Reverse Course: Your trash causes climate change. Here's how to help

Here & Now Anytime

WBUR

News

4.6 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Americans throw out a lot of trash every year, with much of it ending up in landfills, contributing to climate change. Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd and Chris Bentley report on what people across the country are doing to tackle the problem. First, construction creates more than 600 million tons of trash in the U.S. every year. But deconstructing buildings instead of tearing them down can help change that. Then, almost all the clothes we wear wind up in a landfill, but companies are now working to build a "circular economy" that gives new life to old textiles. And, Dave and Erin Sheffield run a lucrative business scavenging and reselling goods they find dumpster diving. We tell you how the couple found love and a living by combing through trash.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.
0:13.8	Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:16.0	It doesn't matter if one person thought it was trash or one person couldn't use it. For everything
0:22.2	we find, we're trying to think of every single possible way to use it to save it from a landfill.
0:28.9	The garbage bin is just the beginning of the story. This is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR.
0:45.1	Music Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. Hey, welcome to a special episode of Here and Now Anytime, where we share some reporting from
0:50.1	our climate project, Reverse course.
0:55.4	I'm Chris Bentley, here with Peter O'Dowd, and Peter.
0:59.0	Do you ever think about how much garbage we human beings create?
1:03.7	I think about how much garbage I create.
1:06.0	I have two kids and a dog, and I have to lug the trash can to the alley a couple times a week and dump it
1:12.8	all into the trash can. So yes, I think about it all the time. It's disgusting. It's a lot.
1:17.2	A valiant effort taking out the trash. You know, I actually love taking out the trash. It's like
1:21.6	my favorite household chore to do because it's satisfying. It feels like it's gone. I take out the bag and I put it there and it's gone,
1:29.0	right? But that's part of the problem, isn't it? It's out of my house. It's gone for me, but it goes
1:34.3	somewhere and it piles up. Chris, out of sight, out of mind is like anathema in the garbage
1:40.0	industry. It goes somewhere. You know that. Exactly. And we're creating more of it all the time. I looked
1:45.7	up a stat the other day. The EPA says Americans create almost five pounds of trash per person per day.
1:52.7	And some of that gets recycled, a little bit gets composted, but most of it gets thrown out.
1:57.2	Which means by a lot of measures, Americans are the most wasteful people in the world.
2:01.3	That is right. And for this installment of our climate reporting project, we wanted to talk to
	...

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