Who's Up For A Circular Economy | Stuff You Should Know

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry will be here eventually.

But for now, all you got is Josh and Chuck.

But really, what more do you need on Stuff You Should Know?

Yeah, in our world, in about two or three minutes, Jerry will just come in and go, hey, I'm here, guys.

Sorry I'm late. I feel like she's learned not to do that.

She'll just sit there on mute for a while.

Really? Yeah, she hasn't done it in a little while.

She's really turned over a new leaf. All right.

We'll see. We'll see. We should leave it in if she does come in.

Yeah. We should do that. We'll share with everybody.

Except they'll just hear our end, so all they'll hear is, oh, God, you.

Well, no, I think if she chimes in on Riverside, we could edit that into the final edit.

All right. This will be a fun test. It will be.

And there's a little peek behind the curtains for everybody of how we do our thing.

Slapdash. That's right. While making fun of Jerry.

Yeah. Hey, I just noticed we were not on the list of Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Podcasts of All Time.

What? Really? Yeah. It was funny because I saw that list and my first instinct was, I mean, top 100?

That's a lot. Like, surely we cracked the top 100.

They probably haven't heard of us is what it is.

No, we're not on there. Literally all of our old time colleagues.

Oh, sure. You name it. Radiolab, 99% Invisible, Ira, Marin, like.

Every podcast of note of the past 18 years except for us, basically.

Wow. That's very stuff you should know, isn't it?

It is. It is very fitting. We don't let that stuff get to us, though, do we?

No. Time magazine. Who cares? Yeah. I didn't even know they put out a stupid podcast list.

Yeah. Watch. We're going to be men of the year now.

The headline on the cover will be like, oh, gosh, we forgot.

Well, no, you'll be man of the year, but I won't be a mentor.

That's how it'll work. That's what time does.

They tinker with relationships by dividing.

That's right. Speaking of tinkering, I think we could all tinker with our worldwide economy a bit and perhaps make it more circular.

What are you talking about? Well, Josh, I'm talking about our topic at hand.

Talking about circular economy, my friend.

Oh, I didn't get the reference. So have you heard of this before?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I ran across it. As far as I know, it's fairly new from the 2000 aughts.

I didn't see that it was an idea that was laying around already in this exact form and then was picked up and promoted.

So it's possible it was generally created by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Hats off to Ellen MacArthur. Yeah. So Ellen MacArthur, as far as I know, still holds the world record for the fastest solo sail trip around the entire world.

26,000 miles of circumnavigation. Circular.

In 72 days. Yeah, she loves circles. And apparently on her trip, I was reading about it.

It sounds just insane. And by the way, whenever I read of like world sailing trips, I can't help but think of one of the best documentaries of all time, Deep Water, about Donald Crowhurst.

I believe you've seen it before. I know we've talked about it.

Oh, if you haven't seen it, I actually envy you.

Is this the guy, the diver? Nope. He's a sailor.

There was about like a 1975 world sailing competition.

So he was, why was it deep water if he wasn't deep in the water?

Because he's sailing over deep water. Oh, over deep water.

They should call it over deep water. Sailing over deep water.

You should actually, I'll wait. Let's just pause recording and go watch it.

It's that good. I'll look into that. I've been on a documentary kick lately, so I'm ripe.

Time would put this one on their top 100 documentaries of all time, probably.

Yeah. So, yeah, so while she was sailing around the world, she just started, she had, I guess, a lot of time to think and saw a lot of waste and junk and terrible stuff and realized that there's a better way.

And a lot of people have thought like, okay, there's a better way to do this.

There has to be. And what she promotes, what she's kind of come up with is this idea of a circular economy.

And in a very short back of the envelope sketch of it, the outputs, the waste of the economy get reused as inputs.

Yeah. has basically turned into raw materials.

And people say, oh, recycling. That's a big part of it.

But as far as the circular economy is concerned, we idealize recycling.

We're like, that's the best you can do. They're like, that's actually the least desirable out of all of them.

There's a bunch of other stuff we can do instead.

So circular economy. Yeah. I mean, it sort of aligns with the whole reduce, reuse, recycle ethos.

I think we could best explain it by maybe starting with what we generally have now, which is linear economy.

And that's who helped us with this, Dave?

Yeah, Dave helped us. Yeah, it smacks of Dave.

