As part of our annual Earth Day programming, on today’s show we do a deep “dumpster dive” into the world of waste: food waste, medical waste, construction waste, e-waste, and more. Our guest is Kate O’Neill, author of the book Waste, which traces the emergence of the global political economy of waste. She and Patty […]
How Big Oil Lied About Plastic Recycling
Last week, the city of Madison announced that it will no longer be recycling plastic bags now that it doesn’t have a buyer for them. This got us thinking: What happens to recycled plastic anyway? Where does it go? It turns out the answer is more complicated than we’d imagined. To help us sort it […]
No More Landfill! Complex Plastic Recycling in Post-Industrial Waste
Tonight the Perpetual Notion Machine talks with Professor George Huber and Professor Reid van Lehn of the University of Wisconsin – Madison Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Department of Energy’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. They are the co-authors of the paper ‘Recycling of multilayer plastic packaging materials by solvent-targeted recovery and […]
Living in a Plastic World
Plastic is all around us: our electronics, our furniture, our clothes, our shoes—and even our food. It’s hard to imagine a world without plastic. So what do we do with all of it? On today’s show, we take a closer look at plastic through the lens of culture, health, and the environment with scholar and […]
“Stop Sucking” Campaign for Strawless Ocean Impacts Disabled Perso...
The “Stop Sucking” campaign on the “strawless ocean” website invites visitors to post a video of themselves challenging a restaurant or bar owner to stop serving plastic straws with their drinks. The site also has shareable memes that make claims like “We use 500 million plastic straws everyday in the United States. If we don’t […]
Not Your Grandfather’s Beer: Microplastics Contamination Now Ubi...
Plastic is a remarkable substance. It can be formed into any shape, never degrades, is strong, pliable, lightweight and cheap to produce. The same qualities that make plastic so useful, however, also make it an ecological nightmare. Of the 7.1 billion tons of plastic ever produced by human beings, at least 5 billion tons of […]
