Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Ultimately, we, we wanted to find out from our awareness campaigns that we did to educate people about the program all the way through towards the last time we collected and finished doing the composting. What did people think was compostable? What education works, what education doesn't. And also what's some of the rich insights that we got from the participants themselves because they all voluntarily filled out a bunch of survey data through our partner, Athens Clarke County Solid Waste Department. And their, their survey data basically gave us a lot of soft information about why people would compost and how to pay for it.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: And that's what I want to, want to really tease out. So in this study, was it 80, 80 homes? 80 households?
[00:00:41] Speaker A: It was 400. So. Oh, much bigger. Okay, a little bit bigger, but still small on the scale of a, of a pilot, for sure.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: To me, that's a pretty good pilot.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in northeast Wisconsin.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Roots to Fruits podcast. I am your host, Kelly Williams. In my book, Tiny the Soft Power Model, I lay out a simple truth that all living systems thrive on hydration, resonance and coherence.
Hydration gives us flow.
Resonance allows us to connect. And coherence is what makes change possible and what makes it stick.
That's the through line that runs underneath every conversation on this show.
If you've been with us, you know, we've explored how this plays out in people, in teams, in materials and in organizations.
Today we're looking at how it shows up in community.
One of the most powerful examples came from a Walmart foundation funded study in Athens, Georgia, where roughly 80 households tested what it meant to bring composting into daily life.
What happened wasn't just about organics recycling. It was about the shift inside families, the conversations around dinner tables and children who carried that truth into their schools.
That's what we're diving into today with Dr. Evan White from the University of Georgia's New Materials Institute.
Evan was part of that study and now he's seeing into how the seeds planted years ago are still rippling outward.
Not from policy mandates or corporate checklists, but from the unfiltered voices of kids who know what alignment feels like and aren't afraid to demand it.
Evan, welcome back.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Hey, Kelly, thanks for that, that introduction. And yeah, you kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of starting the education at the dinner table.
And that's part of the reason why we and the Walmart foundation was interested in doing curbside compost Collection because that's, that's where the big gap is. So appreciate it.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: So tell us a little bit about your, your version of how we met and how it led to this study because I think that that's an interesting story in itself that two people connected on the coherent energy around how do we do this differently, how do we do it better? And it kind of led to some really neat things.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, so first let me give a little preface about who I am and where, what I do.
My name is Evan White. I am a research scientist at the New Materials Institute at the University of Georgia. And since 2017 or so we've been studying all things compostable in terms of materials with a focus on multi layer packaging and tough to recycle materials when it comes to single use packaging.
And it was back then, before the pandemic, when we first took this initiative with funding from the Walmart foundation to first see if compostable packaging could be designed that has high performance metrics, that has the shelf life and works in a normal cost structure for these materials. They are higher, higher performing than the incumbents. But could it be made and could we commercialize it or incentivize other companies to commercialize it?
So we embarked on this journey with the whole vertical supply chain. From raw material suppliers to converters and research institution like ourselves, we're all involved in developing these materials and we were the analytical arm and kind of the design instigators for figuring out what packaging formats gave rise to low temperature compostable packaging. So this, yes, we wanted to degrade and high temperatures like an industrial composting, which we'll get into, but we also want it to work in backyard home compost.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: And I remember too when we were first talking about it, I was just kind of airing my frustration being relatively new to, to this side of packaging and hearing the complaints or the concerns from, from those who make packaging for food brands, et cetera, that they get it, they know that it needs to be compostable, but it's such a time consuming eff demonstrate. And we were saying, and you were sharing with me some of the investments the New Materials Institute had made. And we kind of sketched out on the phone like what would a program look like that we can study these things at the same time in the same environment, the same compost and really understand. So we kind of wrote it up as like a joint white paper of, of, of what we felt we need. And I remember that just happened to be in your hands at the right Time near Christmas, I think that year when Walmart foundation was looking to invest in something and we were there.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it was like a few days before Christmas and we had a December 30 deadline to get in the grant to the proposal. And ultimately it took, you know, some phone calls and figuring out who could be our partners and if we had enough people involved. And Kelly was definitely one of the key players and basically rounding up the right members on the industry side, having the right connections and understanding the engineering needs for the packaging. So he played a big part in helping bring that project to fruition and garnering that support from the industry partners.
