we are here tonight to celebrate

edward humes newest book, total garbage edward humes, a pulitzer prize winning journalist and author whose 16 previous books include garp biology our dirty love affair with trash, the forever witness, mississippi mud and the penn award winning. no matter how loud i shout, ed and his family including their rescued racing greyhounds and collie live in southern california for more information, see edward sitcom. he will be joined in conversation by ryan metzger ryan metzger, the red wells ceo and co-founder cdr has overseen ridgewell since inception in 2018. at that time not satisfied with

the existing for getting rid of hard to recycle around his home. ryan and his son owen started a project in seattle helping their neighbors see how simple could be to keep things from landfills. now, more than 90,000 rodwell ridgewell members in seven states have saved more than 18 pounds million of stuff. ryan, his b.a. and an mba from university and previously marketing roles at madrona venture group zoo, lee and microsoft. please join me in welcoming edward ryan. else. thank you madison and thank elliot bay book company for hosting. it's been great to be here. i came to old location in pioneer square. i was a kid and so it's fun to come full like this. i think. great. especially to have this on earth day. hope you're having a great earth day. it's an important one for for us to read well and hopefully for many of you, it's great to be

connected with ed, too. i remember couple of years ago he reached out and it was really an honor and i read his new book, total garbage this. and it was it was a real page turner. i hope many of you also enjoy. it's really a great read and we love to start by how we got. and it was a couple of years ago i had read garp ology. madison mentioned the story of starting redwood with my son owen and and we had done a lot of research and visits and things like that. and i read garp ology. and so when a friend of mine, this guy by the name of joel, reached out and, said, hey, the author of garbo, he would like to to meet you. and i was amazing. and ed and saw our facility and it was was wonderful. so thank you so much that and i'd love to hear you know why did you reach out to read why you know why did you want to feature us in your book? well, first of all, i want to say hello. thanks for coming. happy earth day. and also brian, i didn't realize that you agreed to do before you actually read the book. so that's a real of faith. he's chapter right.

i did read chapter one. oh, yeah. well, so am a former resident of west seattle. moved up here from southern california, near for an employment for my my wife. she says i'm portable. you know, you get your books anyway. so and we absolutely loved living in west seattle and another employment sent us back down south very regretfully. but we still have bonds here and friends here. hope always will. but while i was in west seattle, i read of course i read the west seattle, and there was an article in there that said ridgewell just recently he from, you know, incorporated from owen's list was coming to west seattle. apparently, people were really excited about. and and i learned something about the gap in our of i

suppose unrecyclable materials which which bridwell has found a way to deal with. and i sort of made a mental note. i had written a book about trash and the past and i knew i was going to do one that expands indeed, maybe the view of what we think as waste. and i had down is and bridwell down a storyline i wanted to explore. thank you i wanted to start you garbled. i was as a more narrow view of waste around you know what goes in the garbage can. that's what i did well in our members to focus on but total garbage takes a broader view of waste. and so what would be curious to hear why you decided to go in that direction and think of waste in a broader sense than just what goes in the garbage can? yeah, well, because waste is much more than what we roll to curb every every week. it's it's all around us. it's so deeply embedded. our everyday lives and habits and products that we see it as

normal. if see it, it is all but we. it's everywhere. it's in what we eat and how we prepare our food. it's in how we dress. every time you if you have a car that takes gasoline, every time you go to the pump, four out of $5, you spend is wasted because you know cars are incredibly wasteful. transportation, our most wasteful activity and right behind it or is our energy systems. when you pay your utility unless you're seattle and 80% of your power is renewable about four two thirds of what you're paying goes to waste inherent in making electricity from fossil fuel. thomas edison 100 over 100 years ago said you know we're burning down our our houses and our forests in order to to later and it's crazy i can't wait for solar to come along so even he he you know the builder of massive coal fired plants knew

it was stopgap measure and that we could do better and now we can do better. but meanwhile we have these old systems that we are wedded to that are incredibly wasteful and thinking about waste as the driver, as the arch of a behind many of our big environmental crises that we're facing from plastic pollution to climate change, all of them can be traced back to the epic wastefulness in our most wasteful civilization in history. and that's why i wanted to do the second book. i'm glad you did there's you talk about a mindset mindset shift that i think you probably made as you wrote it and i think i started doing a while ago but even expanded reading your book about all the great stories can you talk about how people can kind shift their their mind as they think of waste and some of the consumer education that you hope people kind of take of.

