11 Ways People Make Money Off America's Garbage | World Wide Waste | Business Insider Marathon

from the entrepreneur who started recycling new orleans's glass in her dorm room to the team of artists and scientists turning Ohio's pollution into paint and the nonprofit using human hair to clean up oil spills in California I mean this is literally just the hair from your head we looked at 11 ways companies Nos and regular people are making money off America's garbage matter of trust has been making hair mats since the year 2000 founder Lisa gotier sources hair from salons in over 30 countries we we have what we call the Hair Force the donated clippings

arrive in small batches people mail this in every day we get I don't know roughly 10 or so envelopes a day we get a lot of blondes as you can always tell when we had a package from Los Angeles like right away blonde blonde blonde a lot of redhe heads in Boston this is from Boston we've been told that we got a package of underarm hair from Michael Phelps and the Olympic swimming team the team also uses animal fur clippings from alpaca uh Buffalo sheep Etc llamas Lisa and her team of felters start by cleaning

the bags of donations a lot of these were swept off the floors of hair salons pins cigarettes food food anything sharp anything hard that might break the needles all of that is garbage I don't find it gross at all I have a lot of hair and I it doesn't bother me um but and I you know it's part of the charm of it the felters lay out the human hair on this bed of dull nails and start to layer it with animal fur and fleece we had to learn that we needed to not use sharp

nails because it would start to slice the hair and David invented this for us and he created it so that this thing just lifts up and it's really easy for us to remove it afterwards we I'll make it more neat and faster then these machines tighten the fibers the final product looks and feels like a doormat feel how like sturdy that is it's really sturdy the idea to use hair to clean oil spills started in 1989 with Phil mcro a hairsty stylist from Alabama he was watching the Exon Valdes oil spill in William sound Alaska

and on CNN uh it was showing the otter covered in oil and the water around them a little bit cleaner Phil looked down at the oily head of hair he was shampooing and it just sort of sna for him you shampoo because hair collects oil I cut you know a pound of hair every couple of days all of this could be going to clean up o oil spills so 10 years after Phil came up with the idea Lisa partnered with him to scale up at first they stuffed nylon stockings with hair to make booms shaped

like sausage we're going to stop doing as many booms as we have because they needed the nylons which was again plastic to hold them together and we're going to start doing more mats because mats add surface area and so it just collects even more oil that idea was put to the T T in 2010 during the largest oil spill in American history BP's deep waterer Horizon spewed four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over 3 months and Lisa's team got a flood of donations we just started to get in ponytails from people

just you know cutting it off and then of course it was spring and it was shearing season um and there's turns out there's Buffalo herds in in the United States so there was a lot of fleece just coming at us and trucks and mail trucks and everything it was it was fantastic and overwhelming we had 19 warehouses about 100,000 ft each from the Florida Keys all the way to Texas right on the water because people are just so generous Lisa says that a representative from BP reached out to her about a partnership Insider asked BP

about that but the company didn't get back to us in the end the oil giant didn't deploy her hair booms Noah a governmental organization helped run the cleanup up effort scientists concluded that hair booms weren't as effective at removing oil as booms made with polypropylene and oil derivatives the booms would get water oil would get saturated in water become heavier than the water and start to sink in the water and in whatever o they had on it sunk with it and Recovery was very very difficult trying to get those back out of the environment you

don't see that with the poly booms you these Poes do not absorb water like our hair does BP instead tried to burn the oil off but the fires only covered a small percentage of The Spill the company also sprayed dispersants to dissolve the oil and push it toward the ocean floor where much of it remains today and those chemicals can make people sick but the consensus was that the oil was less harmful at the bottom of the ocean than washed up on shorelines it's a tradeoff sometimes I use the word net environmental benefit but it's

not net plus it's net less bad still locals along the coast used Lisa's Hair mats to protect their beaches the EPA told us that RBP response was the largest Grassroots mobilization they had ever seen and I was out there in you know Mississippi Alabama uh Louisiana Texas and Florida eventually BP was able to plug the leak on its own but matter of trust proved it could mobilize thousands of people to address an epic catastrophe the number of large oil spills has gone down in recent years but matter of trust is now focused on a much

more common problem motor oil that drips from cars on the road and makes its way to the ocean there's many ways that um oil gets spilled and the way that we concentrate on is oil that contaminates our waterways is actually just drips on the street mixing with rain water and getting into storm drains and those drips add up to over 180 million gallons per year that's 16 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdes another use for the hair mats the US Air Force is experimenting with them to manage chemical waste on its basis they're

doing a very large um system with um contaminated water reservoirs and once the mats have done their job soaking up oil how does matter of trust plan to get rid of them it actually can break down into compost it takes a really long time and it's not our number one idea of for the circular economy what we think is better is if we have really clean incineration even as she grows her business Lisa wants to make sure her hair mat process remains an open-source technology filma Cory had a patent which expired and we all decided

that it's everybody's hair and we're a public charity and we thought that it was best not to renew it and we just thought it's something that should be offered to the world she's shipped her machines to more than a dozen Partners around the world we just had a really great meeting a big Zoom meeting with all of our partners around the world and everybody was super jazzed because I think we're just getting into that next level now where we're looking at how to send out more and more machines and we have one in London one

in Wales you know France Switzerland Finland Athens Greece Tokyo Santiago Chile and she says it's possible to do this work from home for us cottage industry is the future anybody can make a little felted experiment just by putting a bunch of hair and fur in your shoe and walking around in it for a while the heat from your heels and the sweat and the um and the jostling from your shoe you'll you pull it out and you will get a little a little mat and you've tried this oh [Music] yeah you usually need sand to

make glass but this entrepreneur crushes bottles back into sand she co-founded what could be Louisiana's biggest glass recycling operation and in about 2 years she saved 4 million beer bottles worth of glass from landfills never let anyone tell you that individuals cannot make a difference because all of this is thanks to incredible individuals glass half full operates in a state with a disappearing Coastline and it's ramping up at a time when Global supplies of sand are actually running out we are using up sand at a faster rate than it can be naturally created so volunteers

use the crushed up glass to help rebuild the coastline but is dumping material made from trash into nature a good idea there's a ton of skepticism mostly about the sharpness of the sand we went to New Orleans to see how one company is building back shorelines with Worldwide waste francisa Troutman started glass half full with her boyfriend TR in February of 2020 while they were still college students one night during college over a bottle of wine that we knew would end up in a landfill we decided instead of continuing to complain about the problem and

the lack of glass recycling that we would just do something about it so we had this idea that was about it no waste management experience no recycling experience they raised about $118,000 to cover startup costs including a machine that could grind up one bottle at a time crowdfunding in the beginning was really crucial it not only got us money but got us a lot of Community Support as well as this literal mountain of glass started to form in my residential neighborhood we're like okay we got to do something here quick since moving into this Warehouse

in August 2020 they've received a Non-Stop Avalanche of glass to recycle we're receiving so much more glass than we're able to process as you can see by the mountain behind me traditional recyclers send the crushed glass to manufacturers which mix it with other materials and then melt it all down to make new bottles but France says there aren't any of these facilities nearby and then it doesn't really make sense environmentally because you're spending all of that gas to send a super heavy product 4 hours away so they decided to skip that step the goal was

always to be able to recycle the glass locally glass half full receives about a garbage truck load of glass per week people can drop it off for free or pay to have picked up once a can is full we will dump it into our Glass Mountain unless it's a special color um it'll be mixed into here colorful bottles can be turned into Specialty Sand that sells at a higher price so this is blue sand made from Bombay Jin bottles artists really love to use it people love to use it in their Gardens but most bottles

are thrown onto what Fran calls Glass Mountain so Glass Mountain is always expanding and Contracting we're always adding glass to it and taking glass away to be crushed woo eventually workers scoop the bottles up with this loader and dump them into a crushing machine it's metered out into the conveyor belt and it'll go up this conveyor belt and hit the Hammers where it'll be crushed um and then turned into sort of a mixture of sand and gravel and labels the pulverizer leaves behind some larger chunks of glass that are too big to use everything that's

bigger than 38 of an inch will be taken out so that'll include labels Metals caps anything non glass will come out of this process they're still figuring out what to do with these leftovers the newer models allow you to send this waist stream back through the system so we're working on raising money in order to get that new system for now it's piling up in the back of the warehouse can we reuse it can we Rec crush it how can it be utilized instead of sending it to the landfill Brandon Max try to get creative

with all kinds of non-glass stuff people drop off we separate all the metal for metal recycling and the plastic we're separating for a special project stay tuned like taking dirty cardboard that can't be recycled to a pig farm to become compost at the warehouse some usable sand is piling up too because one crucial piece of equipment is too small you can really see the difference in size of this compared to our machine so our machine can process a lot quicker than this can sift the sifter filters out any leftover label pieces and sorts the Sand

