You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

Guess what, Mary, what's that mango?

Do you know?

There are around two hundred cities on Earth that have trash flying underneath them at speeds of up to forty three miles per hour.

What I know?

It sounds totally bizarre, but it is a very real innovation.

It's called a pneumatic waste collection system and they've been installed in cities all over the world Stockholm, Soul, Singapore, Dubai, even Disney World uses one.

Ah.

Yes, of course disney World one of my favorite cities.

Wait, so how does this work?

Exactly?

So, the systems have these above ground waste inlets, which kind of look like pipes or mailboxes, but with round doors that people open to insert trash, and there are separate ones for recyclables as well.

But when an inlet gets full, a trap door releases its contents into underground pipes and the trash gets sucked through the pneumatic tubes to a waste station thanks to the force of these spinning industrial fans.

Isn't that incredible?

It's also a very whimsical way to deal with garbage.

It also feels like the future, and this tech is actually good for the environment.

The company that first built these tubes, ENVAC, claims that the system can lower the distance driven by garbage trucks by ninety percent, and this of course reduces air pollution, diesel emissions, and hardest of all, especially if you live in a place like New York City, local traffic, which gets slowed down tremendously by these trucks.

According to locals in Bergen, Norway, which began building a pneumatic waste collection system in two thousand and seven, it has also lowered rat sightings.

Well that is a bummer for rat fans though.

Right, yeah, Well rat fans can always come to New York City to get their fixed I think last.

But these systems are not cheap.

Bergen has spent one billion kroner on the system so far, which is one hundred million US dollars, and they estimate it'll take another thirty million dollars to complete it.

But the city officials say they've already saved twenty two million dollars on waste collection since the system launched, so in time, actually this investment will pay off.

Well, you know, that's really good news because one of the things I learned in my research this week is that humans generate two billion tons of municipal solid waste every year.

Now, if we packed that amount of garbage into standard shipping containers and lined them up, it would wrap around the equator twenty five times.

And yeah, no, it gets worse.

Municipal solid waste is expected to rise to three point eight billion tons annually by twenty fifty.

So today on the show, we're talking trash, what we can learn from it, why we have so much of it, and most important, what we can do with it.

So let's dive in.

Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Mongish Articular, and today I'm here with super producer Mary Philip Sandy, and over there in the booth is our pal and producer Dylan Fagan, who's wearing quite the outfit.

He's got a long yellow coat, red button down, clear tie, yellow pants, and the most amazing thing is the silver sunglasses he's wearing.

There's no way he can see through those, but obviously I think he's channeling, right Doc Brown?

Is that right?

Very Yeah, that's what it looks like.

Back to the future as he powers his Delaureate up with trash to go exactly, he's going back to the future.

You know, I wonder if Doc Brown got into podcasts when he landed in twenty fifteen.

I would love to hear his take on cereal.

Actually, I think Doc Brown would be a reply all fan.

Right, yeah, I think so too.

Okay, Well, anyway, here we are in twenty twenty five, and we are still waiting for some of the inventions back to the future promised.

You know, every year I think this is it, this is the year we finally get hoverboards, and every year I'm disappointed.

But you know what, using trash to power cars would be even better than a hoverboard.

Yeah, especially since we generate what would you say, two billion tons a year.

Yeah, two billion tons of municipal waste a year.

But that term municipal waste, it only refers to waste generated by individuals, schools, and businesses.

You know, things like food contain used paper, worn out clothes basically the stuff that you put out and it gets collected by the garbage truck.

And by the way, I mentioned worn out clothes because textiles are a huge source of waste.

Globally, we throw away an entire garbage truck's worth of clothing every single second.

That is insane, it is.

But here's the thing, Mango, all this municipal waste, it's actually only three to five percent of the total waste people create every year.

So so where's the rest of the waste coming from?

So the rest includes waste for mining, farming, construction, not to mention human waste and pollution.

Right, all of that, and when we factor all of that, in the United States alone creates around twelve billion tons of waste every single year.

But listen, I could give trash statistics for hours.

I'm going to cut myself off.

Yeah right, let's go back to the beginning.