yeah yeah you know i actually i kind of redid the the 5 hours which used to be 3 hours i edited a couple more hours. but the first one is to rethink rethink how we define waste, to include other activities that are part of our daily lives and also remember that some things that we use constantly and seem to us to be necessary, like, for instance, disposable plastics aren't necessary and then there are alternatives and you can find in everything that we do that there may be a way of of personal transportation that's not exactly a tesla, but it is. and also, you know, a gas burning car that can meet needs. and it's kind of a good enough solution, an affordable one. and i did find such a solution and an entire community that is loving. and i talk about that in book,

but then there's simple things a an entrepreneur, los angeles who started a nonprofit he left the finance world of finance and he's working in food deserts of l.a., where fresh produce and vegetables are hard to come by. and he's converting people's front lawns into urban farms, and he can feed 25 households with weekly deliveries of fresh fruit and vegetables, a thousand square feet of former and use, about 8% of the water doing it because he recycled water and solar power for it and beautiful you know, people don't miss their lawns, say, wow, why move? why mow, my god, i can eat my yard and and there and awesome and it's so obvious when you think about why do we have something so unproductive as grass in front of our houses native plants? and pollinator gardens are also but in places that need food it's it's it's just such an obvious solution and war two we had 40% of our produce in this

country produced in people's they called victory gardens. but what they were we're we need we need to eat gardens. and when we were so motivated we actually did much of what he's trying to do. and in los angeles now, old ideas are new again, i suppose, you know, wasn't there a stat don't remember the details you can fill us in but around vegetable gardening was i think the highest. it's world war two or yes well since depending people have found their green farms and and it's it's actually wonderful and you don't need a big plot of land for one of these farms or to you know, let's say you live in an apartment, don't have a yard to to to farm you can have indoor plant pots in the window. you can do a lot of things. and there's value and health value and you know, a factory farmed tomato like you get, the supermarket can have up to 70% less vitamins and minerals than a tomato that you could grow in your backyard. if the usda measures this the

thing the modern tomato has more of than than ones of the past is more salt like 7014 times the amount of salt like we that right uh and so we have made certain for, uh, reasons that don't necessarily make sense anymore and these kinds changes that we can do on our own and we do collectively matter. one of the stories that most resonated in my house was the one around gas stoves and induction stoves and all the waste there around heating the the air around it and the amount of waste that that goes. it's kind of seen as sort of a luxury is have a gas and that's how you've kind of made it in some sense and but you're talking with gas you're cooking with gas it's a meme it is. and and i think how it became, you know, the fight against it from the industry. and i think there were laws passed around, you know, new construction things that were pretty, you know, on the

margins, very big deals. but it became kind of a wedge issue really in some. and so i think it'd be interesting the would probably start hearing that story. it certainly made me take notice of a gas stove and how there's this old induction that that is quite less wasteful that's out there. yeah. who here has a gas stove and it's okay. well, me too. you know, but i try not to use it and there's ways around that that i, i don't, i don't, i don't think bans are effective. so i, and, and that's i a very controversial there's a lot of like warfare over banning connections and i think it's important to on some of these changes we can make or actually not giving up something we love. they're upgrading to something that's better. and this is one of those examples and the main characters in the chapter about in total garbage, about the cooking are

two chefs who were, you know tried and true guess cookers. that's how you're trained to be a professional you don't know anything else and those old electric stoves, the ones with, the coils that get orange, i mean they're they're horrors, right? they were really hard to cook up. no, chef, do that. so the idea of cooking electricity really didn't seem like a good idea, then went away. and i should say one of these chefs, rochelle bush, she was the personal chef to george lucas, and she had the toys you could possibly want and all of them involved gas. but then she got a more sustainable kind of thinking and she she learned about induction cooking and i don't want to go into the physics of it, but it's basically using magnetic fields to to generate heat inside a pan. you know how your phone, if you have a wireless charger, it gets warm at that warmth. it's kind of a unintended byproduct in an induction.

it's the same thing, but that is the product heat and and it works very efficiently just as electric cars are more efficient than gas powered cars in terms the amount of energy that turns the wheels. it's the same with with stoves. so you can cook faster. the room stays cool because the stove actually get hot. only the pan on top of it. and it is an old texas. oh, it was it was it was first demonstrated the world's fair in in the 1930s in chicago and they called it cool cooking and the way they demonstrated that they put it a book on of the induction coil and put a ticket on top of the book and then water boiled. they made the tea and then somebody read the books and it was brilliant but it was never commercialized fully until fairly recently. why is important for for us non