by size and you just scoop the unsifted product put it in the top and it'll shake it all down until it's separated into each of the five sizes the largest grains of glass help pay the bills glass half full sells them as gravel some buyers mix it into flooring the smallest type of sand is a fine powder this is like the consistency of flour it's extremely soft I wish everyone could touch it and walk on it it goes into sandbags the company gives away for free people use sandbags to put up against their doors up

against their homes where anywhere where water could get in cuz we're super prone to flooding here in between the powder and the gravel is coarse sand the kind Fran and Max used to rebuild the coast so this is like the size we would be using for Coastal restoration you can see it's not sharp so it's not going to cut me at an event called the deployment the coalition to restore Coastal Louisiana dropped about 10 tons of recycled sand along the pure train this is the Battlefront that y'all are helping us to protect today thank you

for coming Fran and max hand out the sand and burlap bags which were donated by local coffee roers we like being able to move it with man power and kind of get as many people involved as we can it's a really beautiful thing to see volunteers load them onto a boat thank you hey no problem then the team drags the 35lb bags to the site they layer the sandbags in a line connecting two pieces of land these sacks will biodegrade in about 6 months us fish and wildlife agents returned with more volunteers a week later

to plant bull rash saplings the idea is that the plants will take root and hold the sand in place creating new land Fran and Mac spent a year working with Scientists to make sure their product was safe for ecosystems we were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to work with twoand University scientists and Engineers to dive deeper into that research they found that sand made from glass doesn't leech anything into the water and that plant life can grow in it and it actually looks like it grew the best in the mixture of the

recyc glass sand with the native sand which is really cool the researchers haven't tested whether animals can eat it yet but Fran has and that's actually been tested on my dog who ate a lot of the sand one day and we were like but she uh pooped it out so all good that's all really good news because even though Louisiana's land loss has been slowing down huge chunks of wetlands could still be swallowed up in the next few decades these areas are essential habitats for wildlife and they help protect nearby communities from storms you can

imagine a storm which is fueled by the warm Waters of the Gulf of Mexico as it begins to cross over Wetlands it begins to weaken that's especially important in New Orleans because the city is sinking it was built above sea level in the early 1700s but today about half of it is below meanwhile Rising global temperatures make storms stronger and cause ocean levels to rise so New Orleans needs all the storm and flood protection it can get if that weren't enough there's another problem Fran and Max want to take on a shortage of sand globally

and that's because we use sand in a lot of things so concrete phones toothpaste paint Coastal restoration sandbags but you can't use just any sand it's a sand shortage of a specific type of sand which is a coarser a bit more angular sand that means desert sand doesn't cut it it's too rounded from being blown around by the wind most Industries dredge sand from the bottoms of lakes and rivers dredging is really the only mechanism right now to get sand extremely costly both environmentally speaking and fiscally speaking a lot of it's used in construction every

year more than 4 billion metric tons of sand go into glass and concrete for buildings glass half full is a long way from making a dent in map brand and Max hope their story will inspire others to make a difference I think this is really more so the story of of a community coming together uh to say we we demand change and we're not going to going to wait any longer two individuals decided to start this and now over 2 million pounds of glass are not in a landfill and they're making a difference in other

areas with routine maintenance a wind turbine can last about 30 years but things like lightning strikes and extreme weather can shorten their lives just one blade is about as long as the wingspan of a large commercial jet like a Boeing 747 and that's just on land offshore turbine blades can be twice as long both types are made mostly of fiberglass which is generally made by squeezing molten glass through tiny holes creating fluffy glass fibers which can be coated with resin and made into sheets factories glue sheets of this material together with a special kind of

resin that once it sets can never be melted again that makes conventional recycling which usually involves melting and reshaping impossible that's where canvas steps in the company gets blades from around the continental US they're too big to transport whole so contractors slice them into quarters before shipping they arrive like this and the first step is slicing them even smaller this diamond encrusted rope grinds and disintegrates the fiberglass instead of sawing through it to avoid splintering one slow steady slice takes about 4 minutes the team calls these pieces fets and each one will become the base

of a final product a single turbine blade can produce quite a few of them it really depends on what products we are yielding but typically anywhere from 10 to 45 fillets per blade inside the wash bay workers hose them down to remove dirt and grease that built up during use so every blade gets power washed in A system that takes all the water we use and then recycles it so we're not wasting water in our process some filets have extra material inside them that Craftsmen saw off and sand down they spread a filler putty to

even out the surface and smooth over any damage from their time in the air they can get hit by hail they can have bird strikes some get hit by lightning once the filt is a smooth hollow shell the team builds a metal frame inside of it these aluminum beams will form the main support for the seat of a bench welder secure them into place the founders of canvas Drew design Inspirations from pilot projects around the world we were inspired from bike racks and bridges that were being built over in Europe what we wanted to do

was develop a series of products that could be created at scale but one challenge is that each filet has a totally unique shape each one is different even if it was right next to the other one in the blade the 2D scanning tool outlines it exactly every little bump every little divot in that blade is recorded these computer controlled routers read the digital outline and cut a piece of wood to match which is called a subfloor workers then glue the subfloor onto the metal frame we use a composite board so that the cavity doesn't need

to be filled with material to its entire depth with all the main pieces in place it's ready for painting painters make a two-part epoxy by mixing ingredients that form an extra durable seal makes it low maintenance graffiti comes off it's not that easy to scratch up so it'll look good for a long time the painted bench is ready for finishing touches like a softw seat a worker measures and adds granules made from another company's manufacturing scraps that will become the top layer of the seat then he weighs a liquid binder and adds it into the

mix the team spreads this mix over a base layer of recycled granules made of old tires and shoes none of the Craftsmen at canvas worked on wind turbines before they're mainly Builders and skilled trade workers taking something that's so big and turn it into a functional piece of furniture art that yeah was amazing employees like Joe Koger are happy to give turbine blades another chance they may have had a life on a farm doing their job I think they deserve to keep keep on going meanwhile wind turbine designs are changing quickly becoming bigger and more

efficient but that means older wind farms are falling behind the times and need to be replaced this is called repowering it can make a huge difference a wind farm in Spain replaced 69 aging turbines with just seven new ones and they're so much more efficient the repower Farm creates twice as much electricity as before so Farm operators have a business incentive to upgrade their fleets but of course that contributes to the growing piles of leftovers once fully assembled the team prepares their products for delivery just one of these benches weighs over 600 lb the team

screws the products to boards which they strap into place on the truck bed before tying everything down five benches four Planters and one pick set are headed to the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland it tells that story on what happens to things that we use how are things recycled and what is the second life of them the center didn't pay anything for these instead sponsors cover the costs a total of about $42,000 there were local restaurants and bars there were law firms and uh health and fitness centers and then there were some uh National

brands in return those business get their name on the pieces next to a QR code that leads to more information they inherently have a great story because they're made of retired materials or customers can buy the goods directly from canvas some of the products at the science center are a bit more ornate than the others these are part of a program called par which stands for primed and ready for that program the team Paints the furniture with only a coat of white primer creating a canvas for artists like teslaa Baron who get paid $1,000 per

piece I'm used to painting a mural that just like one flat surface so it's interesting and fun to work with something that has curves and to create like organic elements for now canvas only takes blades from land-based turbines not the much larger offshore ones and in general projects like this are not common in the US the cheapest option is to send fiberglass blades to landfills which has caused some controversy in 2020 images of a turbine blade graveyard in Wyoming went viral sparking backlash meanwhile in Europe which has much less landfill space than the us at

least four countries have already banned landfills from accepting turbine blades encouraging other options like burning them for energy or chemical recycling with 9 months of manufacturing under their belt the can crew has placed more than a thousand of their products around the US The Venture isn't quite profitable yet we made $8 this year um no um 2023 will not be a profitable year as a startup but we definitely see a a bright future so far the company has repurposed about 250 blades but the founders estimate they'll reach 3,000 in 2024 however not all of them

will be upcycled [Music] we also see blades that come in too damaged um to actually be turned into our products in 2024 the founders say about half the blades they get will be upcycled and the other half will be shredded one of the first blade recycling efforts in the US piloted this technique a company called violia grinds blades into a soft mixture that looks like mulch it pays cement factories to burn the material as fueled in place of coal the main goal is keeping blades out of landfills but violia estimates it could also reduce CO2

emissions from cement making by about 25% so we will have our own resources inhouse to grind that material down our manufacturing scrap and damage blades to send it to cement K which is what violia does over time they hope a higher percentage can be upcycled and ideally new Innovations unlocked there's people working on a called pyrolysis that hopefully can break the material back down into oil and glass fiber experts say fiberglass blades are not going anywhere anytime soon the problem with using Metals is that they're heavy fiberglass gives us the same strength the same properties