But Dave calls it, and Dave didn't invent this term, but it's a take-make-waste economy system where you take resources and, you know, whatever, like cotton or any kind of raw material, you make something into that, to a product to sell to people, and then that thing maybe generally quickly wears out, and you throw it away, and it goes into a landfill.

It's very... I mean, it's kind of the worst possible scenario you could ask for if you care about planet Earth and people and the world and animals and nature.

And it's linear because it goes in one way.

You have something, you make something, and then that thing wears out and you throw it in the landfill.

Yeah, you take the cotton that you grow, you make it into a car, you drive the car into a landfill and jump out right before it goes over the cliff.

That's what everybody does. That's right.

So you left out kick back and watch the money roll in because that's ultimately what the biggest challenge to implementing a circular economy is.

One of the biggest ones is that the linear economy that we have set up that's been around since the Industrial Revolution is a money making machine.

And it's easy to criticize when you sit there and look at all of the terrible waste and pollution and inequality that's been generated from it.

You can also say, yeah, this wealth has funded a lot of science.

It's improved a lot of living conditions.

Even the poorest people in America are living high on the hog compared to Europe. the poorest people in other nations.

The wealthy nations have really done well for themselves with the linear economy.

Again, that's a big reason why there's a lot of reticence to transition to something different.

Yeah, for sure. There are some, you know, notable, I'm trying to think of a term we could come up with that labels instead of a gold star, like an industry that gets the opposite of that, like a turd pin or something that you wear.

I hate that word so much, turd. But yes, that would work very well.

Do you know what makes turd worse is that it's spelled T-U-R-D.

Yes, that definitely does make it worse.

Everything about that word is so bad. Yeah, totally.

Turdily. So the four sectors that are sort of the worst are food, electronics, consumer goods and construction, food, obviously.

And we're going to get into these, you know, more specifically as we go on.

But generally speaking, food is a pretty terrible sector.

And we've talked about food waste before.

But it's not just the food waste that's like tossed by grocery stores and restaurants and stuff like that.

But it's also, you know, a lot of places still are just using those single-use bags.

And people are like, sure, double bag it, triple bag it.

I don't want my tube of toothpaste to fall through that thing in the parking lot.

And then all the packaging that goes into it.

We've, you know, again, we've covered all this stuff in various forms here and there.

Unsustainable farming, electronics. Don't even get me started on electronics, recycling and electronics that are basically impossible to repair or get repaired.

Well, they're designed that way. We did an entire episode on that planned obsolescence.

And nothing gets me more mad almost. Yeah.

When a company purposefully designs a product to break in a short amount of time, like they'll put some sort of sensor or electrical component next to something that generates a lot of heat so that it degrades faster.

Like it's designed to break for you to throw away and then go buy another one.

That's a big problem. Yeah. Like you said with electronics, but Clothing is another one, too.

It's designed to just be worn. You buy it cheaply.

You wear it for a little bit. You throw it away.

And like you said, we'll talk more about this stuff later.

But my eyes started popping out when I was reading about clothing.

Yeah, that's one for sure. And then construction, a lot of resources used in construction and, you know, basically construction materials.

Anytime we've done any sort of like renovation project, because, you know, we live in like a hundred year old house.

So we've instead of moving, we kind of stayed and fixed it up over the years at first by ourselves.

And then with, you know, the help of contractors and such.

And as you know, you've been through stuff like that.

It's like when that construction dumpster pulls up.

We do everything we can. We fight tooth and nail to give stuff away.

Like, hey, can you put all these awesome hundred-year-old bricks out by the sidewalk?

Someone will take them. And, you know, they will acquiesce.

You know they hate dealing with us because they just want to throw that stuff in the dumpster.

But we've managed to get rid of a, you know, we're going through a little thing now.

And I had this really awesome screen door.

And they were literally throwing this really nice screen door.

It was like a good one. It wasn't just like a $40 screen door.

It was like a Prada screen door? No, it was Gucci, I think.

No, but it was from like a craftsman company for craftsman homes.

It was sort of like an upscale screen door.

And they were throwing it in the trash, and I almost tackled the guy.

And I put that thing out there and it was gone in an hour, you know.

Oh, I bet. Just little things like that make me feel like, oh, God, I saved one little thing from the landfill.

Nice work, man. Not for a pat on the back, but you know what I mean.

Well, you still deserve it. It just kills, our conscience is just burning up when they're throwing away even old wood and stuff, you know.