So we got all kinds of films shipped from all over the country and raw materials and we were able to tinker and start playing in the lab with some designs based off of, you know, what we're able to get our hands on.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: And that one single moment of coherent energy trying to solve something important for society continued on. And you continued to get funding opportunities to continue to explore and push the envelope, starting with industrial. Right. And if I recall, you went all the way up into the lower temperatures, which is home, and then tell us how that kind of led into this study itself that got funded and maybe just talk a little bit more about that study.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So that, I mean, that study still, it's completed, but we're in the, in the review process, so we'll be publishing that. I keep on saying we'll be publishing that eventually, but it's coming out. And ultimately we wanted to organize the study kind of like rounds of testing as you would do in academic setting like organic chemistry, and you kind of weed out the losers and figure out what the, know, the more successful structures are in terms of the fastest to degrade, but also balanced with, you know, ability to be produced. So we looked at some common polymers that are known to be degraders and industrial compost.
We use conventional adhesives at the time and, and laminated these structures or had our partners laminate some of the structures for us.
And we basically tested all these materials and these instruments called respirometers that are basically stripped down gas analyzers that study respiration of organisms that are on the microbe level.
It's a systems biology experiment. And ultimately we're just looking at the end product of biodegradation and that biological assimilation of the actual carbon sources that come from the packaging. And the end product is CO2 and water. So we measure the CO2 that comes from the packaging itself and we can infer rates of Degradation and figure out what works and what doesn't from this, these large rounds of testing.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: So it's fair to say for those who aren't familiar with it, these are like little units and a whole bunch of them where you're studying microorganisms digesting these materials as part of a food source and how they create compost.
And by doing that, we're able to validate it is breaking down, they are being consumed. How long does it take? And so we're able to really characterize. But knowing that compost is a dynamic living system, anytime you grab it, it's a state of a system that's always changing. Right. So this was our first time to really study materials with keeping that constant.
Right. Which I don't know if it had ever been done before, but, but, but we felt there was a need to finally do that.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: So we, we did do the first order from our, our partners in Slovenia who built our respirometers. They didn't have units large enough for what we asked to accomplish that. That need to test all the test materials against the same compost. So we asked them to build a much larger system, biggest one that could fit through our door, which is a 60 chamber system with, including all the, the analytical equipment that goes with each chamber. And that allowed us to screen, I believe it was like 36 samples simultaneously against each other with the help of a couple of other systems. And that really increased the throughput. And we were able to screen the samples against the inoculum in that one time point, that transient time point like Kelly was talking about.
You know, compost is a moving target. It's, it's a dynamic system with some tolerances we try to standardize as much as possible.
But it's, it's, it's a systems biology that's always evolving.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: If I remember correctly, you can tailor these units to industrial conditions, home conditions, anaerobic digestion. Like what? Whatever is the environment. This is where you would evaluate things, conditions inside that environment. Correct.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: The big advantage with these systems, of course, is their size. But they also could be cooled below ambient temperatures. So Instead of doing 25 degree testing, we did 20 Celsius to better match what would happen in the backyard instead of say, a managed compost facility.
So we also wanted to access different organisms. So we did 58C, 35C to go look at the mesophiles and then 20C to look at the psychrophiles, I believe they're called.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: And so from that initial work, I kind of came out of the inner workings of it at that point. But as I recall, and maybe you can walk us through what was the process that led to the idea of hey, let's look at a study of a particular size of city in the US So walk us through what kind of led to that and, and what that study looked like. Cause that, that, that's the one I think has a lot of really rich insights that haven't been talked about. And that's what I want to get to on this show.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: So that was kind of the route like the proving can you make it? And then the elephant in the room is okay, now what do you do with it?
And we first had to figure out, okay, well where does most of this packaging wind up? Where's most of the food waste related to this type of packaging?
And it's somewhere north to 50% of all the food waste happens actually at the home in your own refrigerator and your own pantry. 35, 40%, something like that, depending on where you are in the country is industrial waste. It's like happens in the back of grocery stores or before it leaves the farm.
So there's a burden for businesses as well and industry. But really the big gap is households and it's single family households. It's how most Americans live.
There's solutions in high density areas. I mean everyone knows like dining halls at universities. Of course there's oftentimes composting solutions there, but it's in the single family home type style housing that doesn't have the collection with the exception of some exemplary cities like Minneapolis and some others.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: And so when I believe there was a rationale as to like a particular size of city that, that the, the study wanted to target. Can you, can you talk a little bit about the rationale there?