but for much lower weight it's also pretty cheap it's hard to find a replacement that can match all these qualities but lots of people are working on the issue of Blade waste including another business that's rethinking turbines entirely a company called heirloom is building wind farms that look completely different with no giant blades the company says it costs about a quarter of what a typical Wind Farm does to build if something like this took off it could be an issue for canvas's business model but the founders are confident they won't run out of material for

the next 10 to 15 years we will still have thousands tens of thousands of blades that need to be recycled or upcycled so we we support Solutions like heirloom so if wind energy creates so much waste should the world use less of it well basically every form of energy leaves waste behind including burning fossil fuels which creates billions of tons of Planet warming CO2 every year in terms of solid forms of trash solar panels become tricky to recycle electronic waste coal burning produces toxic coal ash refining oil leaves behind sludge and so on one study

estimates there could soon be 400,000 metric tons of Blade waste piling up each year but when you line that up with other types of energy waste turbine blades are on the low end and to put it in perspective Global household trash outranks it all with any movement forward there are going to be hopefully a lot more Pros than cons but there will always be cons there are always people waiting out there to highlight the cons of anything experts also say there's room for optimism even when it comes to tricky fiberglass waste if you throw enough

money at problems then you can usually solve them and money is now being thrown at these problems and there really are good Solutions coming out this massive pile of pine trees will be turned into cardboard packaging a single box can contain material from thousands of trees and pass through the hands of hundreds of workers they're like it's just a box and I say no it ain't a lot a lot goes into it if you've used a cardboard box in the US today there's a one in3 chance that International Paper made it it's the world's largest

Paper Company cardboard is essential for countless Industries protecting items as they move on trucks and ships and the good news is that it's one of the most recycled materials in the world but if so much of it gets reused why do we still have to cut down millions of trees and is it possible to make environmentally friendly cardboard this Mill in Georgia is just one of hundreds of facilities operated by International Paper it runs 24/7 to meet demand from online shopping grocery stores and more but no one in this industry would call their product card

board why don't you like to use the word cardboard because it's not cardboard insiders call it corrugated packaging a wavy layer sandwiched between two flat outer sheets but yeah most people call it cardboard making it starts with living trees Forester Alex Singleton walked us through an area whose trees were sold to International Paper 2 years ago and is since been replanted with long leaf pine but it will still take decades for the new crop to mature for many Foresters we only see a site harvested once during our careers from this stage to there probably be

around 30 years after harvesting land owners make money selling their trees to different Industries which makes them into things like Lumber telephone poles and of course paper the idea is to turn forests into an investment so more people plant and maintain them without young healthy Forest our industry could not be successful I don't view logging or clear cutting as negative it's just the start of a process but critics say that replanting trees is not the same as letting them grow this is one of the most industrial and heavily logged forests on the planet the southern

us sometimes called America's wood basket is home to 2% of the world's forested land yet it produces nearly 20% of our Pulp and Paper Products which either means it's highly productive or highly exploited depending on who you ask on a typical day about 300 trucks loaded with freshly cut trees drive up to this Mill the first stop is the Woodyard some of the the trees are set aside into these massive piles which ensure the mil can sustain round the-clock operations they come from farms and forests within 120 Mi a sprinkler keeps them wet so they

stay fresh and to reduce the risk of fire a crane Scoops trees from the pile and drops them into a machine that knocks off the bark with a deark and drum you're removing bark you know I tell kids similar to like a pot peer this process creates tons of leftover bark which will be burned for energy the debarked trunks travel through a chipper and pile up here on that wood chip pile we can keep up to around 100,000 tons of chips it'll only take the mill about 10 days to work through this mountain a conveyor

belt feeds into the next step pulping Pine is made of long stringy fibers held together by a natural Glu like material called lignin paper makers want the fibers but not the glue so they use Steam and chemicals to dissolve it the reaction can create gas that smells like sulfur if you've ever noticed a rotten notor while driving by a paper plant that's probably why International Paper says its plants are built to capture a lot of those gases which cuts down on smell the fibers are covered in a toxic mix of chemicals and tree residue so

they have to be cleaned that liquor that's washed off gets evaporated and Consolidated and goes into what we call a recovery boiler in other words the plant Burns those goopy leftovers creating Steam and chemicals that can go back through the process and save energy we're really plants inside of a plant so we have our own chemical plant our own power plant in fact this Mill makes about 75% of its own energy on site IP is also burning less coal than it used to which helps cut down on Factory emissions but trees hold a lot of

carbon and the company's own sustainability report says carbon released by processing the trees was more than double its emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2022 before the pulp becomes paper workers add used cardboard to the mix old packaging gets a new start in this Warehouse the boxes that we use here in the recycle plant come from local retailers and grocery stores up to uh 300 M radius from the mill Katie Freeze has worked in this recycling Mill for 3 years she says people still have a lot of misconceptions about the process our process is designed

to take out the stuff like grease and and tape just recycle any corrugated box you have whether it has tape on it or food in it it can be used to make paper again then you can recycle a pizza box every day this Mill recycles 500 tons of used cardboard each ton saves trees energy and water saving water is key because nearly every step of paper making uses lots of it the used cardboard also gets pulped using water and chemicals then mixes with fresh fibers workers simply call this massive Contraption the paper machine it presses

the pulp flat and squeezes out water then it sends the mixture through a series of dryers heated to over 200° f as it goes down the machine the sheet get drier and drier and after all that you still only have paper to become corrugated packaging the rolls head to a box plant like this one in Illinois here flexible paper becomes sturdy boxes the heartbeat of the plant is the corrugator corrugating is how the packaging's middle layer gets that distinctive wavy shape the waves are actually called flutes and they're what gives this type of packaging its

strength there are different types of flutes smaller ones print better aren't as good for stacking strength and the larger ones don't print as well but they're better for stacking strength this plant can make boxes in over 1.6 million different designs the smallest box I've ever made was about the size of a ring box the largest box I've ever made in one of my facilities was for a washing machine after gluing the layers together finishing touches include printing on graphics and cutting the sheets into their final shapes to save space most boxes shipped to customers flat

and any trimmings or waist pieces can be recycled right back into the process in the US More than 70% of used cardboard gets recycled which is much higher than the rates for aluminum glass or plastic forting paper is uh easy to recycle because the supply chain supports it so there's value in it it also helps that nearly 80% of Americans can recycle it using bins right on their curbs so why does the industry still use up so many trees part of it is that old cardboard can't be recycled in definitely the EPA says it can

only go through the process about seven times each time it goes through pulping and blending the long strong Pine fibers get a bit shorter and weaker and eventually the degraded Paper Bits simply wash through the screens and out of the process so recycling is very important but even if 100% of boxes got reused making new ones would still mean cutting down trees some experts say the big question is whether the industry manages Forest responsibly International Paper gets more than 90% of its fiber from trees in the southern us where the vast majority of Woodlands are

on private property what we do is we provide a viable market for that landowners trees such that they will have the income or Revenue to be able to pay for the reforestation that takes place on their lands Foresters and paper companies argue that without that market people might just sell their land potentially losing forests forever to agriculture parking lots or other uses data from the University of Maryland shows that tree cover in the US today is about the same as it was in the year 2000 for me as a Forester it must mean that we're

doing our job right you know that we're taking care of the environment that we're promoting Forest growth but measuring Forest Area is complicated to start not everyone agrees what a forest even is Pine plantations are not forests those are tree farms that lack the diversity the structural diversity the biological diversity that a lot of these species depend on an environmental nonprofit called The Dogwood Alliance says that tree farms have been replacing natural forests that could potentially have a global impact some experts estimate that natural forests are 40 times better than plantations at storing carbon which

makes them crucial to slowing climate change forests have lots of other benefits too like filtering our drinking water and reducing aroan certain forestry techniques like leaving some large trees in place can help planted forests retain those benefits I think there are ways to sustainably manage forests without taking out the the larger trees and completely destroying the structural complexity of a forest but that takes really skilled targeted forestry and that's not always what happens ultimately the world uses a lot of paper which has to come from somewhere you might see certifications stamped on boxes those are

supposed to indicate they're made of trees that were harvested sustainably International Paper says that more than 30% of the fibers it used in 2022 came from forests with one of those certifications I think there is a way for industry and conservation to coexist in southern forests but there has to be a good faith effort on all sides it's harvest day at Pine Run a Creek in Ohio yeah keep going moving now yeah I see the flow Michelle Shively mckyer and John SRA have been making pigment out of this pollution for over a decade this stuff