I try to take that stuff to the camp and burn it.

You know what I found when you're dealing with contractors and subcontractors, if you want them to do something, you have to tell them directly and kind of an authoritative voice and then finish with chop chop.

Yeah. And also stand there and watch them because as soon as you leave, they'll just say like, whatever, dude.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. For sure. Okay, so you guys out there listening probably have bloody crescent-shaped fingernail marks on the heel of your palms from hearing all this stuff.

So just settle down, relax a little bit, because now we're going to tell you a little bit about an alternative to that, the closed-loop model.

Not linear, circular, the circular economy.

And it basically says... It takes a look at everything wrong with the linear economy and fixes it one by one.

And it's like there's a lot left open. It's not like this is just like a completely ready to go economic model that's going to solve every single problem and it's not going to create any other problems.

It's more we're at the most conceptual stage that is being presented to people to say, hey, there's another way and here are some of the ways we can do it.

Yeah, and it's sort of just the opposite of everything we were just saying.

Instead of planned obsolescence, there's a planned permanence.

Like, hey, let's make something that lasts for a long time.

That's one. Make something that's repairable.

That's another. One really kind of brilliant thing that we're going to talk about later is this idea of instead of owning something like sharing stuff, renting things, sharing things, paying for the use of things that you don't own.

Right. Like, you know, splitting that up.

And then if something finally does reach the end of its life, because not everything will last forever, even the most well-made thing, those components then you can take down.

And hopefully most, if not all of that can be recycled or remade into something else.

Yeah, and if you'll notice, reduction of consumption isn't an emphasis of this.

I didn't see that talked about much at all.

So no one's saying like, hey, you can't keep growing.

It's just that the stuff that you're creating needs to last much, much longer.

And the greatest thing you can do is to keep it as close to the consumer as possible, right?

So let's say you have a hammer. Everybody knows a hammer breaks like the second time you ever use it.

Would you hammer in the morning? More of the evening for me.

Okay. But I would do it all over the land.

All right. So when you take a hammer, I was kidding about it breaking, but if you have a hammer and you don't use it a lot, the best you could do is give it to somebody else who is going to use it more rather than throw the hammer away.

That's a terrible example. I know people don't really throw hammers away.

But keeping it reused so that there's no inputs or very little inputs, that's the ideal.

The more inputs necessary, taking it apart, transporting it somewhere, putting it back together, refurbishing it, that is the least desirable.

Even though that's still within this scope that we currently have in the linear model, that's like the best you can do.

You know, like recycling. Recycling is the last thing you want to do.

Yeah, and hammer's not the worst idea, my friend, because I'd say 99% of the people out there, if their hammer handle breaks, let's say you have a wooden hammer handle and that breaks, people just throw it in the trash.

And you can fix that. One of my favorite things to do is I follow a few Instagram accounts where people fix things in front of your face like that, just simple everyday things.

And it's incredibly rewarding to see someone fix take something that would normally be in the trash and they're like, all you need to do is get another piece of wood, get that other piece of wood fully out of there and shape it like the broken piece and then you've got another hammer.

How do you shape it like the broken piece?

What tools do you need for that? Well, I mean, these people do this for a living, so they may have a lathe or something.

But it doesn't even have to be pretty. I bet you, give me a broken hammer, buddy.

With my limited tools and skills, I could make that hammer new again if I really wanted to.

Okay. Here's a challenge. I challenge all Stuff You Should Know listeners to mail Chuck your broken hammers, and he will fix every single one of them for you for free and mail them back out of his own pocket.

That's right. Send it to top100podcaster at 123 Lane, Atlanta, Georgia.

Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break.

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So, OK, so far, basically what we've been saying are all good ideas.

Very few people are like, no, I want to throw my hammer away.

I get the deep satisfaction throwing that broken hammer away.

Most people just don't want their hammer to break, which, again, is addressed like making products planned for permanence, making them just better rather than cheaper products.

But all of this stuff is going to take a complete shift in how we view economics, how we view growth, and also how we view consumer behavior.

Because we're in a linear model right now, and the basis of the linear model is making it as easy as possible for you to buy and use and throw away, get rid of, whatever product it is you're buying, whether it's potato chips, a hammer, cotton for a car, whatever.

You're going to get me every time, by the way, if you keep going back to that well.

Yeah, but, you know, there are examples of things and companies that are and have been doing this.

