This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. See the full interview below.
Shelley Robbins holds a degree in economics from Duke University, where she spent time at the Duke Marine Lab, and an MBA from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Her varied experience includes working with lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center, regulating water and wastewater utilities for the Florida Public Service Commission, advocating for the protection of the Florida coast and outer continental shelf in Governor Lawton Chiles’ Environmental Policy Unit, and facilitating technology transfer at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. She has been with Upstate Forever since 2007 and has lived in Spartanburg since 1998. She covers energy, transportation, and solid waste and recycling issues.
This interview was recorded on May 28, 2020.
Resources:
- Upstate Forever: www.upstateforever.org, srobbins@upstateforever.org
- Plastic Pollution: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
- No 'Away': Why is the U.S. Still Offshoring Plastic Waste Around the World?: https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2020/4/6/why-is-the-us-still-offshoring-post-consumer-plastic-waste-around-the-world
- Four strategies to tackle the carbon footprint of plastic: https://anthropocenemagazine.org/2019/05/reducing-the-carbon-footprint-of-plastic-is-doable-but-not-easy/
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Fiona Martin (FM):
Welcome to Shelley Robbins from Upstate Forever. Thanks for joining us on The Eco-Interviews today. How are you doing?
Shelley Robbins (SR):
I'm doing great. Thank you.
FM:
Awesome.
SR:
So honored to be here. I appreciate this.
FM:
I'm super excited to speak to you about plastic and recycling and waste management because I think there is just ... I know me personally I just didn't know a lot about plastic, and so I've been searching for someone to talk to about it and learn more and share that with our audience, so I'm really excited to get talking with you about that. But let's start out with why don't you tell us more about yourself, Shelley, and then tell us a little bit about what Upstate Forever does.
SR:
Okay. Let's see. My education is I have a bachelor's degree in economics from Duke University, and that actually plays a really big role in what I do. And then I have an MBA from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. That's just where I was at that point in time. I've had a liberal arts career. I've done a lot of different things. I've worked for the Public Service Commission in Florida. I've worked for the governor's office in Florida under Lawton Chiles who was an amazing human being. I've worked for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and then moved to Spartanburg in 1998 and did several different jobs in Spartanburg until I landed at Upstate Forever almost 13 years ago. I'm now the Energy and State Policy Director at Upstate Forever so I am our presence in Columbia. I'm registered to lobby for the organization, and I also basically frame our larger policy issues beyond energy, beyond plastics, the whole shebang.
FM:
Nice. All right. Today's topic we're talking about plastic. Plastic is something, from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed, I'm interacting with, I'm touching, I'm drinking from, I'm using. I mean, everything is plastic.
SR:
Yeah.
FM:
So even though it's a material, and plastic isn't a single material, there's lots of different types, I still think there's just a lot of mysticism around this, so can you give us a history of plastic, what it's made of, when it came into use, kind of a life cycle of plastic in a general sense?
SR:
Sure. Plastic was invented in 1907. It was first called bakelite. It was used as an insulator for electrical stuff. The electrical industry was just getting off the ground at that point, and it created a lot of heat and a lot of fire. Bakelite was created to insulate those devices. And then it just continued to do that for a while until the 1950s. And then it took off like a rocket. If we think about our history and what else happened in the 1950s, was the automobile boom. That's where we tie plastics and fossil fuels. A lot of people don't realize that. Plastics are a very profitable by product of the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry works very hard to keep the plastics industry growing and expanding.
I'm looking at a headline right now that says, "Shale gas is driving new chemical industry investments in the US," and a lot of that is plastic. Basically, there's a by product of what they call the cracking of fossil fuels, and this by product they didn't have anything to do with it, and now they've realized that they could very inexpensively make plastic out of it, and it's just growing and growing and growing and becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Now, the other thing about plastics, its value as a recycling commodity is also tied to the price of oil, tied to fossil fuels. Everything is tied to fossil fuels. Now that we're in this tremendous valley of fossil fuel prices, our recycling commodities have also very little value. Communities that used to have robust recycling programs are now having a hard time getting someone to pay them, or even they might pay an entity to take this off their hands if they're still operating their recycling programs.
