Hey, this is Outside In, and if you've been listening to the last couple of

episodes, you'll know that I haven't been in the office, which means I have not been

producing stories, but fortunately producer Hannah McCarthy has been.

Yeah, I've been very busy. So we ready to go here? I'm ready.

Okay and go. When I was in grade school in Massachusetts, there was this movie they would show us, it felt like at least once a year.

The sound of birds singing, trees silhouetted against the sunrise and then bam!

Huge piles of garbage and bulldozers roaming the hellscape of an endless landfill.

And if you think that's dramatic, just wait. We didn't stop the landfills and from the good old days we're going to go away.

That is indeed a recycling song sung to the tune of Billy Joel's, we didn't start the fire. And then you get to watch a bunch of sketches and

video clips about how much garbage we produce and how we've got to reduce that waste.

The show was called Recycle This, exclamation Point. The thing was commissioned by the Dow Chemical Corporation, by the

by the Dow Chemical Corporation, by the way, in 1990. And it might sound

dorky.

Doc, what? What is all this trash around the DeLorian? Dorky. D'

But it worked.

I wanted to reduce, reuse, recycle.

I wanted to save the planet. Around the same time that I was sold on the moral obligation of saving the world from trash,

a new way of recycling was born, a technology that would save us from the odious

sorting, none of that plastic versus paper versus glass rigmarole.

It was called Single Stream. one bin for all of your recycling. That

single stream bin opened up a whole world of convenient environmental

responsibility. Unlimited by categories, we can keep all sorts of stuff out of our trash cans.

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