is just really good yeah it's our favorite it is our favorite their team built a system of pipes that collect smelly goo called acid mine drainage or AMD for short it's highly acidic water leaking from an old coal mine that closed over a hundred years ago when you leave a mine and you just walk away from it what happens is it fills up instantly with water there really is no way to seal the mines completely the water that still leaks from mines today creates iron oxide which can be lethal to Aquatic Life that pipe is

full of iron sludge and it's going to come out of there really fast but it also happens to be an essential ingredient to make [Music] paint bucket need bucket so Tech system right now that's what this team is harvesting today it's gold Matt it's gold the team filters buckets of iron oxide using these troughs smooth it out and put some cool- up on there and it's like pumpkin pie in a bin I'd eat it today's Hall is over 200 lb of iron oxide it's a bit more than this m sight pumps out in a single

day wow then they move it to their research facility where Engineers wash the pigment to remove impurities that affect the final color basically we're just diluting out all the dissolved solids this is Guy reefer he's an engineer who partnered with Michelle and John to start true pigments it's still kind of shocks me that Sunday Creek is this Orange Mass and it goes right through several communities and it's been doing it for 20 years and aside from us nobody's really doing anything about it the team dries the pigment before shipping it off to a giant kilm

they change the color by controlling the temperature then they send the pigment to Portland Oregon where Gamblin artists colors uses it to make paint we wanted to be the first to make color with it we were just kind of all in there's three colors that are all made from pigment that has been painstaking reclaimed by John and team this one is called iron Violet this worker mixes the pigment zinc and flax oil and a mill uses heat and pressure to combine the pigment and oil and so with a little bit of pressure we draw it

down then workers test for thickness texture and color finally they bottle it up Gamblin markets the paint as reclaimed Earth colors John teaches art and uses the paints in his own studio if I want something deep and red and earthy you're not going to get anything better than an iron [Music] oxide he says his art helps to start conversations about protecting the environment the circle gives them permission to decide for themselves instantly whether that is a universe a planet a stream or microbes and the new colors are taking off painters across the country have shared

what they've created using the hashtag reclaimed color for now true pigments can't Harvest enough iron oxide to clean up an entire stream it has such a satisfying plop but the company plans to scale up by 2024 true pigments plans to open a larger facility it will harvest iron oxide and clean the water at one of Ohio's most polluted acid mine sites that would mean the company could Harvest raw material that could be used in all kinds of products not just paints construction materials concrete bricks it's used for a lot of Industrial Coatings AG agricultural fertilizer

Cosmetics we really had to find something useful to make out of this really you know detrimental pollution and Michelle says her team's method of retrieving iron oxide is more sustainable than mining it unfortunately they're dealing with a nearly unlimited resource there are nearly 10,000 square miles of abandoned coal mines across the United States iron oxide didn't do anything wrong iron oxide is not to blame here if you treat it right like we're doing it is a valuable asset it is beautiful these mines will continue producing AMD for hundreds of years but Michelle is confident that

turning pollution into art can make a [Music] difference asphalt pavement might be the world's most recycled material my gut feeling is that asphalt can be recycled indefinitely but most recycling plants mix just a small amount of old product into mostly new pavement that means we have to keep mining rocks and drilling oil just to keep roads in shape one company says it's found a way to make 100% recycled asphalt you ask any oldtime asphalt guy and they give you a dirty look and laugh and say it's impossible it doesn't [Music] work for years years green

asphalt fought to prove its product is durable enough for New York City recycled asphalt usually costs less than the brand new stuff but if it's that simple why isn't everyone rolling out roads made from worldwide waste asphalt has two main ingredients crushed rocks and a sticky mixture that holds them together that goop is mostly bitumin a fossil fuel originally found in tarpits people have been using this stuff for thousands of years to waterproof containers build stone walls and seal boats its first use on a road was likely in Babylon more than 2500 years ago asphalt

roads came to the US in the late 1800s and within a few decades demand grew so much that natural sources couldn't keep up so it became more common to make the tumin using crude oil as oil prices Rose in the 1970s more people started reusing old pavement to cut costs but Regulators often limit how much old material can go into new mixes usually around 30% because of concerns that adding more would make roads weaker that creates leftovers that can pile up if New York is going to Mill up 1 million tons of asphal and only

is allowed to replace it with 30% recycled what are you going to do with those 700,000 extra tons it has to go somewhere 100% recycled asphalt could make use of all of it and eliminate the need for rocks mined from quaries the carbon footprint savings is the fact that we don't have to truck Stone and oil from all over Upstate New York in a place like New York City which is almost always tearing up its roads to access utility lines underneath asphalt recycling is a perfect match you'll pave a brand new road and then ConEd

will come and dig a trench through it and you know it's nothing stays down for 10 years anyway to strip old asphalt off the road workers use either a specialized machine that cut cut and grinds up the pavement or less precise methods these old pavement pieces are called millings and cities have to figure out what to do with all of them to recycle it saves a tremendous amount of money you're not trucking it Upstate you're not trucking it to landfills their next stop is this plant on a typical day green asphalt receives up to 50

dump trucks worth of product so back here is where trucks full of New York City's asphalt old millings come in and get dumped every day most of them will get right back in line and leave the plant filled with fresh recycled asphalt but the first step is crushing up the millings that machine on top of the pile is our excavator he grabs material throws it in The Crusher and that's where we process the material a magnet picks out any Metals garbage debris leaves the stuff that you see laying all over the New York city streets

does not make good asphalt if any plastic or Road striping or fabric from the road base gets in it that gets picked out by hand a conveyor belt carries the pieces through screens that sort them into three sizes black sand small rocks and bigger ones they'll be mixed back together in in different combinations depending on whether the asphalt will be used for potholes private roads or highways then it's time to turn up the heat this flaming drum warms and mixes the asphalt at the same time after it's reached a temperature of 300° it's properly mixed

it comes out of the drum we DS it with half a% of a paraffin oil paraffin oil is still a type of f fuel but recycling has lower overall emissions compared to making new product the paraffin helps rejuvenate old asphalt which degrades as it's its on roads and basically brings it back to life these mixes have to stay hot in order to spread onto roads smoothly so the clock is ticking asphalt has to be made and sold within 24 hours you can't leave it up there for too long the final product is temporarily stored in

silos try to get three silos full of material so as trucks start to take it you're just running and keeping up with the trucks these aren't just any trucks though the trucks are designed where the exhaust from the truck runs through the body of the truck and that actually helps keep it warm green asphalt mixes will end up on roads all over New York City here in Queens workers are repaving two city blocks using 100% recycle basball it'll take 14 workers about five hours Anthony Rose has been in this business for a decade more and

more companies are starting to use recycled asphalt but not fully recycled we are one of the few companies actually using 100% recycle these paper say it's no different to work with than conventional asphalt at the beginning of this job excavators tore old asphalt off the road it'll head back to green asphalt to start the process all over again the company sold its first 100% recycled product in 2011 convincing customers it would be as durable as new asphalt was a big hurdle we had to almost give stuff away for free everyone just has that old mindset

like if it's not broken don't fix it the company runs quality tests every day to make sure each batch meets government standards which vary depending on its final use different things on Bridges different things for tunnels different things for airport runways things like that Matt Harrison runs those tests which include checking how much air and moisture is in each batch like a lot of people that don't use a lot of recycled material don't think it can be done because they don't process it the way we do you know like they don't test for all the

little things that we do despite the extra steps green asphalt says its fully recycled mix is the cheapest option our asphalt product here which is 100% recycl is actually 20% cheaper than our conventional asphal in fact one study found that the more you recycle the more costs fall mostly because you don't have to buy new rocks or binder to hold them together that helps explain why in countries like the US Japan and Finland more than 90% of old asphalt gets reused in New Roads but if it's cheaper why isn't fully recycled asphalt more popular for

years asphalt producers and recyclers have fought a enemy blue smoke it's a catchall nickname for air pollution released while making asphalt some of these emissions can cause blood and liver problems the more recycled asphalt in a mix the more pollution you can get green asphalt says it's found a way to minimize that problem you have to find the right distance between the flame and the aggregate so you don't catch on fire but even then the process can create some blue smoke the company told us its filtration system catches it actually uses some from water and

patented bags that we designed ourselves here that filter out anything that could be harmful to the environment the idea is to clean up the emissions before they actually leave this Smoke Stack blue smoke concerns are one reason many asphalt makers stick to about 30% recycled mixes older plants can't safely go above that without new equipment Jim says economic incentives also play a key role because many asphalt plant owners also own quaries they own the stone or the oil supply that they're using in their products why would they want to recycle when they're using their own