There are some plastics that do still have value. The highest valued ones are number 1s and 2s. Number 1s would be your water bottle. Number 2 might be your laundry detergent container. Those do still have some value in the system, but the rest of it is very difficult to deal with and often gets landfilled today.
FM:
Right. That's a big point. I didn't know until recently that plastics were tied in with fossil fuel, so that's definitely something to highlight. Like I said, sometimes you think plastic is just magic, but it is coming from fossil fuels. And then recycling. My understanding is that it really kicked off the reduce, reuse, recycle campaigns in the '70s. I'm born in the early '80s. I've grown up with this idea that we can recycle things, but as you mentioned, there's different types of plastics: type one, type two. I understand it's all the way through type seven. Not all of them are same. Some can be recycled, some can't. Can you tell us a little bit about ... I mean, can plastic be recycled? What type of plastics can be recycled, what can't, and then what is the lifespan of recycling? Can you eternally recycle plastic?
SR:
No, you can't. It's tied to fiber length. These 1s and 2s ... Your berry container we call them clamshells. Those clear plastic containers are also technically 1s, but they are not easy to recycle. They are not in demand right now. I'm speaking generally. There are going to be some places where certain things are, but generally speaking. Your clamshells, I'm throwing mine away, and it hurts to do that. My water bottles I just don't buy them in the first place, but if I did, I would recycle them. 1s and the 2s have much longer fibers, so the longer the fiber, the easier it is to then take it and turn it into yet another item, but it probably can only be done about once, and then that fiber chain is broken and it becomes a waste item.
For example, if you think about the flimsy little plastic that you might buy plants in at the garden store, they have a short fiber valueless. You can't do anything with it at the end of line. There are few exceptions, what we call films. Films are polyethylene: your bread bag, your overwrap for your paper towels and your toilet paper, your grocery bags. One interesting recycling use that is happening with those is Trex, that fake wood that you build an outdoor deck with. Trex incorporates a lot of that into it.
I believe we still have a place in South Carolina that manufactures Trex, and so our films when you take those to the separate container at your grocery store, don't put them in with your commingled recycling because they will tear up equipment, but separate them and take them to the grocery store and recycle them there. And if you're in South Carolina, for example, hopefully, it actually will get recycled and turned into somebody's deck. Never any guarantees, of course.
FM:
Yeah, let's talk about those recycling plants basically. I've seen documentaries-
SR:
A MRF. We call them MRF.
FM:
A MRF.
SR:
Materials recovery facility. A MRF.
FM:
All right. I've seen documentaries that talk about how we used to sell our recycling to China, so maybe it was sorted here and then palleted and shipped off to China. I heard that dried up a little bit. China had crazy air pollution and the Olympics were coming, and so they said no more, and then it got shipped off to other third world countries. I think part of waste is understanding that even though it leaves your hand at the recycling bin or your home trash can, that it still is going somewhere, so can you tell us a little about what's happening once it leaves my hand and either gets recycled? Or the other option would be landfills.
SR:
The worst case scenario is it goes somewhere and poisons someone, and I'll get to that. Ideally, if you have a well-functioning system in place locally, it does go to your mixed recycling, your paper, your cardboard, your plastics and your steel and aluminum. You throw them all in the same bin, and they got to a MRF, a materials recovery facility, which is part-human, part-mechanized sorting of these different things. And they're really fascinating to watch. They used to take glass. They don't now because that's a whole another story, and we can talk about that. But the first thing they would do would be drop the glass. They would have glass breakers.
Sometimes there's a conveyor belt that moves at a certain velocity, and aluminum cans or steel cans will shoot off at a certain velocity and they will drop in a certain place. It's pretty amazing. There are blowers. Different ways to sort out all the different things that are in that commingled group. Then the different products are baled and then what's left over is also baled. And it was those leftovers, the stuff that did not have a market in the United States or anywhere. Those were the things that were shipped overseas. What would happen is as we are exporting and bringing all these containers into our ports in the United States, of course, South Carolina has a massive Port of Charleston, there would be these empty shipping containers, and so it was easy enough and cheap to send things like that back. We're also sending those nurdles back.