I know you looked into this, so tell me when did people start creating trash?

Yeah, so there has always been some level of waste created by humanity.

But I really like the way that Wilson Hughes, who is former co director of the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona in Tucson, puts it.

He said, quote, our forefathers created waste with stone chips, but it didn't become a problem until they settled down and began living in one place.

That's when societies had to start thinking about what to do with it, which is fascinating, right, Like you don't think about the evolution of garbage.

But one place our ancestors settled in was this place called Chattel hu Yuk, which is located in modern day Turkey.

It was a Neolithic settlement and it dates back to around seventy four hundred to sixty two hundred BCE.

This is one of the earliest cities we know about, and people tossed waste between their houses until those houses merged together, and then they built structures on top of that waste, and this practice continued for generations.

That's really I guess that's feasible if your waste isn't mostly made up of like fast food wrappers and industrial chemicals like ours.

Yeah, yeah, okay, So when did people actually start doing something to dispose of the trash other than just throwing it out the door?

You know, I had the same question.

It turns out people started burying their waste as early as three thousand BCE, so we know the Minoan people who lived in the city of Naussus on Crete did this, and in five hundred BCE, Athens actually created this law that waste had to be disposed of at least a mile outside of town, which is, you know, kind of incredible when you think about it.

Still, this didn't immediately become the norm.

Plenty of historic cities were known for their trash and wastefilled streets.

You think about places like ancient Rome, POMPEII, Victorian London right.

In fact, many cities today are built on mounds of trash.

In sixteen eighty six, you could buy what was called a water lot in New York City, which actually cost one twenty fifth price of landlot.

And these water lots got turned into land thanks to you guessed it, crash.

So builders piled up silt and waste from ships and straight up garbage until there was land where the river.

Used to be.

And this actually wasn't a practice just in New York.

Many US cities use this method to create space, including Seattle, New Orleans, Chicago, even Oakland.

Of course, there was one other historic way that New York used to deal with trash that I really think is worth mentioning.

In eighteen forty two, the New York Daily Tribune estimated that there were ten thousand loose pigs running around the city just gobbling up trash.

That is about ten thousand too many loose pigs, if you ask me.

I know.

But they were so good at eating up the garbage is that anytime politicians suggested getting rid of them, the public was completely outraged.

Okay, well you got to listen to your constituents, right, let them have pigs.

Well, the thing is it was a pretty effective strategy too, So by nineteen oh two, about twenty five percent of US cities we're getting rid of garbage by feeding it to livestock.

Not everyone loved the trash pigs though.

Actually, Charles Dickens visited the US and in his travelog American Notes, he devotes multiple paragraphs to the scavenging New York pig.

He writes, quote, ugly brutes they are having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks spotted with unwholesome black blotches, which just feels like an esthetic problem more than anything.

His body shaming the pigs.

It also feels weird that, like with that many pigs, like that none of the New York teams are named after pigs, right, I know, Oh my.

God, someone needs to do that.

Bring back the trash pigs as a mascot completely.

But you know, it is worth noting that there was way less household trash in the US back then compared to today, So like, maybe pigs wouldn't be the most effective solution today.

Right, right, Even one hundred thousand pigs couldn't keep up with the amount of waste wegenerate now.

I mean even just in my neighborhood.

And I assume the reason we have more trash now is because our consumption habits have changed.

Right, absolutely, so, until very recently, most Americans couldn't afford to just toss things out, so things like clothes were mended over and over again until they finally became rags which you could use or sell.

People knew how to fix furniture and glassware and tableware, and if they didn't know how to fix something, you'd take it to an expert for repair.

Pretty Much everything got used up.

Food scraps when to soup or were fed to farm animals.

Lots of waste could be returned to manufacturers.

Even coal ashes were mixed with manure and used as fertilizer.

Yeah, there's something really appealing about that kind of lifestyle.

It's like I saw this person on TikTok who had all of her garbage for a year and fit in one Mason jar.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah completely, But.

It's really not realistic for a lot of us anymore.

Right, Okay, So as people began buying more stuff and all that stuff became more disposable, I imagine waste management had to keep up with it.

