people’s fears. Why? Because the newspapers picked up on the downward trend of numbers, that 3000 is a smaller number than 10,000 and they ran that as the headline without mentioning the actual landfill capacity was increasing. It was consolidation, not an actual shortage. So the landfill shortage wasn’t real, it was a statistical artifact of consolidation, but that doesn’t mean that everything was copacetic with the old landfills. For example, it was common practice to just pour gasoline on top and light the dumps on fire, that way, you’d burn off material and make room for more garbage. That wasn’t a great idea. But just as the reality of recycling doesn’t match public perception, the same is true of landfills. A modern landfill only bears a passing resemblance to the dumps of yesterday and the future of recycling is going to be highly dependent on these landfills. First, let me describe the basics of a modern landfill.

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0:16:54.4 Paul Matzko: It begins with an impermeable clay or plastic liner to prevent groundwater contamination. As the organic material in the landfill slowly decomposes, it creates a sludge called leachate. It’s just as tasty as it sounds, [chuckle] that is piped away and treated. Then it’s fitted with a methane venting system to burn off the other by-​products of organic decomposition. The older dumps had none of these measures in place, they really were just pits that we threw trash into.

0:17:26.6 Paul Matzko: Now, even the modern landfill system isn’t perfect, sometimes that liner can be breached causing the leachate to escape into the water supply. Organic decomposition produces methane, a major global warming emission that traps roughly 25 times more heat than CO2, that’s worth being concerned about. But guess what doesn’t contribute to either of those problems. Plastic. Plastic is chemically inert underground, it doesn’t degrade into leachate, it just sits there. It doesn’t generate methane, it just sits there. It doesn’t break down to microplastics like it does in the ocean, it just sits there, which means that the worst thing you can do with a plastic bottle is to recycle it only to have it end up being dumped in the ocean. It’s actually far better for it to just sit in the landfill. And while landfills certainly aren’t lovely when they’re operating, it’s only a temporary problem. The average life expectancy of a landfill is about 40 years and when they close a landfill, they seal it with an impermeable layer, bulldoze earth on top of it, and sometimes they even turn them into public spaces, parks, nature preserves. As it so happens, my producer, Landry lives near a closed landfill in Helsinki, Finland. Here’s what it sounds like.

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0:19:14.0 Paul Matzko: Not to put too fine a point on it, but when a landfill is full, it just ends up being land.

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0:19:22.7 Paul Matzko: I don’t want you to think of landfills as permanent resting places for our trash, they can be so much more.

0:19:28.3 Travis Wagner: So one of the misnomers of landfills is that they are disposal units because materials like plastics and metals don’t degrade.

0:19:37.4 Paul Matzko: That’s Travis Wagner, an environmental scientist at the University of Southern Maine.

0:19:43.9 Travis Wagner: What they really are are long-​term storage units, which has some different implications, on one aspect you store those materials for a long time and they are then potentially in the future for recovery.

0:19:57.5 Paul Matzko: The way I like to think of landfills is as time dilated resource mines. Okay, stay with me. What I mean by time dilated resource mine, is that even if right now, the contents of a landfill are worthless trash, at some point in the future, that trash could have value and we’ll want to extract or literally mine that material to make new things. In other words, landfilling is a form of recycling, just one that’s chronologically displaced. There are quite a few historical examples of landfill mining, like the push to scavenge tires and scrap metal from dumpster in World War II. My favorite though, is the great Atari video game burial of 2014.

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0:20:48.1 Paul Matzko: Now, back in 1983, the Atari Company, which made video games and consoles was on the precipice of bankruptcy, it over-​produced a video game version of the hit movie, ET the Extra-​Terrestrial.