product and selling their own product we're trying to break that Trend we don't want to buy Stone we don't want to buy oil we want to make recycled asphalt even if the whole world did switch to recycled asphalt there'd still be some downsides the black pavement absorbs heat which is part of why cities are up to 5° hotter than nearby areas Alternatives such as concrete create aot more planet warming pollution but usually don't need to be replaced as often asphalt is stayed popular because it offers a smooth ride and its formula can be tweaked for

different weather conditions and since it's probably not going away anytime soon we might as well recycle as much as possible our mission is really for all asphalt to be green asphalt across the world if people think your dream is crazy then you must be doing something right when everyone said we couldn't do it made us want want to do it even more these are old printers computers and phones and this machine's shredding them to be recycled only about 17% of all electronic waste ends up like this it's very hard to recycle electronics they're not designed

to be recycled there are hundreds of tiny pieces hidden in every device from toxic materials to plastic to gold and they each have to be separated and recycled individually such Precision takes lots of people space and heavy duty machines with a good deal of feminine power Sally Is Our Big Shredder Heidi is German gingers are metal finder female dominant Machines of course yes and if everything goes right there's lots of money to be made will pull off the pieces which will be of value that's ingred president of Sims life cycle services one of the largest

e- recyclers in the US ingred took us through her biggest facility to see how it's repurposing or recycling up to 6 million pounds of old electronics every month so we're in leverne Tennessee just outside of Nashville this is a 200,000 ft facility where we focus on receiving processing Electronics Sims mainly gets electronic waste from Office gear like laptops computers printers or phones we have 14 500 company iies like HP and Lexar insurance companies Banks the rest of its clients are secret but ingred can tell us what happens to these devices once they get here reuse

repurpose re-engineer if we can't reuse it very last resort is recycling what you see here is where we first get the material in it's a fifo type of process first in first out that's how we work it here she's offloading a truck so she'll go in get her Forks into the pallet and pull it out this must to come from an office refresh it looks like there's some old DVD player some old stereo equipment the first stop the scale then they will get the weight and input it into our data center and that's what Drew

is doing over there with a computer then it gets tagged with a barcode it'll tell us whether we go to destroy recycle or we go to reuse the building's broken up into recycling on the right and reuse on the left left we'll start here if we can reuse it and reuse the parts then you're not making a new part so this is the heart harvesting area for laptops sometimes when you can't sell a whole laptop we can remove parts from it and either rebuild a laptop to sell or sell the parts to get all these

tiny pieces out of a device without hurting them it takes a lot of skill and different screws a lot of different screws so much of it still needs to be done manually and to do it properly and that's very labor intensive memory units processors screens keyboards and motherboards can all be reused workers will clean them check that they're functioning and send them back into inventory to be sold again lots of times when we're allowed to sell units we'll do Revenue share with it so we'll share Revenue with the client so that's kind of a a

nice way to add life to the electronics and then also get some Revenue back big hard drives pulled from computers or servers are another Money Maker but they come with an added challenge of security you can see the fence up you need a key car to get in I don't know if I have access oh I do so here is where you'll see the higher value material any stored data has to be wiped before a drive can be resold we have a lot of banks and insurance companies as our clients so you can well imagine

that those folks want their data erased properly this is where you'll see some of the wiping going on of the hard drives at the end here these have already been done so they're ready to go to the next step to get resold so our drives will sell wholesale or on eBay you can see these guys are deemed for eBay so you'll see 1 tbte 500 gbyte it's all different size dri these smaller drives there just isn't any value in it anymore so if something simply not worth Sim's time to refurbish it's sent to be recycled

on the other side is destroy recycle and over here we have a lot of folks that are depackaging and also removing hazards this part is called Dem manufacturing so we'll remove hazards batteries and all that type of thing before it goes to be shredded on this side there's a lot of hazardous materials in electronics like Mercury cadmium and lead and if devices end up in landfills that bad stuff could do major damage to groundwater and soil this is what we want to ensure does not go into the shredder because this could be really dangerous for

fire if we leave toner in there I mean it it goes up like nothing toner is explosive and then the plastic acts as a fuel source that's our biggest challenge everything that's not hazardous gets shredded so this is Lori and Lori is running the shredder all with a mouse right Lori this is the control room I have control of how much go in the shredder how much is on the belts I off the belt I can speed it up I can jog it it's a 400 horsepower quad Shredder which means you have these teeth that

are grinding up all the material here and those are nice printers that are getting eaten up and ground out to this on the outside this is the really cool part it's very noisy the first thing that we're trying to do is remove any steel a giant magnet overhead pulls out all the steel this is where the charge is added to the material and based on the plus and minus will repel so the aluminum gets thrown the farthest away so that's why aluminum is here and the circuit board is in the middle and the plastic Falls

right down because it doesn't accept the charge the leftover mix heads to another machine named Heidi Heidi is German originally we were using it to separate plastic but the technology wasn't keeping up it doesn't work on black plastic and you see today everything's black plastic now Heidi separates everything using infrared technology Ginger's our metal finder she was named after the engineer who designed her because he had a ginger beard and Ginger is just taking out any further metal that's still within the plastic mix what's left goes into the Dutch sink float machine named Otto so

I guess that's the only male machine we have in Oto plastic floats while everything else sinks we scoop off the top the good stuff and that's what will'll go to Montreal to our plastic compounder and then goes back to HP to get reused into parts and those raw materials can make Sims some pretty good money so we really want to recover that value every electronic has precious metals in it some gold some copper some Platinum some padium so all these elements can be separated and sold to be reused peace meal the copper and precious metal

streams will go to a copper smelter in Canada or in in Europe or Japan the steel will go to a steel mill here in Tennessee but with more than 75% of ew landfill bound companies are missing out on huge profits to put it in perspective in 2019 an estimated 57 billion dollars worth of precious metals and valuables in electronics were thrown away or burned if we recycle it then we're not digging holes and mining for Virgin Metals it's a way to get some really precious commodities without expending all that energy and damage to the environment

but it's a catch 22 recycling ew could be a money maker and it's better for the environment but it's both really hard and expensive to do they're not designed to be recycled many different chemical compounds all smashed together when devices got smaller and smaller removing whole components became less and less possible treating and disposing of these hazardous materials is dangerous and pricey recycling also have to constantly upgrade machines and processes to keep up with this changing technology and that's costly too we normally change the blades once a year and when it gets towards the end

the blades get a bit dull that's when we get a little bit anxious and sometimes they're jams Sims has invested a thousand hours updating just its Sally the shredder machine and while recyclers are facing all of these challenges E-Waste is only expected to increase by 38% over the next next decade so is there a way to make e- recycling easier some say it starts with manufacturers what a lot of the manufacturers are focused on rather than making products live a long time they see their way out is to keep selling as many products as they

can as rapidly as possible and they try to compensate by saying don't worry it's recyclable and so this churn and burn mentality is very harmful Jim thinks one solution could be for manufacturers to create electronics that are actually meant to be recycled for example making devices that don't have toxins so they're safer and easier to break down but until that happens Sims will keep wiping and shredding those hard to recycle electronics New York City's Department of Sanitation sends its Fleet of 2,000 garbage trucks to start picking up at 5:00 a.m. you have to keep active

some guys like to work out some guys don't basically it depends on you what do you do me I don't work out this is my workout this is my daily workout that's Frank a 23-year veteran sanitation worker well you get immune to the smell you don't smell garbage you smell money checking to see how solid it is you can tell when the truck is full Frank heads to the dump station in the Upper East Side by then the sun's coming up we are currently at 91st Street MPS doors will open as the truck comes in

and there's radiation detectors that will read the truck trucks pause at the way station to help the city keep track of how much trash New Yorkers produce then handles tilt the hopper then she'll push the blade and the blade will push the the material all the way out to clear the whole truck it's roughly 450 to 600 tons a day tractors move the trash into the containers beneath the ground it's sort of a dance one FPL will clear the wall and one FPL will loow containers getting the material containerized as quickly as possible and sealed

keeps that smell down a Stamper then packs in the garbage mattresses are used like a sponge to sop up anything left over when we have garbage onoy it'll take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to load a container once the department of sanitation seals a container and slides it out to the dock responsibility then goes to covanta the waste Energy company handles two Marine transfer stations in the city containers are picked up by the crane and put on the barge 48 containers go on the barge every one of these containers represents a truck load that

we have taken off of the city streets and out of the tunnels reducing carbon emissions and reducing congestion and wear and tear on the city's infrastructure a tug attaches to the loaded trash barge tug Captain Jason Harris is now in charge he gets to go ahead for a 9:30 a.m. [Music] departure what you see here is is called Hell's Gate this is the upper end of the East River tides play a major factor in the times that we can transfer barges you can't go against the tide when it's Max tide it's too strong WR we