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so we wanted to look at medium sized cities. We also analyzed kind of the, the end the flows of compostable packaging through small, medium and large size cities. But we wanted to do the pilot in a medium sized city in part because there's more of them numerically than the larger cities. And once you get to a population over about 100,000 people, those solutions will scale to larger cities that are populations in the millions, specifically with workers health and protecting the workers. The tipping has to be done by a side loader or by a machine.
Everyone knows the bicyclists that go around town and help haul compost waste by themselves and that's great and it's a young man's game. But to protect workers health, it has to be automated. And that really requires mechanical tipping so that, that would scale to larger cities.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: And so the city that was selected is your university's home city, Athens, Georgia. So you happen to be in one of those profiles of city, right?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, so that was on, on purpose in part because the big collection gap is in the Southeast and the Midwest.
That's, you know, they're just in terms of collection.
And also we have kind of the right partners in place to do the composting and the hauling.
The city of Athens is a little unique in the sense that the county and the city are a unified government. So that actually helps, you know, kind of the navigate the complexities between like government work with maybe city hauler versus a composter that's for profit. We didn't have to worry about that. So it's a nice place to do a test bed because it kind of simplifies the amount of players in the room.
And ultimately we, we wanted to find out, you know, from our awareness campaigns that we did to educate people about the program all the way through towards the last time we collected and finished doing the composting, what did people think was compostable and what education works, what education doesn't.
And also what's some of the rich insights that we got from the participants themselves because they all voluntarily filled out a bunch of survey data through our partner, Athens Clarke county solid waste Department. And their, their survey data basically gave us a lot of information, soft information about why people would compost and how to pay for it.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: And that's what I want to. Want to really tease out. So in this study, was it 80, 80 homes, 80 households?
[00:16:12] Speaker A: It was 400. So. Oh, much bigger. Okay, a little bit bigger, but still small on the scale of a, of a pilot for sure.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: To me, that's a pretty good pilot.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Some are larger, some are in the thousands.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Now was that all in one community or spread out voluntarily participating or were they all geographically pretty close together?
[00:16:33] Speaker A: They're geographically close together and we did that intentionally. So we wanted to choose three neighborhoods in the city that had historically good rate compliance for recycling.
So we have an established recycling program. So it's good to take learnings from the recycling program. The cities that have or the neighborhoods in the cities that have the high compliance, low contamination and recycling probably will do better for composting. And then we also wanted to co locate those neighborhoods. So we chose ones that are physically adjoined to each other for the logistics and for the hauling.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: And this involved new haulers, new trucks.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: For the duration of the pilot and the program. ACC Solid waste department actually did receive a new compost truck that's specifically designed for hauling compost.
They got that through a separate grant through our state.
So we, you know, it was kind of independently arrived funding that we took advantage of, but it shows the growth of the industry, at least in the state of Georgia.
And it was definitely useful because one of our main learnings is that if you want to run a hauling program, one truck, it's the same as zero trucks, because when that truck goes down, you cannot complete the service. And having seamless service is incredibly important. Everyone knows when their trash bin is not picked up that week.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Yeah, everyone remembers that week. It wasn't picked up.
So really we needed to have two working trucks.
And we also used mini compactors because they could basically deal with the material just the same as long as they had enough of the browns in it.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Okay, so the program is set up. It was communicated. There's an onboarding process with the participating families.
Any, Any insights to share on that part of the process? If I recall, there was some, you know, a little jagged in the beginning with the communication, but that kind of streamlined. What I remember, it went more fluidly than even was anticipated in the rollout.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So the awareness campaign as we. As we call it, basically all the communication efforts, we. We basically started planning that two years before the actual launch of the pilot. So that's in the early workings with our partners figuring out logistics targeting these neighborhoods in this time frame. We basically were looking at a launch of. It was mid September in 2023 is when we started doing the awareness campaign all the way through the entire pilot, which ended in April of 2024. So we only, we. We started the pilot in February of 2024. So I guess there's about a six month period where we had strategic letters go out near the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, because that's when people are more often home, have time to read through the mail.
And we also used very harmonized pictures and color schemes and fonts, and everything was basically the same from a graphical standpoint. So that, you know, we had the repetition of seeing the. The campaign material either through direct mailers, you know, actual physical copies, or some people preferred to have just. Just be emailed as well.