The containers come in full of everything we buy at Target or whatever, and then they go back out with our waste. Now, in 2017, I've got some good numbers here, we were sending out 276,000 shipping containers. We were exporting 276,000 shipping containers, and China was a big taker of that. In 2018, they passed a policy. Some people call it the Green Wall. They called it the National Sword Policy. And they stopped accepting most imports of things like that, electronic waste and low-quality plastic waste. In 2018, we exported 157,000 shipping containers. Then, India got wise, and India banned the importation of that type of waste. In 2019, we were down to 88,000 exported shipping containers. A lot of it now is going to Malaysia. That's probably the biggest recipient. And as of 2020, we're still exporting 5,600 containers a month to other countries. Turkey is one of those countries as well.
What journalists are finding is that that plastic is being burned in those countries. And if you burn it, of course, it releases dioxins, and it's finding its way into the food supply, so that is a very bad outcome.
FM:
Yeah. You spoke about those nurdles, and I remember you referring me to an article in regards to the Port of Charleston and then finding nurdles there. Can you tell us what that means?
SR:
The nurdles are the beginning. We're exporting both. We're exporting the beginning of plastic and the end of plastic. The nurdles are these tiny, little pellets that come off of the cracker plants where fossil fuels are being processed, and they then become all of your other plastic products. And so they're at ports. Port of Charleston is one. They have facilities that move these crates of nurdles, and sometimes they spill. And they're going to be exported to Europe, to all over the world in order to become future plastic products in those countries. They're so hard to contain. You drop a crate or something, and they're right by the ocean. They're everywhere, and you can't get them back.
Just this spring I found that the Port of Charleston in the Charleston area was the second worst nurdle spill site in the country after a site in Texas. Of course, Texas is a big petrochemical import state as well.
FM:
Yeah. I just watched the docuseries that's on Netflix. If anyone wants to watch one of these, it was in the Dirty Money series. It talked about Point Comfort in Texas and the Formosa Plastics Company there and not only the nurdle pollution in the bay, which ends up in the fish and destroyed fishing in that area but also the amount of air pollution that they pumped out and the knock-on effect with children with ADHD, pneumonia, all these respiratory infections, and then the men and women working at the plant having toxicity issues, cancer, just the entire thing. We have EPA regulations, but there was no enforcement of it, and there's a lot of money involved in passing hands between politicians.
SR:
There's a lot of money.
FM:
And that stuff. And it's just a seedy world that I think most people are just not even aware of. I hate to hear that Charleston is experiencing this. And that brings us to South Carolina. You work for Upstate Forever, which is in the Upstate of South Carolina, but South Carolina has many environmental issues that the rest of the nation also faces, and so I'd love for you to talk about some of these. To kick off - people are coming a little bit hip with plastics, and it seems to be the two big initiatives are plastic straw ban and a plastic bag ban, but there's been pushback from industry and groups to these types of bans. Can you talk to us about that?
SR:
Yes. The force behind all that is the American Chemistry Council, and they are heavily tied to the petroleum industry. A big shock. One thing I love. They call themselves the American Chemistry Council, not the American Chemical Council. That's very intentional because, "Chemistry that's a good thing, right?" They have been behind two efforts in South Carolina. One is what we call the ban ban. The plastic bag ban ban bill is an effort to prevent communities from deciding on their own whether or not they want to put plastic bag ordinances in place. So many communities on the coast have done this because they're seeing what's happening to marine life.
FM:
Even in my community inland, in Camden, South Carolina we have a plastic bags ban. I live in Lugoff across the river. It doesn't come across the river unfortunately, but it was a big deal. It just came in this year in January 2020.
