Transcript of The Recycling Scam We All Believe In New

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Starbucks recently promoted its cold drink cups as widely recyclable, but an investigation by the environmental group Beyond Plastics decided to test that claim.

Researchers placed Bluetooth trackers inside dozens of Starbucks cups and dropped them into recycling bins at stores across the country. After tracking them for months, they say not a single cup ended up in an actual recycling facility.

Instead, many wound up in landfills, incinerators, or sorting centers where recycling often stops. The report is fueling a bigger question: is America's recycling system delivering what people think it is?

Our guest today recently investigated what exactly happens to plastic after it leaves your curbside bin. The deeper you look, the more you found that the story Americans have been told about recycling may be missing some important details.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire.

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Joining us now is Ken Lacorte, investigative journalist, former Fox News executive, and creator of the YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms. Ken, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Now, when you see a story like this Starbucks investigation where something is marketed as recyclable but apparently isn't being recycled, what's your reaction?

Well, it, it's not terribly surprising because so much about the environment and, and environmentalism today, you know, it's, it's really about performative values. It's really about feeling good rather than doing good. I've researched deeply into the recycling of plastics, and the reality is some things you can recycle great in the world. The plastics turns out to be a nightmare. It'd be better if we all threw them away. But even after I finished doing that research and producing a video on it, I still feel bad about throwing plastic away. You just— you feel guilty on it. So, look, conservatives especially, they need to balance two competing notions in their head. One is we want the environment to be clean. I want clean air for my kids and clean water and streets and all of that. On the other hand, so much of environmentalism is complete and utter nonsense that you find yourself rolling your eyes at people who are ostensibly trying to reach the same goal that, that I'm trying to reach in life and that I think everybody is trying to reach in our society. So yeah, it's, it's just not surprising at all.

Now, why do so many people, including people who know the facts, still feel guilty throwing plastic in the trash?

Look, we've grown up being told that throwing things away is bad. And, you know, to an extent, when you throw something that, that is, has not lost its full value, it's not only resources to the planet, but it's primarily resources to humans. Humans made things, they put effort into things, and for us to toss those away before using up its full value, there's a little bit of guilt in that. And the other thing is the wrong notion that America and first world countries don't have places to put their trash. Now, a lot of this stemmed from, I think it was the late '70s, might have been a little later than that. There was a trash barge that had left New York City and it couldn't find its final destination. And it was, it was a little barge with, you know, tons and tons of trash. And it was kind of like one of those big media stories of the day where they tracked where it was. And it sparked a lot of feeling that we don't have places to throw things away. And the reality is America handles its trash in a wonderful way. I don't know if you've ever looked into how huge both recycling, but also just landfills work.

I mean, they fill up areas. The space isn't all that crazy. One study said by the year 3000, If you got a place that was 100 yards deep, you could have a 35-mile square that could hold every piece of trash between now and the year 3000 in one area. And when you actually look at some of these landfills, they're kind of modern marvels. They have seepage things underneath them so, so things don't get into the water supply. They lay pipeline that, that will get the methane from the trash as it's decomposing, and that actually powers the vehicles that pile the trash on it and the backhoes that take care of those things. So I think that's where the guilt is, is, you know, you don't like, Who likes wasting stuff? Nobody should.

Now, your reporting makes a distinction between recycling in general and plastic recycling specifically. So why is plastic such a different story?

So a lot of— look, a lot of things you can recycle, great. There's a minority of plastics that you can. Things like glass, it's not a crazy expensive thing. Cans, certainly. Plastic is such a bad example of recycling. When people call it a scam, they're not wrong. It popped up when literally the plastics industry came up with a front organization that was an environmental organization telling you to recycle this, and they built that into the American consciousness. And, you know, another part of it is the recycling arrows. That's not a copyrighted symbol, so that can mean anything people want it to mean. And when you see that, it isn't saying that this is recyclable. There's a number under that, and it's like from 1 to 7 or 8, and, and that number says, can it be recycled or can it not be? And in most places, can only recycle a, a 1 or a 2 with plastics. Most of the types of plastics you just can't recycle. And they have to also sort them carefully because if you get in the minority of plastics you can recycle and mix that in with the other stuff, it's like, you know, making a cake with, with the wrong ingredients and it screws everything up.

So they need to literally have humans and machines going in there separating all this stuff. It's all kind of a— yeah, it's a scam. It's a scam when it's having people do things, spend money, spend resources to, to say that you're accomplishing something that you're not accomplishing. That's really the best word to use for it. And that's different than saying everybody involved in that, in that process is, is is, is bad in any way, shape, or form. I mean, you know, they are trying to help the environment. They're separating out the good plastics from the bad plastics. They're, they're individually doing good things in a macro way that turns out that it's, it's a wasteful process.

Now, when Americans put plastic in a recycling bin, what often happens to it after it leaves the United States?

Yeah, yeah, we send it off to countries like Malaysia, and they either bury it in their backyard, they burn it, which really isn't the ideal thing, or, you know, somehow it ends up in the oceans and bad places. The United States used to export a huge amount of things to be recycled. I mean, imagine that you're, you're shipping it across the world too. And then because you know that they can do things over there that you go to jail doing in the United States. So that's all one of those, gee, this, this isn't helping the Earth. It's just making, it's making money for people. And it's making people feel better because, because when you send it off to a third world country and they do whatever the heck they're going to do with it, it's not good.

Now, one of the more surprising arguments you make is that modern landfills aren't the boogeyman environmental disaster that many people are imagining. Right. Why do you say that?

Part of that was a media hype as the, as the environmental movement was really getting going in the, in the late '60s, early '70s. And look, the environmental movement has done some great things. The reality is landfills in America, they're pretty good things. One of the biggest landfills we have in Southern California is in Hacienda Heights. And the efficiency that they had working with that, they basically got two mountains and they filled up the area between it. And when they were done with that, they had a beautiful looking park in areas. It's like, you know, you can't build on it because it's fill and it sinks at different levels. But we've got a lot of land still in this world and we're not running out of it. And the amount of trash that we throw away isn't, isn't bad. We're not Haiti where we just dump it on the side of the road. It's— it's— they are not terrible things for our environment. We're not obnoxious consumers, no matter what people say.

Now, after all this research you did for this project, what changed most about the way you personally think about your recycling?

The biggest thing for me was the intellectual versus emotional issue that— that I've been recycling. You feel good when you recycle something, don't you? I mean, you walk up to those— those blue bins and you put something in and you're like, I didn't, I didn't hurt anybody today. I'm a good person. And that was the hardest part, was now having the intellectual knowledge that this ain't doing any good and I should just throw it in the trash can. And despite everything I said, I will still put some things in my recycling bin just because it makes me feel better. So that, that is the trickiest to me. That was the trickiest thing that I learned, or maybe that I didn't learn, even though I knew.

Well, Ken, this is disappointing news for a lot of people to hear, but probably important to have transparency around the issue. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

That was investigative journalist Ken Lacourt, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.