So we, we leveraged some of the. Or we leveraged the contacts that we had through the holler, which is also the city. So they knew everyone's address and they could, they could provide the. Those direct mailer communications. And also direct emails.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: So. So you get a little bit of a head start in the awareness campaign.
You're getting ready to go live. It's going to start on Monday of next week. We're going to start picking it up. Walk us through that, that initial experience with what went well, what didn't, what, what did you learn from it and how did you correct, you know, how did you do that on the fly to, to continually improve the pilot.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So about two weeks before the pilot started, we, we were about 80 or 90% full. We still didn't have our full 400.
So I was reached out to by the local radio station that's run by the school and wga and I was interviewed on that radio station two weeks before the pilot. So that both Saturdays before the pilot there was more awareness about that happening. Whether or not that filled us up to 400 or not, that might have been related. But ultimately within those two weeks we were able to get our full 400 participants, which was about, I think it was about 22% of all the homes somewhere around there.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Interesting. And so was collections want was the collection part once a week, twice a week. What was the.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: It was once, once weekly, once weekly.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Same day for all 400.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: So yeah, we had the north side of the dividing line, which was the main highway going through the neighborhoods. We did on a Thursday and then it was on a Tuesday froze south of the line. So we had two different days so that we could use, you know, they, they still have to pick up garbage and recycling. So they had to navigate that on two days.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: So it went to a location to, to go to the next step, maybe walk us through quickly, like what that is. And then I want to go back because I know there's some things that were learned early on about what not to put in it, what to put in it. So I want, I want to make sure we get to that as well.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So after it's collected by the hauler, they could, they could use one, one truck to do, you know, a day of worth of collection for half the, for 200 homes pretty much.
And they would dump that off to be sorted either manually actually by hand by the worker who's also running the back of the, or the, the, the rear and loader there and, or through a, a fork screen. So pretty simple filtration. But what was interesting about however, whatever they filtered out, all packaging was garbage to them at the end of the day when it came in to the facility. So it doesn't matter if it was you know, Styrofoam clamshell or a compostable clamshell. They really didn't want that packaging to go into their facility. So if they could easily screen something like that out, they would.
But it was very low tech. Screening is a good way to put it.
And early on in the pilot we got a lot of garbage.
There was 19.11 US tons collected through the whole three month pilot of composted items. But there was also something around 7.3 tons of garbage that was landfilled. So, you know, there was a decent amount of contamination that came from the curbside collection, which was expected. But it's, you know, that's roughly the ratio.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: And that change though, over the length of the study where again, the communication, the education, the knowledge of the homeowners, did that change or did they continue to, out of not knowing, put the wrong things in there?
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I can get you the right tonnages if we want to go back to that, at least in metric tons, but.
So the pilot diverted 17.3 metric tons of food scraps to composting.
6.65 metric tons of landfill material was also collected.
However, 3.88 tons of that was in the first three weeks of the pilot. So, okay, so basically was in the.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Early, the rough early onboarding part of it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: More than half was of all that landfill material occurred in the first two weeks. So we had direct mailers and emails go back out during the pilot to help correct some of that behavior.
We just kind of got to the point just saying, no cardboard, just don't do it.
Because there's some exceptions where cardboard's fine, like a pizza box that's soiled, but you give one exception. Then all of a sudden, you know, cereal boxes and cereal boxes, frozen food.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Boxes, there's just all, that's all polyethylene coated paper. Right.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: So polyethylene coated paper with tons and they're like already nano and microplastics.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So that, that represents a problematic area in general, which I think we're going to circle back to before we're finished. So most of the. So that was corrected for the most part in the beginning and towards the end, what still lingered around as contamination, what was still there after the end of the pilot.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Right. So yeah, the one kind of category that what people didn't really understand or didn't really change their behavior was for junk mail.
They thought if it was paper, it was compostable. Didn't matter if it had a plastic window on it or not or adhesive backing. And some, some, some paper even has, you know, polyesters blended into them for strength and for security reasons.
All that stuff went into the, went into the compost bin, even magazines. But you know, there's this general understanding that most people think that if it's paper it should be compostable, which was interesting. Yeah.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: Now for mechanical recycling, you can throw that in and maybe, you know, but when you throw that, that frozen food box or cereal box into the recycling bin and it goes through re pulping and the fiber gets separated that, that polyethylene that was put on top of it, where does that go?