restaurant chefs. well you can get as my cousin dorothy recently did she just me she said i read your book she's been suffering from long covid and she's had a lot of respiratory. and one of the things she read in the book that we via the voices of the chefs of my book is that there's 42% higher incidence, childhood asthma and respiratory ailments in vulnerable populations like her that have gas. my had had childhood asthma. i had known back then what know now i would have ripped it out a long time ago, but dorothy, she got online and she saw ikea has one of these on sale for $64. it's a single because she was really proud of the the shopping but then she's been using it for about weeks and she says you know, i'm still sick, but my breathing's i don't feel like i'm getting short of and

coughing as much. and i attribute to not turning on my gas stove anymore. and there's actually science to support that. i can't prove that's what's helped her, but, you know, she's doing better and i think that that alone if parents that they could help protect their children with this kind of versus gas and even if they're you know outright climate deniers and they don't care about climate change or they don't think they can do anything about it, they would still want make this change because it's an upgrade, because it's good, because it makes sense and i tried to fill my with similar kinds of propositions where it's a win win and took me framing it around waste that's the big tent that brings people together you feel empowered. whoa. okay. we don't like waste. we can do something. it. yeah, definitely. and i'm not going get induction stove any day now.

you talked a little bit about bands, not something you're you're in favor of and they can become political and charge and things like that. but there is some talk of some policy changes that are more effective than an outright and you know, we're in seattle here and i was excited to see a couple examples in the book of the city of seattle doing some things that were good from the policy sense. one around public transportation and another around reuse, which is something that we all are huge fans of. if you had to give advice to a city like seattle or another city some policy category that may be more effective than outright bans, it kind of making change and getting interested. where would you tell them to go? oh, wow wow. one of the most powerful things that's going on and it started in the state maine and spreading to other states our producer responsibility was pay laws you've probably heard of them and quite quite a few states had have followed lead on this and

it's such a simple proposition because it places the responsibility on the producers of products to take care of them and to if saying for instance that a bottle or a form of plastic is recyclable they have to see that it's done. and if it's not being done, they have to pay for it and they have to clean up after themselves. and the woman who sold this in, maine, she went like rubber chicken. another she's a single mom. she's an environmental activist. and she you know, she'd go to town council and she'd make the same target. you know, i make kids clean up their room when they make a mess. why are we paying to clean up the beverage companies in the big brands mess and and it took her eight years for to start getting going from no waste there to you know what that makes sense that's capitalism should be paying for that so you you guys probably familiar with bridwell so it's a thank you

think about what he's doing our mainstream recycling systems are have are broken we recycle 9% of our plastics in this country. it's a it's a horror. they're in everything are everywhere. plastic pollution is a plague and the ridgewell solution is we can we can find a home for this material whether it's decking or picture frames or this this problematic material he's filling the gap but his subscribers are paying it and they are doing something altruistic and it's it's a deal with a $15 surplus. so, i mean, it's a couple of lattes. okay. it's still it's a big ask because you paying for the system that's supposed to be taking care of this and, you know, and we've talked this as producer responsibility. they should be paying you for well, to do its job because they've created this mess that

is unprecedented in human history since colonial days. the sellers of things came in, bottles and containers were responsible for that material, and they took it back and they reused it because they were valuable. and this this aberration of of this economy is is the exception. this age we live in not the norm and it doesn't have to be that way it's stupid that it's this way. and the thing that ryan said to me, i look forward to day when i'm obsolete and we don't need rid well because, if our systems were working, we wouldn't it but you know we do but until we that was the most impressive thing that you said to me and i really it really stuck with me. thank you. you mentioned the bottle companies and things like that. and there's a little bit of history lessons. the book, which i enjoy reading about and the bottle detector bottle that was a career these these sellers were so anxious to get their bottles back and

people were hoarding them and competitors stealing them that there was actually teams of detectives who would track down missing bottles. can you imagine that? we've gone from the bottle tech detectives to the crying indian, all of us, for you know, people cause pollution. people can stop that. we've been stuck in that mode so long because of that powerful greenwashing, a bit of that and with its curated trash. so you couldn't identify any of the the sources of the litter and, the the italian actor, his inauthentic indigenous garb appropriating culture in order to beat legislation to restore the reuse system was a thousand laws pending in the late sixties and 1970s around the country to force back this conversion, throw away containers and. that ad helped defeat all of that because it was our foot. we have to go pick up the litter

