I'm Stephanie Safarian and this is episode 78.

You are listening to the Sustainable Minimalist Podcast, a show about living simply and sustainably with your family.

Here's your host, Stephanie Safarian.

Hello there and welcome back.

Today we are talking about the true state of recycling in 2019 America. I grew up in the 1980s and I remember as a kid seeing

commercials about recycling, seeing posters about recycling.

The 1980s was a big decade for urging the public to recycle.

And by and large, Americans jumped on board. Today many of us see recycling as the

holy grail of waste management but we shouldn't. Maybe as you've perused the

headlines over the past year you've noticed something about China, something about them not taking our recycling anymore, but it's confusing you don't know what it all means and more specifically you don't know what it all

means for you we're gonna get there today we're also going to get into six

reasons six really concrete reasons why Americans should not be quite so excited about

recycling at all, as well as what we should be excited about and what we should be

doing instead of recycling.

We will also touch on what actually happens to our trash, what incineration and what

landfills actually look like and what their actual consequences are because for many people and if you

feel this way you're absolutely not alone we forget about our trash once the garbage

collector picks it up off of our curb.

We assume that it's going somewhere safe.

We assume it will be disposed of properly.

And spoiler alert, that is simply not the case.

This week's show note, so everything we're talking about today can be found

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