SR:
That process, the community decided on this. The community decided it was important, and here we have the state legislature saying, "No, community, you can't do that." But South Carolina is a home rule state, and because of that, the communities are given a lot more power to decide things for themselves, and so there's been this tremendous fight in the State House about this bill. We fought it this year. Coastal Conservation League was instrumental in fighting that. I also will back up just a little bit. Coastal Conservation League and Charleston Waterkeeper have also filed a lawsuit against Frontier down in Charleston over those nurdles. There's a brand new lawsuit going forward, a Clean Water Act lawsuit on that with Coastal Conservation League. Southern Environmental Law Center is their legal counsel, and they're all just awesome entities.
Upstate Forever is sort of the mountains version of Coastal Conservation League. We're a regional environmental non-profit. We all work together in South Carolina on common issues. We have an incredibly strong conservation community and a coalition in South Carolina. We're also super sensitive in the state to waste issues, so certain types of legislation that may have passed in other states that is pro-trash has a lot harder time in South Carolina because of this. The other bill was what we call the plastics pyrolysis bill. This, too, was advanced by the American Chemistry Council as a solution to our growing plastics problem. It's a way of using gasification pyrolysis to convert, since plastic is made from fossil fuels, to basically convert it back into a fuel or the components of fuel which are benzene. How you configure the process to determine what you would get out of it on the end.
And then the theory was you sell it again as fuel, and it's a circular process. Well, it sounds good on paper, but it is also heavily reliant, again, upon, number one, you being able to produce a fuel that will actually work and is in demand and that somebody is willing to pay for. Somehow they're willing to pay for that which has had all this processing done to it. How can it possibly be cheaper than the fuel that we already buy? The economics to me never worked out. I did not see how these plants could ever possibly be profitable. And even beyond that, I think they're also far from carbon-neutral.
Ultimately, if you create a plastic bag and then you landfill it, well, at least if you've landfilled it, you have not released more carbon. If you turn it back into a fuel, you burn it again. That's another opportunity to release carbon. That was another effort. That one got through. It got rammed through the House, but we were able to hold it up in the Senate. In the long-term these will all be back year after year, and we will keep fighting them year after year. We heard the plastics pyrolysis legislation passed pretty easily in Florida and in Georgia, and they were a little shocked that they had problems in South Carolina. But again, we have an incredibly effective conservation coalition. There are a lot of us who've been around a long time, and we've had a lot of bad experiences in South Carolina with out-of-state dumping. Many of our legislators are very sensitive to that, and that's a good thing.
FM:
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that for our audience who might not know about that. South Carolina has been known maybe as our nation's dumping ground. We've been burned. We accept trash from New York State. I understand we also accept, am I right in saying, nuclear waste down in the Savannah site. Is that right or wrong?
SR:
Yeah, Savannah River site. Pinewood was a horrible toxic dump that many legislators remember and is now closed down and costing a fortune to monitor. The out-of-state waste was out of control for quite a while. We had sewer sludge coming down from New York and New Jersey. Again, we joined forces, worked together, put regulations in place that have at least no longer incentivize that situation. You cannot outright ban it because of commerce laws, but we're certainly no longer incentivizing and the situation has vastly improved.
FM:
And so the American Chemistry Council is coming in and trying to prevent communities from putting plastic bag bans in place.
SR:
Correct.
FM:
And then they were also pro plastic pyrolysis, which you guys have battled and prevented from coming to the state, correct?
SR:
Right. Yes, we need some kind of option with the plastic waste, but that's not the one. That one seemed like a shell game to me.
FM:
Okay. And then sometimes we see articles or videos as well about incinerators in Europe. I've seen one circulating about Sweden, I think, showing that they have no waste because they incinerate their trash in some way, and people are maybe insinuating this will be an option for the US, but you've told me that you don't think this is a good idea for the US. Can you, first of all, explain what this incineration in Europe is and then why it will or will not work in the US?
SR:
Europe has several differences from the United States. Number one being they source separate their recycling way better than we do for the most part. Most countries do. So you don't have a lot of high value commodities like those number 1 and number 2 plastics going into the waste stream. All of the value that can be captured has been taken out. Also, they're much more dense and you just don't have room for landfills in Europe, so they have to do something. Of course, they have much more stringent environmental regulations with respect to emissions, and people are just going to expect that it's going to cost more. Incineration, when properly regulated and the emissions are properly controlled, is going to be expensive because if you're burning plastics, you are getting dioxins and all sorts of other emissions that are harmful, and they have to be captured. They have to be closely regulated.