and the companies did it themselves. i mean, they would take them back and you'd have your coca-cola, you bring it in the bottle washing plants. you have to look at the video of the it's like watching flag pins said those mechanical pin centers times a thousand they're just they're so cool not a single piece of silicon in there and yet were able to have this system that did so much to reuse a coke bottle 50 times and then they grind it up and make a new one out of it because glass, unlike plastic is infinitely recyclable. yeah and was that tied to remember the of the plastic must taken off around then and you know it was convenience convenience is sort of what everyone died and know can be conveniently. so people asked me your book a downer. i said, the very first thing you read is that wait 284 or a five pieces of plastic today, cardboard that adds to a credit cards worth a week. that's it. we have been so low in meat

society. collectively, we in how deal with this a natural material that we've turned that last forever in the environment and yet we make something disposable out of it with. no no way to actually reuse of this material. that's a downer. but it's fixable. and these polluters laws are powerful. they will drive. they will put financial burden, and therefore economic model that supports disposable the already out of reach and big when a company has to bear its costs, it looks for a way cut those costs and we got disposable plastics because. it was a cost cutting measure. but if that doesn't work anymore. then there's got to be something better that would be something reusable or, something truly recyclable. and you're the person in may, and i think was the first to get a packaging epr passed, if i'm not mistaken. yes, yes. and they're implementing it now. there's there's at least 18 other states, i think that

either have it or are looking think washington is still working on it. it's been on the docket for for several years now. haven't got a guy and we have others in the state. we have a patent one that passed recently. there's a light bulb, one a battery, one electronic. so there's different categories that have them. and concept is great. it just you pay up at the beginning or the companies have the incentives to to adapt what they sell. you know, on the back end, there's more capabilities for companies like red wall to do with it. so that helps us add paint to our service or something. we did after the epr passed, which was nice to see. you mentioned, you know, some people might see this a downer. i didn't see it that way. and i think many of the readers oh no, i'm telling them it's not a downer. they live up and part of that is because there's many things, some i'm already doing and then other things we can do. they're not very big things to do that can make a difference. and you know, we don't a lawn in our house, you can already check that one off. you know, the shirt i'm wearing is ward. where from? patagonia, where a lot of my clothes come from, where it's used in high quality store they're store that's another

good one. you know the food waste is there's a whole chapter on that. and the amount of food waste in this country is staggering. the stats on that and duction we mentioned you know are there a few that you want to highlight for the audience? well, we were talking to a city, georgia. i love this. so so i went to georgia to visit the person i call the trash genius in in the book because she literally a macarthur genius jambeck she's amazing. and she's the first person to quantify in the peer reviewed paper how much plastic pollution was going into our oceans and rivers. and it was much more than anybody suspected. she first did this study in. 2010 and figures that team came up with was. 8 to 12 million tons of plastic a year globally and, she says you can visualize this by having a full sized dump truck.

dumping plastic glued after plastic every second of every day for a year. that's that's approximately how much that would add up to and she other awful visuals. but that's the one that i'm remembering right now since she did that study. it's least doubled. so that's why we're eating a credit card, because these particles of pollution although they don't break down like food composition, they do becomes smaller particles. our clothes are all plastic. now, when we wash them all fibers are shed the in down the drain and they're often small to be filtered out. and our washing machines don't have filters unless. you live in france where they make them put them on their another simple solution. the causes the problem don't want to pay for and anyway, that's jenny's story. but i got off track. sorry, i get excited about talk.

i'm sorry. i mean there a there's a gender anecdote that i really like too. i think you made me move. you went around the grocery store with her and oh, god, she okay. people cry on. this tour of the supermarket. i'm warning you and you'll never look at the supermarket the same. i said, sure, yet i'm a i've been a newspaper. i've been to airplane crashes. you can't me i came away feeling so sick to my stomach after the. so we spent all this time the rice aisle. she challenged me. find the product and the most sustainable and the rice section and you know, you about what? all the variety of packaging is for a product that maybe there's four variations of the. typical supermarket and this was in a wal-mart supercenter and finally i found i think this is most sustainable product but the unhealthiest it was in a simple cardboard box and it was, you know, the most processed salt,

the you know, a natural thing on there. and then the organic really like harry heritage rice was like unrecyclable combined plastics pouch is that only you only really kind of piece and it was it was so disheartening and the packaging is confused saying you can't tell what can be recycled came as poorly marked or not marked at all and it's so unnecessary there is maybe five different varieties of rice white brown, short and you know a couple little it was wal-mart so they didn't have that extensive array. but the variety of packaging was endless and and it sort of dawned on me that we were not being sold. the food was an afterthought. we being sold the variations in this packaging and and was the real product and the rice was along for the ride. it was really awful. and every part of the i, i would just go right from what i buy, what i need, i get what i always