You know, Dave looked down on his kitchen table and saw an aluminum can and was like, hey, there's a good example right there.

Aluminum is a very recyclable thing. Yeah.

And thankfully, it's being recycled at pretty good rates.

It depends on where you are. If, like, you're in Brazil, that's about 100%.

If you're in the USA, about 65%. But... The average aluminum can that you're going to purchase in the United States is made from about 71% recycled materials.

So we're doing okay there. It's a good example.

We're doing great. It's a great example.

It's probably the top example as far as the United States goes.

People tend to recycle cans and they're easy to recycle.

So we have a process and an infrastructure that makes the whole thing fairly low-hanging fruit.

And because aluminum cans are light enough but also compactable, you can transport a bunch of them.

So it's worth your while to transport them from a pickup site to like our actual recycling center.

It's just checking all of the boxes. Even still, though, you see with as easy as it is, 35% of those aluminum cans just get thrown away in the trash.

Who's doing that? A lot of people. I mean, a lot of people do that.

Yeah, I know. It's kind of nuts, but that is the case.

So that right there just kind of goes to show you like that's where the consumer behavior needs to change.

Everything else is basically in place for us to recycle.

All of the aluminum cans that we have, we're just not doing it.

So that's like kind of one pillar or an example of one of the pillars that has to be adapted to go to a circular economy.

Making people more thoughtful, I guess. Good luck, buddy.

I know. I think that's probably more than anything what makes this a pipe dream.

I should say the most cynical side of me says that.

Is getting everybody on board with a single idea these days is not possible, basically.

Yeah, because all it takes is one schmo to throw his can away in the trash and you just lost your 100% recycling status.

And then everybody goes, what's the point of a circular economy anyway?

And goes back to the linear economy. Yeah, but the stat they could throw out then is 100% except Gary.

Mm-hmm. You know? And it would be a Gary.

Yeah. I'm sorry, Gary's. You know it's true.

Yeah. Not all Gary's are bad, but all bad people are Gary's.

There's a stuff you should know, sure. Not all Gary's.

Just that's it. Okay. There are also some examples of companies that, you know, I'm a big Shark Tank fan of that TV show.

And it seems like more and more companies are coming through there that are small.

And obviously they're small because they're on Shark Tank and looking for initial investments.

Right. They're trying to do the right thing here.

Getting corporations on board is the big problem.

But I've seen a lot of companies come through Shark Tank where they're like, hey, and the reason I mentioned this is because Unilever is one of the examples of a corporation that's partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

They're reducing plastic waste. And they sell a ton of stuff.

But like when they're selling detergent and stuff like that or shampoo, now they have programs where you're like, hey, send in your empty shampoo bottle and we will fill that thing up and send it back to you or get it and concentrate, stuff like that.

And there's a lot of like Shark Tank companies that are doing similar things, including cleaning products where they're like, hey, there's a better way to do this where you're just not –

Even if you're recycling that plastic, just burning through these things on a daily and weekly basis and tossing it in the recycling or worse, trash.

For sure. Right. And I think like entrepreneurs creating small businesses and focusing on like one thing that is sustainable, reusable, whatever.

That's how larger corporations start doing that stuff, because they buy those smaller corporations for that idea and implement it company wide.

Hopefully. So that's great that those people are out there.

Or they squash it. Yeah. Or they squash it.

Yeah. Lord. I just want to tell everybody we should say hi, Jerry.

Jerry's here, everyone. Oh, I was I was wrong.

Yeah, I saw that there are I did not see a single shampoo refilling station in the US there.

I found them in Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines and Pakistan so far.

I mean, that's even better because then you're not, you know, mailing stuff, you know, because that's another type of waste is like just mailing the empty bottles and having that mailed back.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you're going to the store already and they're like, they're attractive little shampoo refilling centers.

And I guess if you were really hard up, you could go just put your head under the nozzle and do a little squirt and then run home and wash your hair.

Yeah. I mean, they've been doing that with the big five-gallon jugs of water forever.

Right. I thought of that, too. Yeah. That's a good thing because those things are huge.

And just swapping those out and refilling them, it only makes sense.

Yep. There's also a Dutch company called Niagara, which is, again, backwards.

You'd never know that unless someone told you or you happen to be wearing a Niagara T-shirt in front of a mirror.

Yeah, it is the word again. I think just the way you said that might be confusing.