The United States, number one, we don't do a very good job recycling, so a lot of those high commodity items, cardboard, paper, fiber, that's where the Btus comes from, things that burn, things that are made from petroleum products, so it's going to be your high value paper, cardboard products and then also your higher value plastics where the Btus are going to come from and which means they're gone. They're turned into carbon, into emissions. Because of that and the fact that we're just not very good at regulating polluters. We closed an incinerator in South Carolina many years ago that caused a lot of community harm. Now there's an attempt to bring incineration back to South Carolina. We're going to continue to fight that because we are not to the point where that is the best alternative.
I hate to say it. We still have plenty of landfill space, but what we need to do now is fiercely protect that landfill space by recycling as much as possible, by dramatically increasing composting and commercial composting and just preserve what we have as long as we can before we bring in something as nasty as incineration as a last resort.
FM:
Interesting. I think sometimes the vastness of our nation can hurt us because we came into, let's say, the origins of the United States, this wilderness, which I think we all know was no wilderness. There were plenty of people here before we got here. It set up a wasteful use of all of the resources. I've just read in one of my Wildflower books about the abuse of land in South Carolina where they would just till and plant and plant, knowing that they were going to remove the fertility, and they did that anyway because it was so cheap just to move over a few hundred acres and do exactly the same thing. Just this idea, and it's similar with our waste. We can just throw it out of sight, out of mind whereas, as you mentioned, Europe is much denser. You throw it over your shoulder and it's going in your neighbor's yard. It's only so long until someone complains about that.
Let's circle back and tell me a little bit about glass recycling because glass is from what we think is a material that can be recycled and should be recycled, but even my community with the plastic bag ban no longer has glass recycling, so what's going on in that case?
SR:
Now, glass is that commodity that can be endlessly recycled. Glass is glass is glass. There are no fibers that get shorter. But what has happened with glass is, first off, communities demanded that glass be brought into the recycling stream. And while prices were high, basically other commodities propped up glass and carried it along, but it was tough on the equipment. It's also very heavy to move. And so in order to be successful, you need to have a glass processor nearby. Many years ago the conservation community tried to pass what's called an ABC bill where bars and anybody with an ABC permit would be required to ... Originally, it was required to recycle all of those containers.
Eventually, it was watered-down to what they just had to get ... They had to look at the numbers. They had to get a bid. But the point is you create a predictable supply stream and a processor will come and locate in your community. That happened in North Carolina. Strategic Materials built a huge facility in Wilson, North Carolina, and there's some in Georgia. That was our goal. We were working with the Department of Commerce on this. Our goal was to get a glass processor in South Carolina, and then that becomes cheaper to haul all that glass to one place where it's then turned into what's called cullet and it can either be turned into fiberglass or more bottles, whatever. That bill failed. It was killed at the last minute by the Charleston hospitality folks. Basically, they said they didn't want to be told what to do with their glass.
Glass continued along for several years, and then all of sudden it was gone. The prices paid for the rest of the commodities dropped. As fuel prices dropped, they couldn't afford to carry glass anymore, and so one by one the MRFs, the material recovery facilities, stopped accepting glass. If a MRF won't accept it, then the city can't take it because it goes from the city to the MRF. That's what happened to glass. There are some pilot projects where they're trying to do some things locally. We have some here in the Upstate.
There's Fisher Recycling in Charleston doing some interesting stuff. There's some small pilot projects that are capturing some of that glass and turning it into things, but for the most part, most communities in South Carolina have stopped recycling glass unless they happen to be on a border, and it is cost effective to take it to North Carolina or Georgia. There's a hauler who can do that. We have a couple of counties on the borders that can still do that, but for the most part it's gone.
The game-changer for glass and for a lot of this would be if there was a price on carbon because recycled glass has a lower carbon intensity. Basically, you burn your furnaces at a lower temperature, and the same would hold for plastics, for everything. If we had a price on carbon, that would go a long way toward solving a lot of these problems and restarting the recycling engine.