Does it go to landfill?
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Well, if it's a poll post consumer recycled content, it'll go into that new fiber board.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: But if I go to the grocery store and buy a box of Cheerios, that box is polyethylene coated paperboard. Right.
Where does that polyethylene go?
[00:26:36] Speaker A: If I recycle that box, I mean it gets, I'm not an expert in the recycling processes, but my understanding is that they do a pretty good job of cleaning it up for purity and most of it gets landfilled. Ultimately it goes the way of the stickies and all the other gunk that comes off of that recycling process.
And I think the fiber that they can get out of it is quite pure in my understanding. Greater than 99% purity.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Because polyethylene hates water, so it should be easy to separate.
So let's go back to I guess the societal or the cultural learnings from that study.
Share with me what you took away from it in terms of what did those families experience? What did they learn? How did it change them?
[00:27:23] Speaker A: So we got a couple of responses from parents and just describing how their, their kids responded to it.
And ultimately the, the parents had no issues with teaching or allowing their children to participate in, in the composting project. And preschoolers really liked it, you know, elementary school children. And we have one response that to shorten up says you'd be surprised how much joy can bring a preschooler to participate in this composting program. So it's, it's really showing how kids want to do it. Not every kid of course, but they can understand that, you know, this is a different way of recycling. It's just organics recycling and is all the natural stuff that goes in there.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: I mean down to a pretty young age, they get it. I know, I know. When my, my son was, was around three, four years old, I loved when he would ask me why I Left the sink running when I was washing something. Like they're really attuned to, to this, I think more than we give it credit and I think that that's what's missing from this conversation is in packaging. We've built this mountain of single use plastic because 8 billion people are largely food dependent on a system they have no control over. So packaging is essential because you can't build a parachute falling out of an airplane, right? You can't be an overnight homesteader. You need packaged food.
And that when you look at the way a child's mind review like they, they get it, it's almost like they don't need to be taught anything.
So when you have children involved, how does, does that, does that change the dynamic? Is that how, you know, I always think the example, like when nobody wanted to pay $3,000 for a MacBook, Apple put them in every school. What do you buy when you leave school? You buy a MacBook. So I feel like any type of real change starts at the ground and it starts with children and it starts generationally that they carry that forward. And I think this is no different because what we've built is this big, big mountain of plastic sitting, it's it and it's got all of these conundrums tied to it.
And, and the ground that it sits on is a bit of a quagmire. So I think in order to, to, to move it out of the quagmire, we have to rethink it. And to rethink it, it's about the size and the scale of the circularity for what you're trying to, to do.
You can't solve this coast to coast, but you can solve it in a community.
And I feel like this study really gave us good insights into how you do that and, and, and to how people embrace it.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: So ultimately, like I'm, I'm, I'm trying to, trying to figure out what you want to go, where you want to go from there. Kelly But I, I agree.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Any more insights from, from the study?
I remember there were some things that you had shared with me in the past about the families, got to know the haulers, like, how great is that?
You know your holler by name now because you're part of this program.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: There was a couple of instances where we, we were following the haulers and we'd just been a fly on the wall in public space and we noticed that there were several participants that would stop and ask the hauler what can go in, what can't, and the hauler would just point different things that are actually in the back of the truck at that moment and said okay, this is fine, that's not.
So that doesn't really happen at the hauler level, typically the driver. So it was really good to work with them and see that interaction just emerge.
There's some other programs that have emerged kind of after the pilot program.
So the program was only three months long. However, there were two existing private haulers that operated in the same territory. So we had meetings with them both before and after the pilot with understanding that there was going to be some other business that would be interrupted from this free service to the participants.
However, on the back end of that we really wanted to emphasize to the participants that this is an existing service that you can use now. We're working up for a citywide program, but we're not ready yet. So we did a little bit of free advertising for them to help them rebuild their business. And basically there's still the existing private hauler while this composting program is built out.
We did present a lot of this information to the mayor and city council as well.
After the pilot, both myself and Joe Dunlap, who at the time was working at ACC saw waste department, he was a recycling director and we, we shared some of these findings, these about how participants enjoyed the program. We had a over 90% positive overall feeling. I guess we give some of that.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: Kind of data satisfaction rating or whatever, right?
