What If Your Own Trash Slowly Crushed Your House?
Pin 07 · the family house
Plays from YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode). Watch on YouTube
For ten years, everything you throw away comes back at midnight. Onto your pillow.
What's real in this episode
- For 2021, researchers estimated only about 5–6% of US post-consumer plastic waste was recycled (by weight).
- In warm weather, a house fly can go from egg to adult in about a week.
- In 1988 the US Supreme Court ruled that trash left at the curb for collection isn't protected by the Fourth Amendment.
- Damaged lithium-ion batteries can start fires in garbage trucks and recycling facilities.
- In 1947, well over a hundred tons were cleared from the Collyer brothers' Harlem home, including fourteen pianos.
- Archaeologists of the University of Arizona's Garbage Project found newspapers in landfills that were still readable decades later.
- The 11,800 lb truck load is our estimate from typical rear-loader specs.
Sources
- Beyond Plastics & The Last Beach Cleanup (2022), The Real Truth About the U.S. Plastic Recycling Rate: https://www.beyondplastics.org/press-releases/the-real-truth-about-plastics-recycling
- University of Florida IFAS, Featured Creatures: house fly, Musca domestica
- California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988): https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/486/35
- US EPA, Used Lithium-Ion Batteries: https://www.epa.gov/recycle/used-lithium-ion-batteries
- Collyer brothers (1947): https://www.firehouse.com/home/news/10529720/collyers-mansion-conditions
- Rathje & Murphy (1992), Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage; Garbage Project, University of Arizona