FM:
So a price on carbon, is that the same idea as a carbon tax? It would be eventually passed on to the consumer and that would dissuade a consumer from buying something that had a higher carbon footprint, and so it would encourage them to buy something recycled. Is that the right way to understand that?
SR:
It depends on how it's structured. One plan out there is called tax and dividend where there's a price on carbon where the carbon intensive industries they are taxed, but then the money flows back to citizens or individuals who are either lower in carbon emissions or are not contributing to the problem, so it all depends on how it's structured, or there's cap and trade. There's lots of different ways to do it. Recognizing through a price what carbon is doing to our ecosystem would go a long way toward sending the correct message. Companies, if they wanted to avoid that carbon tax, they would find ways to reduce their carbon intensity with something better.
There's growth in plant-based plastics. I don't know if you still call them plastics, but there's a lot of attention growing in creating plastics out of things that are not fossil fuels, and I'm really intrigued by those to see where they go.
FM:
Yeah, so let's talk about that in terms of the future of waste management and how it can be less harmful for the environment. You've touched on a little bit. Plant-based plastics, but basically I imagine just removing plastics from our supply chain and our consumer products. Right now it's there because it's driven by industry. It's also incredibly cheap, and so companies are going to use it because it cuts the cost. But we still have things going to landfills, things that can't be replaced. And then something that gets me super excited would be if we could start composting all of this stuff. Tell us about what you would like to see for the future of waste management.
SR:
Well, there are compostable plastic bags. I'm a customer of a commercial composting company in South Carolina called Atlas Organics. The bag liners they use are compostable. Now this is commercially compostable, which is at a very high temperature. It's not your backyard stuff. But I also buy ... I have to get them on the internet, so there's shipping involved. There's some emissions there. But I buy compostable plastic baggies. When my son was taking a sandwich to school every single day, he's too cool to carry a plastic reusable thing, so the compostable bag the sandwich goes in it, then it comes home in the book bag and then all that goes back into the compost bin.
Seeing growth there and then in the alternatives. Also, just thinking about, "Do I really need this plastic bag?" When I see people go through the produce department and just mindlessly shove things in plastic bags, I just think, "Really?"
FM:
Like bananas, right?
SR:
Yeah. Bananas come with their own little packaging. Why would you put bananas in a bag? If I just go to the store and buy a couple of things, well, number one, I always have my cloth bags, always, always, always. But if I run in and I didn't take a bag and I only bought one thing, I'm like, "I'm not putting that in the bag." So many times I'll tell a clerk, "I'd rather not have a bag if you don't mind." They never mind. Just thinking about, "Do I really need that flimsy little piece of plastic for this purpose?" Just being much more mindful I think goes a long way.
FM:
Yeah, I agree with you. It's interesting. I have my own produce bags that I bring, and I bought some for my stepmom because I was like, "You'll like them. You'll reuse them." It's actually a conversation starter in the store. I've had so many people come up to me and say, "Excuse me, where did you get those?" I was like, "I ordered them on Amazon." I'm not a big fan of using Amazon, but unfortunately, some things only seem to be found that way. And they think it's really cool, and I'm like, "Yeah, why not? We have tons of reusable produce bags like that." What I found interesting, and I've seen this reply to that, is there's a cleanliness factor. There are some people who truly believe it has to be in plastic for it to be clean, and so I think we need to do some education around that. I'm not sure what you think about that.
SR:
Yeah. I mean, I understand if you eat meat and you buy that wrapped in plastic. I think there are certain uses. I think we will move toward those plant-based plastics for those types of purposes. I think that's definitely a growth area there. I know people who insist on straw because they don't want to drink out of a restaurant cup. I'm just not one of those people. I don't think a straw ban is going to solve every problem in the world. I do have my stainless steel straws. I think those are great. I think more in terms of permanence, or if I do have to use plastic. Sometimes you just can't get away from needing a big old gallon Ziploc bag. But what I try to do now more is whatever goes in the Ziploc bag, pre-wrap it with wax paper so that I can then reuse the Ziploc bag again and again and again and again and again rather than washing it. And then the wax paper goes in the compost bin. Even if it is plastic you can make it last a lot longer, and of course I compost.