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Positive feedback for, for the pilot program and we had enough positive support just from the participants that the commission approved out of the general fund a full time position for somewhere around $70,000 for including benefits.
And that's a permanent position that'll last for years until it's, until they decide to remove it permanently if that's the case. We hope that doesn't happen. But ultimately it's hard to generate those kind of permanent positions from general funds. And that's usually how cities fund might be different. It's so fragmented across the state of Georgia. So it's going to be even more diverse and dynamic than that. And from a funding standpoint, and I.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Hear that in other municipalities too, Evan, where unfortunately a lot of these municipalities are running on the same reduced budget and headcount during COVID They never restabbed, so. So they might believe in programs like this, but they're pretty daunting to envision. So I always feel like looking at that small scale wins like this becomes easier and less intimidating to, to take on because there's some baseline Thing to borrow. I. It makes me think of the Dayton Food bank and what they're doing and building. It started out dealing with food shortages with the families in the county and solving that. And that just kept cascading and leading to more compost programs, growing food on site. Now education sessions and training and teaching people like it's become a community center. That because it to me we in, in the packaging industry or a material science. We keep thinking of composting as like some end of life ultimate solution Bullshit. Evan. It's where carbon starts. It's the renewal process starts there. Our ability to fix our failing human gut biome should be directed there. That's where we're going to start to fix it. So if we think about it differently then you realize it is just an extension of community.
And you know, you're seeing, I'm seeing. I don't know if UGA has data on this, but man, it just seems like community programs are popping up all over. Here in Cincinnati, a new one just got announced in one of the wealthier parts of the city, the old money part of the city. They're starting a program and I feel like it's picking up. The coherence signal of it is starting to pick up.
What about schools? Like how does school start doing it differently too?
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah, there's some.
I can't speak to every school in Athens Clark county, but there's definitely awareness around composting and some smaller composting operations that happen at the schools. There's a, a garden at my son's school. So there's. There. They're basically exploring and educating composting at that level.
But when it comes to the city level and kind of the, the decisions of the, whether or not to have a compost facility compared to just landfill and recycling, we, I mean the Athens Clark county facility, it has its, the motivation is because the facility is profitable, I'm not sure profitable, but it covers costs and they, they publish their, their revenue streams on their website so everyone can see it. It's a public service.
But they sell out a compost that's a product for them every month from March through September. Typically, it's hard to get compost from there, at least in large volumes because there's demand in our surrounding area for the compost, for agriculture.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: I hear that from all of them. I don't think there's a composter out there that doesn't have a sales problem.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so the, the demand is larger than what they can produce and really what they need is collection of that food scraps because the, that kind of input provides all the other micronutrients that a carbon heavy source like maybe wood chips and timber, you know, doesn't provide the same nutrients as the, as the food scraps. So they really need to have the right recipe. And that's, that's why we really need to have programs like this to divert that large volume of food scraps to composting.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Do you have a crystal ball on what you think the material science needs to be for packaging? Is it more cellulosics, is it more biopolymers? Like what, what, what do you have a gut feel on what could be some big changes that makes it easier to implement downstream?
[00:36:59] Speaker A: The one thing I always come back to is, is this paradox between composting and recycling.
So if you're recycling a product or designing a plastic packaging product to be recyclable, what the recyclers want is something that's mono material and massive. They want it that's clean as possible with no dyes.
So you're talking one chemistry is ideal when it comes to compostable materials. It's the opposite. So we want something that's very lightweight, very thin and made out of many hundreds of compounds. You know, the right recipe for the bacteria and for the fungus to eat. So there's no issue with it being complex and actually mixing together dissimilar chemistries like a polyester with a polysaccharide, maybe with a little bit of nitrogen, potassium, the NKs and Ps that the organisms want.
You can afford materials that will degrade faster and still can be high performing. So I think that the opportunity for compostables is they can be, they can be complex, they just still, they have to maintain their biodegradability like us.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Right? We don't want to eat the same food every day.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. You got to feed the microbes with the right diet as well.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Yep, that's right.
And, and, and I think that that's the scary part because it's like a big pile of dirt. Stuff goes on in it. We get it, but we can't see it. Which is what always attracted me about the new Materials Institute's capabilities. Because now you can actually study them in, in that way.