do or what's on sale. and now i'm paying attention to the plastic, i end up like with three things in my bag, you know, that's because i want to buy this stuff. i go to the farmer's market a lot. yeah. the thing that stuck out to me hearing that was around the waist, really the product, the packaging is what differenti ate. that's what they invest in. yeah, that's easy because we make the packaging as best can to sell it and then the food is i think i counted, you know, 30 different varieties of rice with different brand names, but it was for the four same companies. we're making all this and repackaging it differently for that variety. yeah, i wanted to get back to transportation history. yes, sure. yeah. you said that was the biggest of waste, i think. i think you said yes. so these are all so this town in georgia since the 1970s has been cobbling together, this kind of pathway system, it's like a secondary road system, like maybe 12 feet wide as full or concrete and in different sections there's 100 miles of them now, all the wind through this town of 30,000 people,

almost thousand now as and it goes everywhere to, the local airport. and for them all the restaurants to the business district, the industrial park and cars are allowed on this separate road system. and there's crossings that are marked where it intersects with the regular roads and the main vehicle they drive are electric golf carts. in california. call them neighborhood electric vehicles. evs. they think of you as golf carts and cheap. a lot of them have very primitive in them. they go about 40 miles and that's everybody has a regular car, but that's their main form transportation because it turns out this whole that we need teslas with 300 mile batteries doesn't really match how we drive. i mean, 50% of our trips in a car or three miles or less, 93% of them are 25 miles or less. that's we actually drive and town has figured out that well

these these golf carts are how we drive maybe i went the high school parking lot and it had it strapped these golf carts but it was like line after line of these golf carts with a high school banners on it. mascots is a rite of in this town. it's so normalized they're this kind of transportation that when you turn 15 and if i can drive school now and you're driving a golf, you go it out, you know with dates in your golf cart because normal there you know sounds crazy abnormal i got there but when i arrived i had talked to the and she said i'm going to show you around you're going to love this and that was really a golf cart. you could do some things. it's a really crappy substitute for, a car. i left here thinking my car is a really crappy substitute for, a golf cart, because that's how we actually drive. why i think if we really want to get -- into clean cars, we shouldn't be trying to convince

people to get really expensive enormously heavy cars to replace what they have. i think we be pitching them as the best second car you'll ever know and it'll turn out to be the one you mostly drive for short trips, which are most of our trips. imagine 93, you do 93% in a small format vehicle of your driving test because mostly drive alone, mostly you know, our main trips are to the grocery store to go to eat and our number three is a commute on average drive about in america 37 miles a day. that's it that's our average day, our average commute, 20 miles a day. so we could get -- in cars if we could convince people, keep your car, just keep it, park. they do in the street. most of the if only 9% of your trips, 7% of your trips are in a fossil fuel powered car. we get really close to where we need to be.

that would make a huge difference. and i think there are some some policy to to get there too. and there's a name for someone to kind of impact those changes that was in the book and out of me and i think the person talked about can you talk about the margins oh the barn you had to. so sarah nichols, is this the man i told you about who was the real driving force and the architect behind means extended producer responsibility. polluters pay laws and in fact, that piece of legislation that she crafted has gone to all other states that have known they're it as a kind of model. so amazing. sarah but she only could it if she could get volunteer hours to support her in all communities in maine that she was visiting and talking to and she and early her career of environmental advocacy she had this like wonder woman type of of volunteer named marge and now she says i always go to

community to find my marge and so in the book there's there's a list of ten ways to be a marge. that she wrote and gave gave for the book. but what it really marge is sarah it is a person and. it could be a female or male. marge but or but she is a person who knows. she wants to do something and to to be part of of creating change, positive change, but isn't sure how to go about it. so one of her margins in book is a woman named laura marston, who was starting refill store in portland, maine, and. she was a real advocate. why businesses should embrace over dispose ability and she

sarah how can i, uh how can i sort of take part in the political process? so actually walked her through or here's how you comment on legislation and this is the website you go to put yourself out as a witness and and to submit testimony. and pretty soon she was actually testifying before the main and she said i didn't know i could do this and i didn't know it was so easy to do this to actually part of the solution. that's not just your own individual action, but acting as part of the political process too, to make it collective effort. and and it worked. there was a lot of marches behind this piece of that was a bipartisan bill in the maine legislature. and it is powerful and and unprecedented and it it got rid of the logjam other states were emboldened to do the same thing

because you know the first mover had been had been solved for sure. yeah i think we were to start with a video. you know, we've been doing a lot of talking and things like that, but can we get the video? we could, yes, we i've already said all this stuff, but the visuals to go with them, to go with that. with my computer this week before. there we go. all right. what if our biggest environmental crises from plastic pollution, climate change are all symptoms of just one disease? and it's something we can actually fix that's, right? the planet has an arch villain waste. we live in the most wasteful civilization in history. and this goes way beyond what we roll to the curb week. it's in what we eat and drink and how we cook. it's the main thing you pay for and your utility bills. and at the gas pump waste is so deeply embedded our daily lives that we see it as normal.