FM:
Yeah, let's talk about compost. We compost at home and we have been for a while, and it took maybe a week for me to adjust and understand what goes in the compost. I've also tried to expand it out to my coworking space where I'm bringing the compost home with me, and luckily, we can get through it enough to be able to provide that. But I was excited being on a call with you that they identified four large commercial composting facilities in South Carolina, and one of them is nine miles down the road from me, a huge commercial composting facility, which I need to get to this week to get some compost. I understand that not everyone can do home composting. Either they don't have the land, they don't have the patience. I'm thinking of my dad and his wife. They wouldn't have the physical ability to even have a heap compost pile. But do you think we can get to the point where we have curbside compost abilities?
SR:
That's what I have because of Atlas. I pay for it, and I love it. I am absolutely willing to pay for it. I had a t-shirt made a long time ago that says methane is the gunslinger. It's from Fred Pearce's book, With Speed and Violence. It's about tipping points in climate change. And so I've been paying attention to methane and landfills and permafrost and all that for a long time. So by golly, I will pay for curbside compost because if it goes in the landfill, it becomes methane. More than 40% of what goes into our landfills is compostable. I mean, that seems like a no-brainer to me. We are moving in the right direction. There was going to be a bill or resolution that was going to pay ... Vincent Sheheen had put it up that was going to pay a lot more-
FM:
He's my representative.
SR:
Oh, great. It'll be back once things return to normal. It would have DHEC take a look at what it's going to take to get larger scale composting up and running. It does make economic sense for certain entities like grocery stores because they are paying to landfill their waste produce, so they could also pay ... I don't know how the economics work out, but maybe pay less to the compost hauler for all those organics, all that stuff that was going to rot in the produce department. The economics work out for them, but how do we scale it for everyone and make it affordable for everyone? And that's the direction that we need to be working, again, if we're going to keep our landfills running, keep incinerators out of this state and slow down the production of methane in landfills and just turning what came from the Earth back to the Earth.
You were talking about our crop habits where we just used up the land and then moved on. Compost puts it back. Compost feeds the Earth, so it's a nice circle there.
FM:
Yeah. And I think if we're mindful ... I've spoken to one of my friends who's a permaculture chick down in Florida. And we get a little excited about compost because there's something very satisfying about taking something that was waste and turning it back into your land and then growing food from it. This circular economy, this cycle ... It's hard to explain unless you've done it. Everyone I know who's composting and has the ability to do it gets that warm fuzzy feeling from doing it. I think a lot of it is educating people on either composting themself or why we should compost.
I know I was on the hunt for wood chips to build some of the soil in our yard, and I called tree removal places and they're like, "Just take it to a landfill," and you can't get anything from the landfill. I called the county. They just don't have anything set up for residents to get wood chips. It's just not possible. I'm like, "If you have someone driving that and educating people, instead of it going to a landfill, it can go somewhere else." I hope we can do that.
SR:
Yes. Well, as there are more of us, as we space gets tighter and as the climate changes, we are forced to think about these things. That's why we're here in the conservation community to keep those things moving forward.
FM:
Yeah, you're doing wonderful work. It's been incredible to connect with you and other organizations in the state who are doing this great work. Shelley, what would you advise us as individuals to do when it comes to managing our own waste?
SR:
Think. Stop and think. Spend some time with each purchasing decision. Think about what your options are. Is there a way to do this with less plastic? I used to buy bagged kale. Yes, kale. I'm one of those people. I got to thinking, "It's always in this plastic bag." I thought, "There's bunched kale, and it's probably from a farm closer by. I'll just buy the bunched kale and not put in a plastic bag, take it home." That was one. Checked. Did that. Item after item just think through what are your alternatives. Again, it doesn't have to be more expensive. The bunched kale is actually cheaper than the bagged kale. Just be mindful of ... Think about petroleum products that went into making this plastic and then ultimately where it could wind up. It might wind up in Malaysia being burned and turning into dioxins. Is it worth it?