Since I have you as my, one of my resident experts to go to on this microplastics. You know, you and I have known about this, we've talked about it. But, but you know, it. It's also interesting. I don't think most People know this, but probably the most retweeted re restated stat is in the history of this space was that by 2050 there'll be more plastics in the ocean than fish, quote unquote, by weight. That's always left off by weight. But that actually came from University of Georgia's work and some. Prof. With Jenna Jem back there at uga. But I say that only to again, give credit to uga, which deserves it, for doing that.
So profoundly important. But those ocean plastics were like the danger that you can see, and it's visceral and real.
Well, we always knew. It's, it's the, it's the truth of what you can't see that's the bigger danger and that's the microplastics.
And, and I know that the bioplastics industry has done a great job recently, particularly showing that, yeah, bioplastics do miniaturize into smaller pieces, but they don't stick around.
And, and it reminds me of the other study that you guys did on the sea turtles that maybe you can quickly introduce and maybe share your thoughts on the truths and the worries and what, what we really should be concerned about with microplastics.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's.
So before the pandemic, microplastics were a hot topic and then we forgot about them.
And, and the pandemic also helped us realize that we need E commerce, we need packaging to survive in this modern world.
So it really just exacerbated the problem of microplastics.
And now we have behavioral trends with E commerce and basically decentralized or rather centralized food supplies that has led to almost all of our food being packaged in some format.
So we looked at all of the different packaging production on Earth for that year back in 2020 and 2021, and it matches approximately the distribution of the plastics for that we found within washback baby sea turtles. So these are just turtles that forage at the surface. They don't dive. So we're only looking at floating plastics. So the, the lighter than water materials, polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. But what we found in the sea turtles, thousands of microplastics in the sea turtles, or maybe hundreds, but ample material to basically get a cross section of what they were eating. And it matched the global supply of those three plastics for the floating.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: No surprise. And, and what happens is, right, their, their, their system gets, they feel full because they've got microplastics in their, in their digestive tract, so that they're not eating enough, they're not strong enough. They can't make it out, so they wash back.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll put on my veterinary hat real quick. But we didn't prove mortality from the consumption of plastic. But what we could prove is that all but a couple of the sea turtles that we studied, over 95%, had some level of anthropogenic plastic in their guts.
And we quantified how many plastics there were and what their chemistry was.
And.
And ultimately, what's unique about these young sea turtles is that they don't forge around the whole ocean like the adults do.
They're localized to wherever you found them. So in Juneau Beach, Florida, very wealthy place in Florida with a wealthy coastline, and it doesn't matter whether it's a remote ocean or right off the coast of one of the wealthier places in the United States, you're going to find microplastics in the ocean and animals will concentrate them by eating them.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: In your view, I mean, is this the same concern with soil, too? Like, what's your.
If you could speak some truth to power around microplastics, like, what's your sense on the dangers? What do we need to do? What should we be thinking about?
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there's very little control experiments.
I mean, we've all probably remember the report of finding microplastics in the Alps up on the, on the snowpack. So we know that they, they can be lifted by. By the winds and brought in many places so that there's no control experiment. Everyone is exposed to microplastics just like we're exposed to PFAs and those other materials.
So we are the guinea pigs to see what our environmental exposure is. But what, what you can do is you can try to. Try to limit your exposure in your local environment by, you know, if you find trash on the side of the road, be a role model to your preschooler. Pick up that trash. That's right. That trash is going to form, you know, countless microplastics if it just stays out in the environment. So there's some environmental stewardship that we can all transfer to our children.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: Absolutely. And you know, when people say, well, if you make packaging compostable, you're disencouraging litter, I'm like, look, no, when you're, if you're 25 years old, you're either a litterer or you're not.
You may have less guilt if you accidentally drop a granola bar out of your backpack on a hike, but you're not going to throw it out because it's compostable. And nobody talks about entropy. And really compostables, the earth digestible materials used for the essential packaging because again, 8 billion people can't become overnight homesteaders. So if you need it, it should be flexible and it should be earth digestible because it's the only way you address entropy, which is the problem when you, when you siphon unnatural carbon out of the earth and spew it entropically into the world, you should expect some unresolvable complexities. And I'd say that's kind of where we're at now. So it feels like it's fueling what's being called today the paperization of packaging. So a lot of interest in building with, with more paper and fiber.
Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But what, what real, what is really encouraging to me and why I wanted to, to have you on the show is to tell that story.