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0:21:07.3 Paul Matzko: But there was so little demand for the game, and to be clear, it was notoriously terrible. That it was cheaper to load up 10-20 tractor trailers with millions of the cartridges and just dump them in an unmarked spot in the landfill near Alamogordo in New Mexico. But fast forward 30 years, and that video game had become a collectors item with copies going for as much as $1500 a pop. Rumors of the Atari dump site and millions of rare game copies circulated online, it was just a potential gold mine for whomever identified exactly where in the landfill the games were. So the town sanctioned the little landfill digging and over 1000 cartridges were recovered and sold for a nice profit. That’s rather niche, of course. We’re not gonna transition to a classic video game archaeology-​based economy any time soon, except in my dreams, but there are other recent examples of successful and more importantly, scalable landfill mining operations. In fact, there’s one not far from where Travis and I live in Maine.

0:22:17.2 Travis Wagner: In our own backyard in Portland, Maine, they actually did it, and it was the first and thus far that I’m aware of, only successful landfill mining project that didn’t have government involvement. It simply happened with all free market forces determining whether it was a viable project.

0:22:39.7 Paul Matzko: Here’s how it works. Portland is one of a relatively small number of US cities that burns its waste to create energy, we’ll talk more about incineration in a bit, but what that means is that the end product is ash, which then gets landfilled.

0:22:55.4 Travis Wagner: There’s a lot of ash, but there’s also stuff that doesn’t get burned, so little propane tanks and mattress springs, ’cause that didn’t burn, but if you take an old box spring, everything about that that’s flammable did get burned. So any wood and fabric and foam and plastic was burned off, so all that you’re left with is the bed springs in that case. It’s called an ashfill or sometimes we call it a monofill, which means it has only one type of waste, so all that diapers and junk is gone. And you also… Because you know what’s there, it’s easier to process. And so those are the things that go right, so you know what’s there, how much is there, it’s easier to process and there’s a higher concentration than regular trash and there’s no methane gas.

0:23:44.9 Paul Matzko: That metal has value on the open scrap metal market, so the ashfill allowed a company to come in, excavate the ash, run it on conveyor belts through screens and then by a magnet that pulls out the various medals. The ash goes back into the landfill, the metal gets sold, repurposed as new products and our waste system becomes just a little bit more sustainable. The landfill’s biggest financial gain from the mining however isn’t actually the direct payments from the mining company, but the simple fact that the extraction creates more volume in the landfill, extending its life and allowing more material to go in before being closed up. That’s worth something. In the case of eco-​Maine’s ashfill, it’s worth perhaps as much as $3 million to $4 million dollars all in, and the mining is ongoing.

0:24:38.3 Paul Matzko: This is great. We’re turning trash into treasure. But it’s only feasible in particular situations right now, like ashfills. We can make this kind of mining more feasible in more places, we just need to do a better job sorting our waste. As Travis noted, it’s easier and cheaper to extract resources from a monofill than from a regular landfill, which is piles all different kinds of materials together from organic waste to every kind of plastic to metal, glass and so on, that makes it harder, which makes it more expensive, which means we don’t do it, which means we don’t extract and re-​use those resources, which means we use more freshly extracted or created materials, which means a greater burden on the environment.

0:25:28.4 Travis Wagner: The market has to be bright, first of all. Now the costs are difficult to predict because in a typical landfill, you have no idea what’s in there. So in a regular mining operations, you’re gonna do some sampling, but it’s not homogeneous material, so you don’t know what was disposed, where, how. And so even with some sampling, it can be very difficult because with sampling, you’re gonna assume some sort of uniformity. It’s really difficult to do that. The other thing is there’s lots of problematic materials in there, whether it’s organics, diapers, all sorts of material, all that has to be removed ’cause you’re interested in the commodity, you’re not interested in the diapers and the dirt and all that stuff.

0:26:12.3 Paul Matzko: Normally this might be an insoluble problem. We want landfills to sort the categories of material and then bury them together. But they won’t see a return from that sorting until some indeterminate point in the future. Maybe in 10 years we’ll discover new plastic recycling technology that makes types 3-10 worthwhile to reuse or maybe the price of ethically sourced aluminium will sky rocket or who knows. But that’s too speculative for a company, not something that’s gonna get shareholders to invest the capital necessary to make it happen now. We need a way to draw forward in time the potential future profits from that sorted waste. Now, if only there were some kind of mechanism that could reward landfill owners for sorting their waste, tracks the location of that waste and… Oh, does it via an in-​erasable distributed ledger. Let me think. Oh, wait. There is something like that.