if we see it all. but here's the good news. fixing our waste doesn't have to be about giving up stuff we love it's about upgrading to stuff we're going to lose more. and that shift in thinking can save the planet. my name is edward humes and my new book is total garbage how we can fix our waste and heal our world. it's the story of game and ordinary people in our neighborhoods tackling waste and the environmental catastrophes it drives. the former financier turned urban farmer who turns wasteful grass lawns into fresh food for whole neighborhoods where it's needed most. there's the conservative farm town in minnesota that partners with the local university to make wind, solar their cash crop. and you'll meet the seattle dad, who's father and son. we can project is now a powerhouse social impact company that recycles and reuses your

just in plastics, otherwise it would otherwise become landfill or pollution and just that's just a taste of the total garbage story. sorry you're supposed to do at the beginning. i think we're probably the q&a section. if people have questions they'd like to ask, they can about us. do you want to give us instructions there? yeah. you want to come up. we can come in here and ask your questions. first movers. thank you. just like main. so it's not. hello. hello. i can. i think everybody can hear. i really have a question you but

i'm definitely not walking out of here without at least two of your books and i hope you'll sign them. one for my daughter, who's doing amazing. of course. and green work in colorado. i'm working with trying to stand some circular economy type projects in southeast seattle. and i've got five restaurant owners who are willing to hold a signed film multi layer plastic cork and styrofoam and i'm trying to understand how i work with bridwell to make that happen. and i reached out to rodwell well and said. well you have to get a residential channel start there which i will do. but i also wanted to make a point but this can be become something that if a pilot like this or little pilot could show oh this is how much waste we held back the rest through

working with restaurants, then maybe we can to the city and say anybody from the city out there. and say, you know, you need to work with red. well to do the commercial department. yeah. so thank you. yeah, we'd love to work with the city. we'd love to work with restaurants. we're a relatively small team, so we've chosen to focus on the residential side, but there's plenty waste in restaurants and i'm sure even bookstores and other commercial establishments. i think connecting us with the city and, with your restaurant, we'd love to chat and see. we do have some restaurants and coffee shops that we do limited pickups from and so we can see if that would be a match with what our capabilities. and we are near south seattle, so it's just a quick little hop skip and jump to where our warehouses so thank you for your interest. and oh the mike's work.

amazing. and above this i've spoken to and it's related in that i just wanted to share that i, i it's some of these larger grocery outlets i have extensive salad that are frequented by working in mass and certain times today. and i would go to place i like this dog a burger other time but i one time i was like well they don't even have compostable items that you put your things on and i was going to get my tuna there and then i was like, no. and happened twice. and then another time i went there and they had totally compostable, garishly compost of all things to put your food in and and i really like the way the upgrades are you they plastic utensils and as a the store because i found some like i just love to keep they're not throwing corners and they're combustible kind of but even have this attractive dispenser

for compostable for spoon knives that you can just you know nothing to undo and it was this is a real example of commercial upgrade happening in the impossible that's on thank you for that shift is really important and i'm glad you asked about that because it's just such a simple solution or bringing your own container to bring home your take of is and also a pretty simple ask or even have silverware that. you can your cutlery that you can use while eating there too. i would love more salad bars to do that type of thing as well for sure. i have a question. so you mentioned working in california and washington and people in maine, other places. how do you think you've talked about making changes to legislation, working with like residential groups or small businesses? how do you think the of driving

change changes depending on where you are because you know the difference between larger cities, smaller cities or just different mindsets across the u.s. and of course, tremendous variation. but i so i didn't start writing books. i was a journalist, you know, and i wrote about the fabric of the communities where i lived. and that's where i for the kind of solutions to these problems i wanted to highlight in the book. and so tried to have a broad geographical representation because there's cool things going on in different places know who do you know who would the most renewable state in the country is? it is surprising? it surprised me. it's it's iowa it's iowa. so the farmers there got an i started following us ten years ago forming electrical cooperative and using that investing in building these large wind turbines and their