Because if you're going to change things, it's not going to get changed by a single regulation. It's not going to be changed by a big retailer or brand like Walmart. It's going to happen the way everything happens from a coherent, localized level, proving that it works and then that adopts and scales across other geographic domains.
So I feel like the study that you did, what Dayton Food bank is doing there, I think these are all. And just the, the, the growth of community compost programs across the country are just examples of. Yeah, you really can divert food waste. You mentioned how much food waste is in the, in the cupboard.
I don't think people realize that because no retailer wants that shelf to be empty.
The flawed ways we make packaging is creating a problem because you overshoot every step of the process to the store shelf. So there's 30% waste and just over production and over packaging before it even gets there.
So you've got like twice as much waste than you need just because of the system that we built.
Because packaging was never designed to go back to soil. It was designed to close financial loops to unitize food for future sales, not to create a healthier soil. So I kind of feel like we're all stuck in that conundrum, which, you know, I really wanted to have you on the show to talk about that program because I feel like a, it never would have happened had you and I not spent time really sketching out what we felt was needed. And you had that when you needed it, when Walmart came knocking for ideas.
And that led to this study that I think is so profoundly important and more people need to hear about it. So I'm glad to see that it's finally coming out in print because I think that that's something that we can all learn from, whether it's in California, West Virginia or Georgia. These are things that you can learn from.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: I'll have to let you know when it, when it hits the press.
We can, we can definitely share that hopefully, hopefully within a couple months.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: Any, any other thoughts that you would like to share? Ideas that you think we need to be thinking about as, as a culture, as a community, as people?
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it just comes down to a little bit more of environmental stewardship on a personal level.
But I think that you need to find a way to practice that in a cost positive way, whether it's for your own education and your own family, or if you're actually trying to get into the business.
[00:47:30] Speaker B: Support any local programs. Right. When they come up, if you don't have one, start asking why there isn't one.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And it starts, it really does kind of start at the city level.
I mean, we had the benefit of the grant and that's needed to continue to expand these programs. But the real change happens in those commission meetings.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: So that's where we need to start raising our voice.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: That's right, yep.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: Well, Evan, I really appreciate you coming onto the show. I believe that change happens at the coherent local level, at the small level, and the successful bruise the next layer of success. And pretty soon you see what I think we're already seeing, which these things are coming up around the country, but there's no real data to point to. But it's out there. If you look, you'll, you'll see these programs starting up in, in all kinds of different places. And I think it's all positive.
But if we can solve one thing right now for me, it would be to stop putting fossilized hydrocarbons onto natural materials like cellulose, stop taking natural materials and, and contaminating them with non natural materials so that we can have a chance of not having the contamination continue to persist.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I like to say very similar thing. You know, let's use the most robust recycling system that's been invented and that's organic recycling. And the base molecule of that process is CO2.
Sure, it is the greenhouse gas, but it's also the important monomer for the carbon cycle.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Nature's preferred monomer. Right. I remember you telling me that many.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Years ago, nature prefers CO2 as its monomer.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: Correct. Not, not, not. Not ethylene or propylene.
[00:49:21] Speaker A: Well, this is what the plant's like, right, for photosynthesis. So we need to work. Work in that wheel that. Work in that toolbox.
I love it.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: So maybe one day our. Our. Our. Our sons will be the. The ones that take our baton, Evan, and carry it forward. But. But I do. I do believe we're underestimating the influence and the. The power of their call to action. When schools start implementing programs, and because their small, young children in the school system are asking for it, it's pretty powerful. So we need to give them a bigger voice, speak for them, because, look, this is for them. And, you know, and university level, I spent a lot of time talking to college kids, and I feel like there's so much energy to save the world, to change the world, and they're all looking for what that means to them.
But what. What gives me hope is that this generation that's in college today and coming out of college have a. The best BS meter I've ever seen and where you and I spent time in our careers before. We're comfortable breaking group think. They do it like it's an appetizer before a meal. They're not afraid to break anybody's group think or shatter anyone's echo chamber. And I feel like that. That forthrightness and stubbornness for change is what we need.
Just got to show them how to do it there.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: There's opportunities in the. In the niche. Absolutely.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: Well, Evan, thank you again.
We like to end each show with my. With what I believe is true.
Bond soft and build strong, because that's where it starts. So thanks again, Evan. I really appreciate it. And until next time, this is Roots to Fruits.
[00:51:02] Speaker C: Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