0:27:20.8 Paul Matzko: I present for your consideration the trash token, a cryptocurrency that rewards those who invest in the supply chain for sorted waste. People who think the contents of a landfill might become valuable someday, and so have an interest in making that someday happen, well, as close to today as possible, could purchase the trash tokens, which are minted by landfill owners. The tokens value would hinge on landfill owners sorting their types of plastics and other potential recyclables before burying them and identifying where in the landfill they are buried. That means the owners get paid today while crypto investors take on the risk and reward of future returns from mining that material. And we just created a positive incentive for better recycling practices. Let’s think about that solution in a little more detail. The problem is that we have thousands of landfills spread across the nation owned by hundreds of companies and municipalities. Each one keeps its own set of records of what material they process and bury. So the first step is creating a system that maintains a central database of landfill content, but does so in a decentralized distributed manner and that’s what blockchains are great at doing.

0:28:39.6 Kate Sills: Yeah, I think when it comes to any data that’s being put on chain, like location data, what you get from a blockchain is knowing that at some point, this entity recorded this data, which is actually a really important thing to know.

0:28:58.1 Paul Matzko: That’s Kate Sills, a software engineer at Blockchain startup, Agoric. What that means is that even if a landfill company goes bankrupt or loses its records in a fire or flood, heck if 95% of those companies don’t exist a century from now, we’ll still have an account of what went into those landfills. Given that we’re talking about time dilation and future mining, that’s really important. However, there is a problem.

0:29:26.1 Kate Sills: But what it doesn’t give you is, it doesn’t necessarily give you the truth or the accuracy for the situation. So the information that’s going into the accounting might be bad information.

0:29:38.0 Paul Matzko: In other words, a blockchain is a distributed lossless ledger that anybody can look at, but it doesn’t itself guarantee that the information fed into it is accurate. It could be a garbage in, garbage out problem if you’ll pardon the pun. In blockchain terms, this is called the Oracle problem. The need for some kind of off chain external authority to validate the information being put on the chain, but there are some ways of providing Oracle validation for our trash token blockchain.

0:30:09.9 Kate Sills: How would someone know that a token that is minted on chain actually corresponds to something that’s sorted. If one landfill is saying, “I’ve sorted all of this glass, I think this is worth 1000 glass tokens” How do we know that that’s actually true?

0:30:28.9 Paul Matzko: Well, you could ask landfills to mint their own particular tokens and then ask individual investors to verify that each landfill is doing what they promised, but that’s not really workable. How many investors are able and willing to drive out to a landfill themselves to check?

0:30:46.9 Kate Sills: Another thing that you could do is have a third-​party audit system or organization. This is something that, for instance, the US has in the area of food safety. We have food safety laws, but a lot of what actually gets enforced is through a third-​party audits. So a big company like SafeWay will require all of their suppliers to go through these third-​party audits and that’s how they keep the quality up. So I think that’s something that is very plausible for something like this, you might have the landfill organization that people voluntarily decide to join and they’re the ones that actually confirm that, “Okay, this landfill has sorted 1000 tokens worth of glass, we’ll actually mint that and give that to them.”

0:31:31.2 Paul Matzko: So now we have our blockchain run by landfill owners who then hire third-​party auditing organizations to verify that the sorting is taking place, and you could take that system a step further. Even now, part of the plastic sorting process is automated. Big machines with conveyor belts wash the plastic, then they use infrared cameras to detect different plastic types, since different plastics reflect different wavelengths and amounts of light, and then they sort them into different colors, sizes and so on. But don’t think of those just as sorting machines. They’re also potentially validators.

0:32:05.8 Kate Sills: That machine that does the automated analysis of the plastics or the metal or whatever it is, could actually be it’s own entity on chain.

0:32:16.0 Paul Matzko: And through a clever use of cryptography that I won’t get into here, we can make sure that the machine isn’t being tampered with.