cornfields and their, you know, they're driving tractors around the turbines and and their harvesting the wind, which is a great resource in iowa. and so they have incredibly inexpensive electricity there they are. if they a country, they'd be the second most renewable powered country in the world, which is crazy there their greatest by renewable energy, you know, rivaling washington and, they don't do it because they're climate activists, they do it because. it makes economic sense for them because. it is part of their economy. and they'd be foolish not to exploit and it's a completely read state, but they are doing something powerful that also helping to save the world, save the planet. and that's they're focused on efficiency and on and they saw the waste in their existing power systems. and that was a tremendous

motivation for them. and think whatever when we can agree on things that aren't divisive, we can make tremendous like that. and i was heartened when i learned those figures. and the secret then is to, you know, find what works for local communities, branch off it is rather than top down legislation per se and i think we need both. we can't shame consumers into like the like there's all litter ads to it's all our fault we have to fix it. i think our chain our our individual choices they when they become collective do can drive those top down solutions but it also has to work the other way and i on plastic pollution we really need a down solution but on renewable energy that's a community thing with it where we're seeing a lot of progress and. i mean, seattle's really doing it right.

i think they only a tiny little bit of coal left maybe, but one thing on the plastic, just add my perspective a little bit. i definitely agree with the government side, the policy, but i think what can do and small businesses, large businesses sometimes move a little faster a lot of these laws that are around know they'll be kick in in 20, 30 or 2035 or something like that. well how many millions of pounds the rainbow community and others like us save between now and that? and how can we catalyze innovation on the processing side? so when those things do happen, there's more options domestically to recycle things. so i think it's undoing the pace and knowing the role that consumers and kind of fast moving groups can do and then also advocate for the top as people like sarah in maine and have doing. but i'm thinking, well, i mean people particularly i'm going to guess your generation are really into thrifting and the reuse economy would you would you be supportive of that yeah so and that's that's very powerful it's

just the most fast growing part of the apparel industry reuse i saw some stats it blew me away. 50% of americans 2022 bought a used of clothing, 100% of the stage two. probably. well, get yourselves ahead. you know, there's a lot of there's there's very encouraging things happening. i mean, we have a huge challenge, even if all these great things happen all over away, we'd still also to be building resilience and to deal with the damage that's already been done. but the choices that we're making now will make things better in the future and keep it from getting worse. so that's important. thank you. thank you you.

first off, i just want to say thank you. this is giving us all hope here. i think this is great. so my question to both of you is, what do you think about waste to energy solutions. that's a mixed bag. it has a history of of imposing additional burdens. the and communities with the least resources in power. you know that's where the facilities up. on the other hand you have countries like denmark who have figured out how to make waste energy plants that emit less than a backyard barbecue view of some of the really nasty things that come out of it. and it's a big part of their non-fossil fuel i guess it's be considered that power sector so i, i think that trash is a terrible fuel because not it just doesn't produce as much

energy as other other things that we can get energy out but as a better than nothing solution maybe it's okay for some communities. yeah. i haven't dug into the science too deeply. i know we operated in minneapolis where they have a facility and it's quite controversial and they're trying to change it and move it. i think from what ed mentioned as well around just the community, around it has had health problems to. other people i've got stoves and things like that. you know, the same things are asthma and those sorts of things i think can cause it there. so i think it depends on the details of it. there are examples where i think it probably is a positive, but there's also, you know, how is it implemented? where is it placed? what is it replacing? i think sometimes it can seen as oh, it's put it all in the garbage and it'll take care of it. there are higher up uses reuse many of recycling even that are that are environmentally and even recycling is for the similar because it's a mechanical rather than burning and it creates plastic dust and

plastic pollution that is not often well contained depending on the facilities and whether the new are able to capture the carbon and the emissions. and you can turn it into electricity now. so i mean the technology is evolving. oh, well the the in my, my first trash book garbage algae. i the main character was a place i called garbage mountain, which was the biggest landfill in the country, which in los angeles handy for me. and but they actually a power plant on top of it and extracted the methane emissions from the landfill and it was enough power for 50,000 homes. so let's that's how much 50 years of trash in l.a. it made the 12th to structure in the city. so know but i don't think that's a really solution for for clean energy. yeah well obviously doing away with plastic ideal but in the meantime we have all this waste

where's it going to go right and we're going to have to do something. no, no. you know, some of it shouldn't be landfill. probably. that's the this idea that recycle everything and, don't send anything to landfill. that was kind took hold of a lot of progressive in the in the early 2000 it turned out to be a mistake it actually carries a much higher carbon footprint than than if you just buried the stuff safely in a landfill because at least buried plastic doesn't give it all get it doesn't you know have climate disrupting emissions. so and it's not getting into the ocean hopefully until the sea levels rise and then all bets are off. thank you. for what sounded like a reusable cup just got cooked. so thank you for that. i looks like going. yeah, nice script. andreas, i have a question for of you. so my wife, i are very well