You can't do everything. There is still plastic in my trash can, and of course my trash bag is plastic, although I've bought some recycled trash bags. But tackle as many things as you can. Just think about it. Google. Look for ideas on the internet or just see what your options are. Stop being mindless about it. Be mindful.
FM:
I agree with that. I think, as consumers, mindful consumption is a powerful thing. They make things as simple as possible for you to just move with it, so we're paying for convenience above all else, but really tiny habit changes don't actually cost you more money or more time but make a huge amount of difference, so if we can all be mindful consumers. I think there's an education element. I remember when we first started composting at my house, and I told my dad ... We went from three trash bags a week to the landfill to one trash bag. That's it. My dad's like, "Oh, do you save money?" And I'm like, "No, it's not a money-saving thing. They don't charge us by trash bag, but it's just satisfying. I'm not sending three bags of trash a week to the landfill." Of course, we're not perfect.
SR:
Some communities have what's called pay-as-you-throw. That's another alternative to policy change. It would be difficult to get it accepted widely in South Carolina, but if you did have to pay for every bag that you throw away or for the size of your roll cart. If you pay more for a big roll cart, less for a little roll cart, people would be more thoughtful. The counter to that is in South Carolina folks say, "No, people just throw stuff by the road." I mean, there might be some of that, but I think it would make us all think a lot more about the quantity of trash that we produce.
FM:
Definitely. For sure. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Shelley. I really appreciate your time today. Are there any other thoughts you want to leave us with before we wrap it up?
SR:
I was poking around with some things. Every time I think about plastics and these issues, my mind always goes back to the film, The Graduate. I don't know if you ever saw that, but it was Dustin Hoffman. It came out one month to the day after I was born in 1967 where the guy says to Dustin Hoffman who's young and doesn't know what he wants to do, "I've got one word for you, plastics." I always hear that in my head, "Plastics." And the fact that then finding out that it came out so close to when I was actually born. I always thought that was interesting. We'll continue to fight the good fight and raise awareness. I thank you so much for the opportunity to let me yak about this and for getting the message out there and for everything you do.
Circling back to one of your other guests about people knowing on whose land they live. Cherokee hunting lands in the Upstate of South Carolina. On our side of the Enoree River it was Cherokee game lands and hunting lands.
FM:
Yeah, I still need to get up to ... I have it written down here. There's a reservation up outside of Rock Hill, the Catawba Cultural Center.
SR:
Yeah, the Catawba.
FM:
I still haven't been there. I've been saying I need to and then Coronavirus came, and I really didn't want to be ... I can't help but think I'm that white person coming in with a smallpox blanket. No. I'm not coming in. We'll let them do their thing. But yeah, that conversation was with David Harper for Land In Common. I've always felt a little bit like a foreigner in South Carolina. I spent half my life growing up in Scotland and half here. In Scotland, it's a different feeling. It feels old with roots, but the reality is I live here. I love where I live, and I've been communing with the land more and learning more about it and trying to discover who was here before us and what sort of plants would be here. I actually feel like I belong here a little bit more as I commune more with the land, and so you're right in saying it's very important to understand those things and have that respect back and forth. It's been an interesting journey.
SR:
Well, you're making it a better place and I appreciate that.
FM:
Well, I appreciate you, Shelley. How do people connect with you and with Upstate Forever and the work that you guys are doing?
SR:
We've got an easy website name, upstateforever.org. And then I'm SR, so I'm just srobbins, S-R-O-B-B-I-N-S, two b's, @upstateforever.org. You can find me on our staff page on our website as well.
FM:
Excellent. Well, I hope we will connect with you. I really appreciate your time today and the information you've imparted us about plastics. I just encourage everyone to do their research on it, figure out what those one to sevens are. I'll be sure to share on our social media the information I can find to help people make smart decisions and use this podcast as an educational tool as well.
SR:
Thank you.
FM:
All right. Thank you, Shelley. Have a wonderful day.