Okay. I got you. Yeah, I'm sure it was confusing.

Can't you just hear like a time podcast monitor going and like checking some box that keeps us off the list?

Yeah, like 101. So if we're lucky. So this company, they're Dutch.

They targeted carpets and mattresses. And those are two of the worst offenders as far as, at least as far as textiles go, but maybe as far as all products go.

Because they're big. They're essentially impossible to recycle.

They're very, very hard to recycle. And people throw a lot of them away.

I think 20 million mattresses are thrown away in the United States alone.

30 million in Europe. And we toss about 2 billion pounds of carpet away every year in the United States into landfills.

Only 5% of carpet gets recycled. I couldn't even tell you where you would recycle carpet.

I don't know. Is there a place called Recarpet?

Maybe. That's what it should be called, right?

Or carpets again. Right. Or all of that backward.

Yeah, I mean, the other reason those two, they're targeting those two, A, is because the people of the Netherlands are great.

And, hey, if you live in the Netherlands and you would go see a live podcast of us there in Amsterdam, let us know.

Sure. Let's go ahead and just say that. We're putting out feelers for Europe, so we'd love to hear from people about where we might could get an audience.

Sure. Is that okay to say that? Yeah, we should probably tell everybody it won't be for two years.

Yeah, we're targeting 27, but we're going to get back on the road next year.

Yeah, for sure. So you better close the borders.

That's a little, well, they might. I hope we'll be welcome.

We'll get a pass, I hope. It's up in the air.

But long way of saying the reason that they are targeting those specifically is not just the lifespan, but they actually have a name.

They're called medium life bulky products.

They, you know, this stuff lasts about 10 years and they're just full of nasty chemicals.

And so all of that leads to them being two of the two of the worst offenders.

Mattresses and carpet full of chemicals don't last long and they're fairly large.

Yeah, especially if they're stained mattresses.

Yeah. Yeah. Good luck recycling that. I saw 80 to 120 years for a mattress to degrade in a landfill, which actually seemed a little fast for me.

But, you know, it's still not fast enough.

So this this company is like, OK, we're actually going to make this stuff out of recyclable materials.

But even better than that, we're going to make it so that every part of the mattress is replaceable.

Imagine that. Or a parable. Yes. So you're like, I got just gallons of urine staining the cover of my mattress.

I need a new mattress cover. Rather than throwing out the whole mattress and waiting 120 years for it to degrade, you just call up Niagara and you say, hey, send me another mattress cover.

And they say, hey, we didn't know that you could call direct from the United States to the Netherlands, but that's new for us.

We'll send it to you straight away. And they send it to you, you put it back on, and there's no urine whatsoever until the next time it happens.

That's right. But they say, what's the magic word?

And you have to go, again. Right. Like a two-year-old.

Again. They do actually do that. Yeah. It's great, and we'll look at other Dutch companies because they're doing the right thing, it seems like, in a lot of ways.

One key to all of this is design. If you have a linear economy, which we do, like we said, it's purposeful.

It's designed in such a way to make it either obsolete or just a mattress that can't be recovered or whatever.

So you have to start with design. It has to start on the very conceptual phase of like, how could we make a mattress that could last you forever?

And then you design it that way because it's possible.

Yeah. And design doesn't just apply to products, although that's the easiest thing to do is to say, OK, how can I design this product to fit into the existing recycling infrastructure or design it to be reusable or repairable?

That's the easiest one. We also, though, need to design our recycling infrastructure to make it easier to recycle products that aren't designed to be recycled.

So there's a lot of design that has to go.

But you're right. Like, it has to be a conscious choice.

And Dave points out something I think is important, too.

Waste is a conscious choice, too. Like when when you're a little like mini bag of Lay's potato chips, when you're done with it, you throw it away.

It was designed to be thrown away like that was a decision that was made by the package designers.

They didn't do anything to try to make it recyclable.

They decided that the best thing for you to do with that package is to throw it away.

And as much as you hate it, you have no choice.

Your choice is to buy those Lay's potato chips or not buy them.

And some people are starting to, based on the packaging, so some companies are starting to wake up.

But for the most part, people are like...

I don't want to think about the packaging that my potato chips come in.

I have so many more bigger pressing issues right now that if you can just make it so that the people don't have to think about recycling it, then you're onto something.

Yeah, 100%. And I was talking about myself.