would actually come to a dead stop on this boat and Barge you wait until you can go with it quite often a barge gets gets filled up and we will have to wait two three maybe 4 hours before the tide is is in the favor he navigates this heavy load safely along one of the busiest waterways in the world down the East River through New York Harbor to Staten Island 3 hours later the tug andarge back up into the global transfer station it is an inherently dangerous operation to to move heavy equipment overhead then a

train takes it to one of kant's waste energy facilities it can also get there via truck all of Manhattan's residential trash goes to waste energy facilities like this one to be burned and turned into electricity this facility processes up to a million tons of waste annually once the trucks scale in and come up to the Tipping floor they dump in front of one of these Bays tractors push the trash into a massive storage pit 93 ft deep and 270 ft long between 8 and 9,000 tons are in the refu pit it's about 3 to 4

days worth of trash a giant grapple claw descends over the trash in one swoop it can pick up as much as one trash truck [Music] carries the claw builds a wall of trash to prevent it from avalanching onto the Tipping floor it also helps to make more space for incoming refu you look at garbage a very different way since I've been working here we create a lot of garbage as as a population two claws work together in tandem dumping trash into Hoppers leading to the incinerator Romeo's an expert giant claw operator 21 years of playing

the clan there is no shortage of fuel for our boilers Toy Story is the first thing everyone thinks of Disney actually got inspiration for the Toy Story 3 incinerator sequence from a covant plant the incinerators burn the trash at 2000° F it takes 1 to 2 hours to burn an entire Hopper load we've now entered the control room area of the plant this is the brain of the operation yes it is and here's your brain he's got camera views of the combustion Zone how important are you for this this place running correctly how important am

I I am the Gody I I am the guy he's in the hot seat Russell monitors as the furnace heats up steam turning this turbine and generating enough energy to power this plant and 46,000 homes in the region after everything's burned all that's left over is Ash and metal this magnet pulls off enough metal to make 21,000 cars the leftover Ash goes to cover landfills next the plant tackles those nasty fumes but burning trash causes first leftover gases go through a scrubber reactor a lime slurry cleans any acid gases and activated carbon absorbs pollutants then

it goes through a bag house basically a bunch of filters so what's left coming out of that Smoke Stack constituents of the flu gas is what's in normal air like nitrogen carbon dioxide moisture the alternative to this would be going to a landfill waste to energy does produce CO2 emissions but in a year this process eliminates a million tons of CO2 emissions a landfill would have produced we generate a very small amount of methane the methane we offset from a land fill results in an actual decrease of CO2 emissions the city hopes to keep moving

trash on waterways to facilities like this one it's all part of its goal of becoming zero waste to landfill by 2030 but that is becoming harder and harder to reach only about 30% of New York City's waste turns into energy the rest ends up in harmful methane producing landfills as far away as South Carolina and Ohio and it takes a significant investment to move it every year exporting trash costs the city about 400 $100 million so why does New York City send its trash so far away in 1881 New York city streets were notoriously filthy

so dirty people were getting sick so the department of sanitation was established to clean up the streets and the department did help mop up the city but the city quickly ran out of room to put all of its trash in the early 1900s the city turned a dumping trash into the ocean even though it was illegal as much as 80% of the city's trash ended up in the sea this continued until 19 34 when a Supreme Court case forced the city to stop ocean dumping in the' 70s incinerators used for much of the 1900s were

closed down because they didn't meet the epa's Clean Air standards so the city opened up landfills across the five burrows including at one point the world's largest in 1973 New York even built out lower Manhattan using trash Mounds but even that wasn't enough with nowhere else to put it the city began sending its waste to other states most of the landfills in this area have been closed down so the available landfills are getting further and further away exporting trash is a costly practice with a big environmental footprint and it puts the burden on communities far

from these shiny skyscrapers for now New York City's only choice is to keep exporting the trash but ultimately the department says the best solution would be getting New Yorkers to waste less altogether trash is like one of those things that you put it outside and forget about it I think everybody should know what happens to what they get rid of if you know where it's going and you don't like where it's going maybe you'll find ways to recycle things I would never take anything home because my wife wouldn't allow it but there'll be a butt

there if I see something that's Star Wars I'm going to look for it and make if it's good I'm going to take it home about 1/3 of all waste in New York City comes from construction and demolition sites almost all of that is reusable but most of it ends up in landfills that's a problem and it needs a system change it needs a redo okay let's load this in that's what inspired Amber lash Shack to found a company that makes custom furniture using construction waste box truck life I have been called the queen of trash

for obvious reasons because I've make a life of transforming trash like the $4,200 Condor couch the plywood came from a building site the frame is scrap metal and an ice cream factory provided a barrel for the armrests but turning trash in luxur Furniture requires a skilled hand in 53 years in the business I've done just about everything but use recycled materials can the company make a dent in a city that generates 150 Statue of Liberties worth of construction waste every day we went to Brooklyn to see how redo makes upscale furniture out of worldwide waste

the redo team makes weekly runs to pick up materials from construction sites and companies around the Red Hook neighborhood I've actually put on a crown and a big dress I'm going to be the queen of trash why not knocking on doors and finding out what kind of trash people have they don't forget you what's going on everything that we get is local it's within 15 minutes of where we are good to see you again let's see just a few blocks away from Red's home base Eli fernald is working on a four-story residential building I'm happy

for anybody who's getting involved to try to take take construction material out of the waist stream that could very easily be reused here they'll pick up wasted wood masonry debris and any other scraps Amber things could come in handy okay and then let's get some of that netting awesome it's like a set but they're this is one part and this is another part they plan what they'll make from recovered waste at weekly design meetings the first construction site we went to had all this netting which I think is super amazing it's incredibly durable first they

sketch out designs before making a virtual 3D mockup then they move to the workshop they nicknamed it the the Condor couch um I don't know who came up with that name but it's pretty interesting Andre stea starts by cutting a metal Barrel in half which comes with unique problems it had a purpose at some point in time so you never know the finishing on it the the painting there's sometimes toxic materials he then welds each half onto a metal frame and attaches the legs kakon nonth handles the shelves under the armrests he's been repurposing waste

since he was a kid my dad he always have like just these reclaimed things you know as like a panel for a wall he cuts plywood boards down to sze to build the shelves under the armrests then he Smooths out any rough edges on the board it's a reclaimed piece of wood so I had to um sand down the oil finally he stains the shelves with a rag now that those shelves are complete the upholsterer Gary Wright who worked for redo when this video was filmed steps in I do a lot everything I even spill

blood sometime for this couch he's using recycled yoga mats and deadstock fabric Overstock materials that redo sources from a local Texas style recycler first Gary Staples padding down onto a wooden board which will become part of the seat then he carefully sews fabric to fit over the padded seats and cushions so I do every piece that I work on like it's going to uh I don't know his first name but last name Rockefeller finally the boards and cushions are placed on the metal frame to complete the Condor couch okay get the bottom I got the

top some items redo makes are one of a kind like this five 100b reclaimed oak table what does a custom job like that cost um none of your busette no the way that we price out our jobs with our clients really is just about materials and labor and that's it most items are made to order but they keep their most popular products like their benches and stools in stock we we originally said 3:00 we're having a little bit of an issue right now my main concern is the the color differentiation with some of the custom

projects the team can work right up until delivery where are the movers they're not here a lot of times yeah there is last minute stuff that needs to be done and it's showtime and you just got to make sure it happens Gary uses fine brushes and tints that match the grain of the wood to cover those blemishes when you're dealing with uh recycled materials you run into flaws and blemishes that you have to uh touch up we have the construction site we have George metal Amber worked in TV in film for 15 years before launching

this business I had this sort of Brewing sense that I wasn't contributing in the way that I really wanted to contribute that's when she scribbl out the idea to use construction waste to make furniture in her notebook there's a lot of work that went into seeing if something that was an idea in a notebook come to fruition and really work after years of trial and error the company says it has now used roughly 1.2 million pounds of waste but that's just the drop in the bucket of a growing problem all right come on as far

as like overall waste pie how much is construction demolition waste maybe a little bit higher cuz New York never stops building right in the five burrows developers are supposed to cart away their own waste some contractors bring their dumpsters here Cooper recycling sorts a whole lot of mixed construction and demolition waste on a typical day we get between 450 and 500 trucks coming in with material we sort it with those excavators we put it into our operating system where everything gets processed what's recoverable gets extracted and separated according to its material type concrete can be

crushed to make new concrete wood can be chipped and metal can be refined and smelted for reuse while the city has 22 facilities like this that sort and recycle construction waste more than half of it still ends up in landfills that's because a typical construction manager has almost no incentive to reuse waste the probably sad truth here is that there's not much money in it for you construction manager other than maybe Metals so why would someone send their construction and demolition waste to Cooper because the company has a reputation for quickly processing debris from a

job site you could be on the property for no more than 15 minutes besides keeping waste out of landfills companies that repurpose construction materials save a lot of energy the equivalent of more than 85 million barrels of oil every year Amber thinks her business model can work in other places she plans to open redo locations in Miami Hudson New York and other cities in the near future each place will have a place where we manufacture on the spot and we also do retail other countries are further along and how they deal with construction waste the

