SPEAKER_08: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_05: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_01: Sail up the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong, past Shenzhen and you come to the industrial city of Dongguan. Here you'll find what may be the world's biggest paper mill, larger than 300 football pitches. It's owned by Nine Dragons, a recycling company started by Zhang Yin, who was once ranked by Forbes as the world's richest self-made woman. Nine Dragons is, or perhaps was, the largest importer by volume of American goods into China. Those goods? Waste paper, typically with some less useful trash mixed in. It's among many Chinese companies that built business models around importing what Americans and others put in their recycling receptacles and picking out stuff that shouldn't be there. That's a crucial job. If the waste is too contaminated, you can't recycle it. It's also a job that's hard to automate. So rich countries started shipping their waste to countries where workers are poor enough to sort it for wages low enough to turn a profit. From the 1980s to until very recently, this system worked smoothly. China's fast growing economy was exporting lots of manufactured goods. And because those ships would otherwise return empty, it was cheap to load them with waste for China to recycle. Entrepreneurs, such as Madame Zhang, made a fortune. But as China got richer, the government decided it no longer wanted to be a dumping ground for the rest of the world's badly sorted rubbish. In 2017, it announced a strict new policy called National Sword. China would now accept only well sorted rubbish, no more than half of 1% stuff that shouldn't be there. That was a big change. Contamination rates used to reach 40 times higher. The amount of waste being shipped to China plunged. Governments and recycling companies scrambled to adjust. Should they find other countries still poor enough to accept their badly sorted waste, or raise taxes to pay higher wage workers to sort it better? Or something else? Let's come back to that conundrum via a brief history of recycling. And here I should distinguish recycling from reusing. There's a reason that the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra is in that order. Take glass bottles. If you can rinse and refill them, that makes more sense than crushing and melting them to make new ones. Examples of reuse go back before paper, to papyrus. Ancient Greece gave us the word palimpsest, which literally means scraped clean to be used again. As for recycling, a thousand years ago, Japan was pulping paper to make more paper. But that was all driven by saving or making money. The raw materials were too valuable to be thrown away. The idea that we should recycle because it's the right thing to do is much more recent. To see how attitudes have changed, look at Time magazine from August 1955. There's an article headlined Throwaway Living, and the adjective isn't pejorative, it's celebratory. The subtitle is Disposable Items Cut Down Household
SPEAKER_04: Chores. An image shows a smiling family filling their bin with paper plates, plastic cutlery
SPEAKER_01: and other objects that, the article tells us, would take 40 hours to clean, except that
SPEAKER_04: no housewife need bother.
SPEAKER_00: A TV ad campaign known as The Crying Indian helped shift the mood, in America at least.
SPEAKER_01: First shown in 1971, it depicted a Native American man paddling his canoe down a trash-polluted river. Then he stands by a highway as a passing motorist tosses a bag of fast-food detritus at his feet. Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once
SPEAKER_06: this country. The Native American man turns to the camera, a single tear rolling down
SPEAKER_01: his cheek. People start pollution, people can stop it.
SPEAKER_01: But the advert wasn't all it seemed, and not just because the actor later turned out to be a second-generation Italian immigrant. It was funded by an organisation backed by leading companies in the beverage and packaging industries. At the time, deposit schemes were common. You'd buy a fizzy drink and get some cash back when you returned the bottle. This model assumes it's the manufacturer's job to provide the incentives and logistics for returning waste. The Crying Indian had a different message. Who's responsible? People. Historian Phinice Dunaway argues that turning big systemic problems into questions of individual responsibility was a bad idea. It made recycling less about effective action, more about making ourselves feel good. That seems to chime with research by behavioural economists at Boston University, who found that when people know they'll be able to recycle, they act more wastefully. The economist Michael Munger develops a similar argument. You can't just leave waste disposal to the free market. If you charge people what it really costs, you tempt them to dump it illegally instead. You have to subsidise it. But that incentivises the behaviour in Time magazine. People chuck stuff away, and society bears the costs. How do we get them to recycle instead? One solution is the guilt trip. For example, the Crying Indian. But that creates a problem, says Munger, in an essay for the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. For each kind of waste, glass bottles, plastic coffee cups, what we should do is coolly compare the costs and benefits of recycling against other options. Well-designed landfills are nowadays pretty safe, and we can harness the methane they produce for electricity. Modern waste incinerators can be a clean-ish source of power. If instead we turn recycling into a moral good, when do we stop? Which brings us back to the conundrum posed by China's national sword policy. Some say we should pare back recycling programmes, collecting only what everyone agrees it makes sense to recycle, such as corrugated cardboard and aluminium cans. That's one way to make sorting easier. But it seems like a backward step. Perhaps we need systemic answers. Maybe regulators can encourage new business models, like those bottle deposit schemes, making manufacturers think through the incentives and logistics for recycling their products. Or perhaps technology will come to the rescue. A mall in Australia recently debuted an AI-enabled trash can, which senses what you put in it and sorts accordingly. State-of-the-art sorting facilities use lasers and magnets and airjets to separate different recyclable streams. None of this can yet compete with low-cost labourers in China. But maybe closing off that option will prove just the spur to innovation that the industry needs.
SPEAKER_00: Eagle, Houston, you're go for landing. Over.
SPEAKER_03: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. A story of breathtaking
SPEAKER_06: ambition. I thought that he was a little premature on making an announcement just in ten years
SPEAKER_00: since we hadn't even gone into orbit. A story of incredible innovation. I'm in charge of
SPEAKER_06: this stuff called software, but nobody knew what software was. A story of amazing human
SPEAKER_06: endeavour. It was the lack of fear. It wasn't the lack of knowing it was risky, but just
SPEAKER_04: weren't afraid of it. A story of triumph over adversity. As they pitch over and see the
SPEAKER_00: moon for the first time, Neil said, we can't land here. A story where we all know the ending.
SPEAKER_06: That's one small step for man. But not necessarily the beginning. Three, two, one, zero. I'm Kevin Fong and fifty years on I'll be telling the story of the
SPEAKER_06: Apollo moon landings in a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service. We're about to do something that nobody has ever done. With the help of the people who made it happen. We were able to do this impossible thing. That's 13 minutes to the moon. We did it. We did it.
SPEAKER_06: The first episode is available now. Just search for 13 minutes to the moon wherever you found this podcast.
