Students across the world today are walking out of school to protest for action on the

climate.

It's in conjunction with the big UN climate summit.

Maybe you heard about the 16 year old climate activist Greta who took a boat across the

Atlantic for the occasion.

Everyone's focusing on the big, but I'm sort of caught up on the small and I'm catching

up today explained in the small.

I asked producer reporter Noam Hasenfeld to help me on this quest because I heard that

there was a chance that my recycling was being burned.

Yeah, Sean, you sent me this article in the Guardian from a couple months ago and it

was about how Philadelphia was having problems with its recycling system and was sending

its recyclables to an incinerator outside the city.

Yeah, and I think it was kind of like shocking, right?

Because it flies in the face of like things that we were taught as children.

What happens to your recycling?

Yeah, I sort of couldn't believe that it was happening and so I had to go check it out

for myself.

I wanted to go to a local incinerator operated by the same company and so I went to an incinerator

in Alexandria, Virginia right outside of DC.

This is a view inside the combustion chamber.

So this is where we're burning waste about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's a good view in there.

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