United Kingdom manages to recycle 90% And while the US has a long way to go before it catches up Amber and her crew hope their model can Inspire others um like look at this people will look at it and say hey we could do that and that's the whole point we want a lot of companies to do this I think education is one of the most important ways that we can really get people to understand that there's value you know these are nutrients that they're throwing away not garbage about 13 million tons of used Shingles

get torn off American roofs each year these ones are on their way to be mixed into pavement that will be laid on US highways the popular roof covering can often be repurposed but mostly ends up in landfills companies that make shingles often say they want their products recycled but those sustainability pledges tend to fall flat they're not making anyone accountable they're not going to make contractor accountable they're not going to make landfill accountable if landfill claims to do it they're not going to come and investigate if they're actually doing it not to mention America isn't

even building enough roads to use up all this waste so the vast majority just keeps piling up in 2021 one of the nation's biggest Roofing manufacturers announced that it figured out how to turn used shingles back into new ones but in an industry plagued by empty recycling promises can this new technique keep one of the world's most popular roof types from becoming worldwide waste each asphalt shingle starts out as a thin sheet of fabric it's coated in Asphalt which usually comes from crude oil then it's topped with tiny rocks minerals and metals the technique was

probably invented in the early 1900s but cheaper wood shingles were more popular until the 1930s when a push for fire safety forced towns Across America to switch to Asphalt some shingle makers also started adding a fire resistant fiber in the base sheets that we now know to be poisonous it was natural that the scientists would turn to asbestos for this is a remarkable mineral millions of American workers were exposed before the risks became widely known though it's rare some of this stuff could still be sitting on top of older houses today so recyclers still have

to be careful obviously we do not want to take asbes in containing material and grind it up and and Liberate the asbest into the atmosphere manufacturers switched to a new material for the sheets in the 1970s fiberglass a fascinating manufacturing process so asphalt shingles stayed popular today industry sources say about 3/4 of us homes are topped with them and the whole industry is worth about 7 billion dollar they work well in lots of climates and are often the cheapest option up front but the mix of ingredients makes recycling them pretty tricky when asphalt and those

materials sit on a roof for many years those materials age and degrade and being able to reclaim those materials can be very very challenging so for years the main way to recycle shingles has been to grind them into a fine powder that can be mixed into roads hundreds of trucks full of shingles arrive here every day most of them have been torn off old roofs a waste management company called demcon buries most of that stuff in its landfill but about a quarter of what they receive is leftover scrapped from shingle factories that's cleaner and cheaper

to process manufacturers right now are generating enough waste material to meet the demands of the hot mix asphalt Market an excavator dumps the shingles into a grinder a screen separates big pieces from small ones qu inch and smaller ends up in One stock pile the larger pieces go through it all again then Road makers mix this Sandy black powder into asphalt pavement it takes the place of fossil fuels and ingredients that have to be mined which cuts down on greenhouse gases when there's enough demand they do process used shingles but it gets messy we have

laborers on a conveyor belt picking out the plastic picking out the popcs picking out the wood tree branches any of the contamination it's very labor intensive very challenging what's also challenging is keeping track of who's actually recycling which kinds of shingle waste so for example one of the world's biggest roofing companies called GF sponsors a website with a list of recycling options on it the goal was to make it easier for contractors to recycle asphalt shingles we found demcon listed as an option but demcon had told us that it only recycles a small fraction of

the used shingles arriving in those trucks every day when we asked asked GF about it it said its website lists places that accept shingle waste but acknowledged that recycling options are limited and the vast majority of tear off shingles go to landfills about an hour after we reached out someone updated the site with a clarification about Demon's operations and removed three other Minnesota facilities from the list of recyclers the specifics can be hard to pin down but there are some states where recycling used shingles into roads seems to be working next door to Minnesota in

Wisconsin shingles used to make up 6% of landfill waste over the last two decades that's gone down to just a tenth of 1% but adding in too much ground roofing material can make roads more brittle and that means more Pooles which are usually caused by extreme temperatures only about half the states allow shingle waste in their roads and in 2015 Colorado Regulators officially declared shingles can't be recycled at all that's because recycling companies were getting paid to take the waste then just letting it pile up in Texas a failed Roofing to roads Venture from 2018

left behind a mountain of shingles piles like these can contaminate nearby air Soil and Water and where recycling efforts fall through shingles are taking up more and more space in landfills which are filling up in some states we do believe at some point communities are going to forbid asphalt shingles from going into landfills that would be a huge problem for companies like GF which says its product is on a quarter of All American Homes it says better recycling techniques are a must we figured if we could do this we could probably save quite honestly the

asphalt Roofing industry it took over a decade of research to develop the company's recycling method GF Engineers had to make sure recycled Jingles would be as strong durable and weather resistant as brand new ones and they couldn't be more expensive than the alternative all of the sustainability efforts should be at Cost neutral or better Engineers here say they've cracked the code the company opened up this demonstration plant last year roof tear off is brought into the facility and sorted and inspected to make certain that the material is of sufficient quality to go through our process

that means the shingles can't be mixed with any other waste the shingles are ground into roughly silver dollar size pieces and magnets filter the mixture at several stages in the process nails and other metallic contaminants are removed and then are funneled into Metals Recycling processes the nail-free blend gets ground down even more to separate out the asphalt Rich parts of the of the waist stream from the asphalt poor uh parts of the waist stream these machines grind shake and sift the mixture until the rocky granules are filtered out we need to drive the purity of

our asphalt briquettes as high as possible to make shingles with recycled content that perform as best as possible this machine presses the asphalt mixture to make it more portable the asphalt briquettes are dissolved in virgin asphalt and used to make new shingles but at first new shingles will only contain about 7% recycled material our intent is to get to 40 to 50% um recycled content in the shingles to do that GF has to do more research and scale up our ultimate goal um by 2030 is to have enough capacity across the US to be diverting

at least a million tons of shingle waste per year from landfills into our process that would still be less than a tenth of the old shingles that get torn off American Homes each year I think it's a good start do I think it's enough to save us in the next 5 Years From filling up landfills with asphalt shingles I don't but the company says that eventually all of its shingle plants will use at least some of the Recycled briquettes and granules ultimately companies don't have to keep their sustainability promises but one former industry player wants

to hold them accountable Dimitri Linsky installed roofs for 7 years and often found he had nowhere to take used shingles besides landfills one of the most frustrating things was to Dam shingles on Landfield but also seeing marketing promise that manufacturers asking us to pass to the homeowner he says exaggerated recycling claims sway consumers toward asphalt shingles we're influencing buying decision and misleading homeowner from real green options I think more homeowners would pick a different roofing system if they knew the truth as a contractor who made a living installing Roofing he found it difficult to challenge

single producers to do better you know if you're in the game it's very hard to go against manufacturer or expose manufacturer because they might not sell you shingles so he sold his business in 2021 and launched a YouTube channel about the industry we exposed the bad the ugly and highlight the best practices welcome back to Roofing inside Channel where you can find the truth about Roofing industry all of this manufacturer says the same thing we are the leader we recycle we're sustainable we are green most major manufacturers say their roofs last for decades but storms

can shorten that Dimitri says other options might actually Cost Less in the long run you might pay double or triple for rber shingle but that shingle will last 30 40 years still Asal chingles rule the North American Market but globally Alternatives like clay metal wood and Concrete roofs are often more popular and can last longer of course every roof needs to be replaced eventually and GF acknowledges that suppliers need to take responsibility for where their product ends up anything that you're making you should have some understanding or at least consideration for what happens to those

products I just think it's part of good corporate hygiene and citizenship coal mining has ruined millions of acres of land across the us and it can pollute the surrounding areas for decades after the coal is gone now these farmers are restoring coal mining land with lavender can this Farm be a model for lands destroyed by coal mining across the country we went to Ashford West Virginia to find out when I signed up and I found out it was a lavender farm I was no way I never heard of a lavender farm I kind of like

it it's my new home Aaron Morgan worked as a coal miner for a decade you I'm not the only ex- Miner here there's a lot of EX coal miners here he never imagined he would be picking flowers on coal mining land it's strange to me that it's been farmed now yeah cuz it's really just all rock It's A Wasteland [Music] really Appalachian Botanical company or ABCO is on a retired part of a larger coal mine let's go over and meet some of the guys my name's Frank I've had an assortment of jobs I like this