0:32:23.0 Kate Sills: The code on the machine is only triggered when plastic flows through and it’s able to actually make sure that this amount has been produced and this amount of waste has been produced, then you could have that machine kind of make its own transaction on the blockchain, and make its own assertions.

0:32:40.1 Paul Matzko: Think of it like an advanced version of an electronic voting machine, like the one at your polling place. It automatically scans the ballots and reports the results, it also keeps the paper copy of the ballot for a potential hand-​done audit. These machines have been highly accurate, and contra post-​2020 sour grapes, relatively tamper proof. We’ll adopt something similar for our trash chain with on-​chain plastic sorters generating data for the chain subject to periodic human audits. Even so, all of this seems like a lot of work. Why would our landfill owners sign up? Because it would allow them to monetize the future potential value of their sorted waste. They tell the blockchain that, say, 100 cubic yards of landfill at a given GPS location at a particular depth is primarily type 4 plastic.

0:33:33.8 Paul Matzko: Right now, we can’t profitably recycle that plastic, but maybe some day it will be profitable to mine and process, and that possibility will attract present day investors who are interested in buying those tokens from the landfill owners since they represent shares and future mining rights. And the amounts wouldn’t have to be large. Remember that ashfill in Maine, it’s returning potentially millions of dollars and profits the miners, because the material is easy to locate and process. That’s the key. Okay. I think we’ve made the point that there are market-​based mechanisms that we could use to reward landfill owners who do a better job sorting their waste. Through voluntary action, we’d be encouraging owners to sort their materials and make it easier for future generations to mine, recycle and reuse. In fact, burning off the methane emissions from the organic matter in the landfill could even power the computers that are validating the blockchain. It kind of amuses me that people often complain about cryptocurrency miners burning lots of electricity. Well, in our future landfill, our crypto blockchain miners are making it easier for actual real life miners to do their part in recycling and reusing. It’s the circle of life or well, trash, I suppose.

0:34:58.1 Paul Matzko: So we’ve established a few key elements of our futuristic waste disposal system, we’ve created a market incentive to do a better job sorting waste, we’ve kept it out of the ocean and buried it safely with the intent of mining and recycling it in the future, but there’s still a missing component, organic matter sucks. Food waste, lawn clippings, leaves, it all rots underground and produces toxic leachate and methane gas and well, yes, we can treat the leach and burn the methane. What if we were able to skip the intermediate step entirely? Good news, we can. We’re just gonna torch it.

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0:35:44.0 Paul Matzko: Burn baby burn. Now, the jargon that waste disposal experts prefer is thermal treatment, but it just means burning it. They use the euphemism in part because when you say the words trash and fire, it gets people thinking of plumes of black smoke, horrific air pollution and the like. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. You see, modern trash incinerators are so efficient, they scrub their emissions so thoroughly that a municipal incinerator, big enough to burn all of the trash of an entire city emits about as much pollution as your backyard barbecue grill. And we can do that right in the heart of our biggest cities.

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0:36:29.5 Paul Matzko: Other countries that are more environmentally conscious than the US, have already been leading the way.

0:36:34.8 Speaker 7: A lot of progressive countries, Northern European countries, Denmark, we always think of as the champion of the environment, they rely very heavily on incineration as does countries in South East Asia. This new generation of incinerators 2.0, if you wanna call it, are amazing facilities. And they love plastic, by the way, plastic is very combustible. They generate energy, they generate the Tritium, even the ashes. The ashes come out of the incinerator, they can actually use magnets to pull any metals out of there then afterwards, no separation required, we’ll take care of it at the end. And then the ashes after that are used to make these pavers, there’s zero waste coming out of these things.