customers. thank you. you can have some coasters you made out of court. oh, green friday. yeah, that was a very good. how difficult would it be to take your business case and move it to municipal. have you ever thought of that have selling your idea smaller towns? maybe not seattle but other and and my question to you is how success is are miss palliatives or states i guess it's states that have deposits for bottles is that really successful or is it just the state of raising money and never giving it back to the customers? well, let's let's let's take that first. it does vary state to state, but as a group, the states that have deposit was out recycle other state in the country. i mean not even close california it's kind of made it hard to

redeem those those containers so a lot of people just put it in general recycling and don't get their deposit back. um which which is unfortunate. it's much less likely to get recycled that way than in the in the deposit system. but other states are really good at it and so on. the municipality. so we've worked with some cities, even many, not many, several in washington. the city of redmond has done stuff with us around pick ups of things that we manage that traditional waste haulers don't styrofoam home and holiday lights and things like that. and then the city of federal definitely won't to give them credit. we worked with them on a pilot where they had some grants that would subsidize our membership cost for lower income people in the community and we're big fans, all those types of things. i think the of the struggles have been just the nature of the industry and these long ten plus year contracts with very large garbage haulers who are very much protect the status quo and

seeing is not the status quo or seen as this little pesky startup that is trying to do things differently. and so there's not even been a willingness to really meet with when some of the larger cities around certain things that even to keep our model from entering even there's tons of demand and people voluntarily do it so we would love to do more. and i want to give special kudos to cities like redmond and federal way that have found a way to to make it work. thank you. i want to mention one one thing that we didn't really talk about in this, besides the plastics, rodwell deals with. one of the coolest things you told me was used eyeglasses. nobody knows what to do with them, but now they're going to people who need glasses and they're finding a second life through various that they find is a fun story too. so in their owns list days which i did and many parts of seattle back in 18, it started just things that i had around my house and our basement room and eventually community members would suggest categories to us and actually of the read well featured categories that we have

today came from that experience of people saying, well, about this, what about that? and actually had some glasses that weren't the right prescription and were cracked. and so someone said, hey, what about glasses? and so we went down this path of researching it and lions club is great organization that does eyeglass recycling. and so they have a facility down olympia an hour and a half or so from here. and it was a phenomenal little tour volunteer run. they have dishwashers that wash them out. they have machines and they send people on missions, bring big bags of eyeglasses, give people in developing countries, and then the ones that are way off the deep end of prescriptions, they have ways to that, too. and turn the glass of metal and other products into, things that can be recycled as well. so it was it was a fun one and we've and if another number but, i'm sure tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands parents we've helped people recycle since starting out every month. all of the we've we have time for maybe one more question.

bring us home i don't think it's that riveting, but i'm a red bull customer and. i look at like the next four things that are coming out right. but my challenge is, is that when i have an object and i'm like, i think this be something red bull does. but then i look and, it's i only know the list like the next four. and so i haven't been a customer long enough to actually know hold on to this item. so when i'm making that decision, am i just completely missing somewhere that there's a massive list saying, here's we take? yeah and audience member can answer that one but if you have the we have an app that people use to manage pick ups and that goes someone help me out here i want to say the next 14 weeks something like that so you can see a much, much longer list of what's coming. we also introduce something about a year ago called swappable featured categories. and so there's six or so that you have all the time.

so if you were doing, i don't know, many suits, one day and you don't have any of those, but you have red or bottle caps or you have wine corks. there's there's things like that that we wanted to just make it. so every time there's something that was kind of our goal. okay. so i think the other part was, was it your app only an apple phone? yes. yes. thank you. so now because i tried learn and i am an android users and so then i only know the next four weeks. i'm very aware of the changeable ones. really the next one. yeah. so your android. you like. we like android to know bands allowed here maybe if the municipal. please wear this a little bit more we'd have more funds invest in a an android app so you know we'd love to do it. i think it's just a matter of resources have a small development team and it's a big investment. we need to see the list. it's many of. it's on our website.

yeah. is it okay. yeah. you could i think if you're stuck, let help it red. well no. and we'll look up your account and tell the next group so we can, we can get we have a phenomenal members success team who can help give you the ability, give you a list. let's say you have really good things i about to 14 weeks isn't 52 weeks like 14 days. well it's every two weeks to be 28. it's about the whole it's almost the whole year. so yeah these thank. thank you. all right, let's think of two speakers for being in.