one the bit I don't even work here I just come to be we do turn a good section of this mountain purple during the blooming season the business is part of a reclaiming process that rebuilds the landscape with new vegetation but it's complicated and costly imagine blasting the top off of a mountain and then trying to rebuild it piece by piece growing plants in the soil on mines is tough but luckily lavender loves poor soils and the sweet smelling herb can actually reduce toxic heavy metals in the soil we make sure the soil tests come

back so that there's no heavy metals no toxins of any kind the team harvest the lavender throughout the summer and early fall ABCO uses every part of the flower so nothing goes to waste I need like 35 lbs of these buds cut off by tomorrow they spread the lavender on the floor to cut the buds and bundle the stems to sell for cooking we strip the bottom two leaves off and we'll dip that in water and rooting hormone they save small Leaf clippings and plant them to grow more lavender this is the 40-gallon pot that's

a 26 gallon Matt Carter boils water to steam distill about 40 lb of lavender to make essential oil everybody knows that oil is lighter than water the oil floats to the top just strain the water off of it which we keep the water too they filter the oil three times before bottling it up they also use the flowers to make creams Honey Salt and hand sanitizer ready finally the leftover plant biomass is transformed into compost coal companies are legally required to restore the land they have mined after a company drills and blasts a deep pit

it piles all the broken rock and top soil back into it to reshape the landscape all that Earth gets compacted down to prevent erosion and runoff they plant some sort of vegetation and clean the water if need be an old mine can become any number of things like a Gra land a home or in the case of ABCO a farm but does the land actually go back to what it was like before it's still fairly rare I think for um Reclamation to be done well Mike is reforesting a 2500 acre surface mine that has already

been reclaimed but he says growing trees in the Rocky compacted soil is really challenging they have to rip the soil sometimes 3 or 4 feet to plant anything here when you stop the mining it doesn't mean that the pollution stops layers of rock that have been deep in the Earth for Millennia are now exposed and so they become very active chemically uh when they're exposed to water pollutants leech off of those materials for you know decades if not hundreds of years hundreds of thousands of Acres of mining land across the US coal Fields haven't been

reclaimed yet if the mine is stopped and Reclamation activity stops these mines just sort of sit um often is you know wastelands of bare soil and rock and there's a fear that as the coal industry continues to decline more land could go to waste ABCO hopes to expand its Farm onto this patch of partially reclaimed land on the mine but for now it's its Idol you look out there and see all the nasty water just sitting out there and laying it's awful man we ain't even allowed out there and I'm assuming that's the reason we

we're not allowed out there what is most likely is that these mining companies will end up going bankrupt leaving this partially or unreclaimed land without following through on the Reclamation obligations unreclaimed mining land can lead to more flooding and landslides the coal companies stopped working which meant they also stopped fixing any of the problems that they had created companies only became responsible for cleaning up old mines in 1977 before that they simply abandoned them there are over 6 million Acres of abandoned coal mines across the country and they're releasing heavy metals and other toxins into

the water and [Music] air come in and take some of these off businesses like ABCO are working to both restore the land and provide jobs here in Boone County as Co is on its way out the farm has doubled in size since it broke ground in 2019 that's a lot of flowers that's a lot of lavender it's a lot of work that's a lot of employment along with employing former coal miners ABCO also hires people in long-term drug recovery I like working here because they gave me the opportunity to show that my past is in

a past they were still willing to work with me and it was great that somebody gave me a chance to show that I can do this and so when we reclaim we we don't just reclaim Land We reclaim land people communities everything reclaiming Min land is one step toward a postco future the Biden Administration has committed to investing $260 million in Reclamation efforts for States and tribes and appco hopes to use some of that money to expand the business to more of West Virginia if that is funded it will enable us to set up a

new Farm location in a neighboring County and set up a Regional Community Hub there but the US government is still adding one more hurdle to cleaning up abandoned Min land the proposed infrastructure bill would reduce the tax on coal production that funds these Reclamation projects the Appalachian region they've sacrificed a lot for energy that has really built this country we as as a nation owe it to this region to fix some of these inadequacies Appalachia has a long way to go to clean up the mess created by generations of mining but these flowers give hope

for a blossoming future a lot of times you get a ripple effect in the water right we don't make a ripple we make a wave owner Pierre deog has been running Park Avenue International since 1982 and he was skeptical when his son son Alex deug came up with the idea for the totes I'm oldfashioned I came to United States during Civil War in Lebanon and after 5 years I opened my uh own Factory I was against this cuz I say you're going to waste your time we're going to buy garbage bags the idea came to

Alex one night when he was taking out the trash I realized if this is one family's garbage on a single week you know what are the other 8 and a half million people in New York City doing the construction and the design of the plastic woven was pretty much inspired by this this is a 10x 6t carpet that I made all from repurposed upcycled leather scraps and Remnants that were you know on The Cutting Room floor I figured if I could do this with leather why can't I do this with plastic and you know after

6 months of trial and error we were able to figure out the right technique Alex and his team start by separating plastic bags by size the shop already had all the right equipment so these are the same machines that we use for pretty much any leather good construction they fuse the bags together using a heat sealer and cut them into long strips they spool the strips into something like yarn which is then woven together using a hand Loom [Music] [Music] it took Reuben about two days three two and a half three days to to weall

this figuring out how to combine soft and harder Plastics took some troubleshooting so in the beginning when we first started this we were using all soft plastic bags like the single use that you got at a supermarket but we noticed when we took it off the roll the bag wouldn't stand up on its own so we went back to the drawing board and you know I started using the heavier Plastics that were coming through the factory and mixing that in with the softer Plastics so it's a lot stronger now this bag could probably easily hold

at least 50 to 75 lb it takes nearly 4 hours to make just one bag finally they cut out the size of the bags and Stitch on the binding and handles it takes a about 95 plastic bags to make the any bag which is short for a New York bag so far they've sold nearly 300 any bags in the beginning Alex collected plastic from friends and family know you could see the Dwayne reeds in there the CVS the the Home Depot you know the aisle of New York bags in there here we have about 22

garbage bags full of plastic that we've collected um in the last 6 months pretty much nothing we're not using from from Bubble Wrap to heavy plastic film to shopping bags to rad wrapping I mean anything that has a plastic bag uh plastic bag we're stripping it down and using it but he scaled up his operation in the past year he's partnered with fashion retailers and even elementary schools to collect their unwanted plastic now he has more than 8,000 lb of material to work with and he bags 13 $3 price point might seem steep but Alex

markets it as a luxury item the cost of the any bag really reflects the the process of the making of it the weaving process alone is very time consuming which costs a lot of money especially being here in New York City the common grocery bag is made of polyethylene plastic it was first patented in 1965 and by the mid 80s it had gained real traction over the paper bag in American supermarkets in many ways it's a brilliant vention it's thin stretchy strong and cheap to make today we go through one trillion bags worldwide every year

most of which are made with fossil fuels one study found that the average bag is used for 12 minutes and then thrown out less than 10% of them are ever recycled and they're one of the most commonly littered items on the planet they're light and easily shredded which means they can wreak havoc on animals and ecosystems alike the world's most populous country countries are starting to ban many kinds of single-use plastics China's already banned plastic bags and straws in some places this year and a nation wide ban will take effect by 2025 India has a

similar law that goes into effect in 2022 in the US eight states have passed some form of bag ban New York's went into effect in October of 2020 it had been delayed for 7 months following a lawsuit and the pandemic but they're still everywhere the law prevents large change from offering plastic bags but there are exemptions for things like takeout food prescription drugs newspapers and garment bags and enforcement is rare the state has only fined 14 businesses a total of $ 27,2 for violating the ban so do these laws actually reduce waste Kenya enacted one

of the strictest bans in 2017 with harsh penalties for any violations the Kenyan government says 80% of people now comply with the law and the country has begun to issue Bans on other single-use plastic items California was the first US state to enforce a plastic bag band in 2016 a study published 3 years later found thin plastic bag use was down by More than 70% but that people spent more on paper and sturdier plastic bags taxing consumers who choose plastic bags as a more effective way to limit their use According to some experts there's always

tote bags which certainly last longer but as Alex notes they come with costs of their own you have to remember that you know in order order to create an alternative they need to manufacture something new so with that M manufacturing comes CO2 emissions and carbon Footprints so the best solution out there is really to upcycle and when I say upcycle it's taking what's already out there what's existing you know giving it a second life giving it a second use or get creative which is what I'm doing with the any bag the company's not taking in

any more plastic donations at the moment but that doesn't stop Pierre from scouting potential material for more any bags yes I'm I do joke with my son in the morning with when we drivve in and the west side I see those plastic hanging in the trees I tell him look you want stop take those plastic he start laughing I say come on dad not that much