I don't want to think about what I'm supposed to do with the potato chip package.

And I'm not being judgy. Like, I'm including myself in this.

Like, I mean, I like to think I'm more conscientious than, say, the average person, but I'm certainly, I'm not at, like, Chuck level.

I'm not like that. Emily level. You know me.

I'm on her coattails. Right. I mean, when I was a kid, we had the Charles Chips driver come around.

Yeah, I remember that. And we would give them our, I mean, if you're of a certain age, you might remember this.

There was a literal potato chip delivery company.

They were called Charles Chips and they came in a big metal tin.

And you would finish with that tin and your chip person would come by and you would give them the tin of empty chips and they would give you a full tin of chips.

Yeah, they'd reach in with the cuff of their shirt, wipe the tin out, put the chips in the tin sometimes I saw.

Yeah, and obviously, again, there's still waste with the delivery truck and stuff.

So save the emails. But we're talking about, you know, we're not idealizing it as perfect.

We're just saying, like, it's a better thing than what we're doing now, which is those little foil bags sitting in landfills.

For sure. And yeah, that's another thing, too, is because this is kind of conceptual and not every issue is being tackled right out of the gate with it, like energy use is a big part of it.

So they obviously are like, well, we need more renewables.

That's kind of a no brainer. But it's important because not everything can be done with renewable resources.

Some stuff just requires fossil fuels. Some stuff, say, requires nuclear.

So you have to be able to design those power plants or those industrial smokestacks so that that stuff's being captured and reused as an input somehow.

Right, exactly. And, you know, you talked about educating the consumer, and it's not educating the corporation because they know this stuff.

They do it on purpose for a reason, like you said.

But it's more about, like, companies coming along where the end user isn't the single focus.

They take a more macro view and say, well, there's something bigger at work with these products we sell, and that's planet Earth.

And mother nature. And while the consumer is important and we want to give them a good product, we can start from the beginning and design something that has less of an environmental impact designed to fit within these recycling networks like, you know, aluminum, like you were talking about, like once those are up and running.

And and a big one that I didn't think of that they pointed out was like.

Do you need this new product? Does the consumer need it?

Or is it just like, hey, I think we could boost sales in Q3 if we released a slightly different version of this dumb same thing?

Right. So you kind of mentioned something where like using something like leasing or renting something can also be applied to things we don't normally think of as what we lease or rent, right?

Right. One of the, again, a Dutch company called Bundles is...

So basically, they come to your house. They'll bring you your dishwasher or your washing machine or your dryer or your coffee maker, or you can bundle it all together.

That's the name. And they're going to bring you a really high-end Miele sustainably manufactured appliance. and you're going to have this thing in your house, and you don't have to lift a finger other than to use it.

This company brings it. They install it.

They come by and maintain it. When it's done, when you're done with it, say you're moving and you can't use it anymore, they're going to come pick it up.

They're going to refurbish it. They're going to bring it to somebody else.

It's, like, really circular. And the way that you are charged for it is by the number of washes you –

I guess, carry out. I guess that's how you talk about laundry.

You carry out a wash. It is called the paper wash model.

And the whole basis of it is Wi-Fi. Like your washing machine is connected to their servers.

So they're tracking how many times you're washing.

And then from what I can tell, you get a monthly bill based on the amount of washes you did, the amount of use you did for that or you use for the washer or the dryer or whatever.

You know what my takeaway here is? What?

You've never washed your own clothes, have you?

That is not true. I'm actually kind of good at my own clothes.

I had to get good because I don't know how I do it, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't get a spot on one of my T-shirts.

So I've gotten good at salvaging T-shirts.

Same, same. It's incredible how stained my T-shirt gets on a regular basis.

And I do believe you can carry out a wash like nobody's business.

Do you use Shout? That's what I use. I shout it out.

It works really well. I use, and I hate having to use it, but my friend that has been working in wardrobe departments in Hollywood for 30 years said Zout is the one.

I've not heard of Zout. Why do you hate to use it?

Is it made from coal? It's just one of those disgustingly smelly products.

Is it naphtha? I don't know, but no, I mean, they mask it.

It smells like, you know, just really, really, really, really heavily fragranced stuff.

I gotcha, yeah. And, you know, we're not down with that.

So it gets out of spot, but it'll taint.

You got to wash it by itself. It'll taint your whole load.

Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and be right back.

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