0:37:09.1 Paul Matzko: My favorite example though, of these high-​tech incinerators is in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I do mean in Copenhagen, it’s not on the outskirts of town. It’s a block from luxury apartment complexes, and even the Copenhagen Opera House. It was designed by a firm that specializes in carbon neutral buildings, that burns all 440,000 tons of the city’s non-​construction waste each year. They’re even gonna start importing foreign waste to burn to heat the water that powers its turbines, which generate 40 megawatts of electricity or enough to power 30,000 homes. They call it Amager Bakke, Bakke meaning Hill in Danish. The name was chosen because the 328-​foot tall building is half as tall as the highest Hill in the entire relatively flat country of Denmark, and what better to do with a new tall building than build a ski slope on top of course.

0:38:09.4 Paul Matzko: That’s right, Danes have one of the highest percentage of skiers in the world, but few places to ski, so they put a quarter mile long dry ski slope on top. In fact, the special artificial turf they used for the slope is made from the ash generated by the incinerator. And that puts Copenhagen on track to be the first carbon-​neutral world capital by 2025, and they did it without the requisite anti materialist, wailing and gnashing of teeth that we’ve come to expect from American environmentalists, all organic care shirts and locally sourced self-​flagellation. As the architects put it, it’s a “crystal clear example of hedonistic sustainability.” The belief that a sustainable city is not only better for the environment, but also more enjoyable for the lives of its citizens.

0:39:04.2 Paul Matzko: But this doesn’t just have to be a Danish or European success story. We can do it too. Let’s put one of these incinerators right in Manhattan, we’d burn all the borough’s trash while emitting a little more steam than a couple of those sidewalk cones you see on New York City streets. It would be easy-​peasy to hook up the incineration’s Hot Water Production System to New York City’s already existing district heating system and heat much of Lower Manhattan. The warm water could even be used to inexpensively heat and irrigate vertical urban greenhouses that would grow fresh local produce right in the heart of the city. In fact, let’s double down on the plan. Madison Square Garden is getting a bit long in the tooth. We’re actually considering building a new stadium elsewhere. So let’s put our incinerator on the ground floor. Instead of a ski slope on top, let’s have them build a brand new stadium. The ash produced could be repurposed to create artificial turf for the playing field, or to create durable asphalt alternatives to repair the city’s many potholes and to resurface its streets. And of course, the whole stadium would be powered by the incinerator, which would produce enough excess electricity for hundreds of thousands of apartments.

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0:40:23.3 Paul Matzko: Scientists have a term for this kind of vision, Industrial Ecology. The goal is design production in industry to be complementary to both natural and built environments, not antagonistic to them. The platonic ideal that it aspires to is the creation of a fully closed sustainable loop of production, recycling and reproduction. It takes the old reduce, reuse, recycle mantra and systematizes it, transforms it from conspicuous conservation into effective environmentalism.

0:41:00.4 Travis Wagner: That’s the industrial ecology park concept, holistic smart thinking where it eliminates the concept of waste, that waste is a resource and just throwing it away is myopic.

0:41:14.9 Paul Matzko: Some combination of these new waste systems will be in our future. We’ll have urban incinerators warming our homes, landfills as time dilated resource mines, we will turn our trash into treasure. We’ll incentivize responsible conservation and better recycling, an industrial ecology that creates pro-​social spaces while fueling economic growth and better living conditions. The remaining question is, how quickly we embrace this better way. Every time you hear a report about the Great Pacific garbage patch or listen to a local politician complain about the location for a new landfill or the cost of recycling, I want you to think this. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s reject conspicuous conservation and embrace effective environmentalism. As Captain Planet always said, The power is yours. I’m Paul Matzko, this is Building Tomorrow, and I want more landfills.

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0:42:27.2 Paul Matzko: Even though creating a podcast isn’t quite a task on the same scale as saving the planet, this episode is the product of our own merry little band of planeteers. Special thanks as always to our producer, Landry Ayres, and to Greta Langhenry, Natalie Dowzicky and Aaron Powell for their feedback along the way. By our powers combined, this is Building Tomorrow. If you enjoyed this episode, give us a positive review wherever you download your podcasts so that more people will discover this show. And stay tuned for next episode when we ask, Do your things spark joy? That’s right. We’re talking Marie Kondo and the radical future of material possession in a digital age. If you want more podcasts and articles about the intersection of liberty in the modern world, go to lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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