Yeah, and this change really took off in the early part of the twentieth century.

For example, in Pittsburgh, the amount of trash in the city rose by forty three percent between nineteen oh three and nineteen oh seven.

So by the early nineteen hundreds, most American cities had implemented some forum of municipal trash removal service, which meant pigs weren't required anymore.

I love that you found one statistic here, and then it was just about Pittsburgh.

So shout out to Pittsburgh.

I've never been there, but I have always wanted to go there.

Okay, mag Well, I mean.

It's land of mister Rogers.

It's not far from Falling Water.

I like pittsfrog Yeah, yeah.

The Warhol Museum, if if anyone lives in Pittsburgh, tell us what we should go see there?

Okay, okay, So obviously the next question is what do you do with all of this trash once you've picked it up?

Well, incinerators were an early solution, inspired by European ones that had been around since the eighteen seventies, but that practice started to decline during the late thirties when we borrowed yet another idea from Europe, the landfill, and since then that's been our primary method of garbage disposal in the United States.

And landfills are everywhere, but unless you live next one, you probably don't notice them.

They're typically located far outside cities, and they look like these big, treeless mounds that just blend into the landscape.

But do not be fooled.

These boring hills have a serious downside.

They emit landfill gas, which is fifty percent methane and fifty percent carbon dioxide, so the bigger they get, the more they contribute to climate change.

One thing we can do, however, is we can turn landfills into parks with vegetation and animal habitats, and that's the plan for Freshkills Park in Staten Island, here in New York.

It was once the world's biggest landfill, and eventually it'll be a two two hundred acre public park that is three times larger than Central Park.

That is really incredible.

Actually, have you been to the Hirley Chisholm Park in it's in South Brooklyn.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's on a former landfill and it is so gorgeous.

I have not.

It's very far from where I live, but I've heard about.

It's the largest state park in New York.

Yeah.

We drove out there and it was stunning, Like there was stunning bird watching.

You can't believe how beautiful is and you kind of forget you're in New York.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really great use of a former landfill.

And the only problem is this process of converting landfills to parks.

It takes a long time and a lot of environmental engineering.

Landfills can take decades to settle, meaning their foundations shift over time, and to avoid public health risks, you need to figure out how to vent the landfill gas.

So you can't just slap some turf on top of a garbage pile and call it a day.

Yeah, I mean I'm sure it takes a ton of work to make.

But if we want the landfills to be small, I'm wondering, like, could we go back to burning the waste first and then burying it?

Yeah, that is actually an option.

This method has been adopted in a bunch of places in Europe, where the process is also used to generate electricity.

Right, so that's a bonus.

So some advocates are calling for the United States to do more of this too.

The problem, of course, is that burning trash creates air pollutions.

It'sually not perfect fix.

So at the end of the day, we have the same options we've always had for dealing with garbage.

We can toss it on the ground, we can put it in a hole, we can light it on fire, or we can find a way to reuse it.

And luckily, some scientists have come up with a way to turn garbage into something very valuable knowledge.

No, no, no, it's true, I know, I know.

It's amazing.

It's the most valuable product of all.

And after we take a quick break, we'll find out how garbage can counteract government propaganda, and we'll also talk about some truly amazing things that have been found in the trash, Go anywhere.

Welcome back to Part Time Genius.

In just a moment, I'm going to tell you about one of the coolest scientific fields I've ever heard about.

It's called garbology.

But first I want to remind you to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app.

Please leave us a nice rating and review, and if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend.

Okay, So back to garbology.

The term was coined in the early nineteen seventies by aj Weberman, and it became a legitimate scientific pursuit in nineteen seventy three.

This is when the archaeologist William Rathge launched the Tucson Garbage Project.

This involved analyzing over fifteen thousand samples of trash, which revealed tons of information about residents of Tucson, from what they how much alcohol they drank, to how good they were recycling and Researchers on the project even learned that people tend to report eating a lot less junk food than they actually eat.

You know, I actually did a garbology project of my own in fourth grade.

Yeah, I've actually I have actually studied garbology at a university.

I was nine years old at the time.

But I was really into archaeology back then, and the University of Maine had these weekend classes that were open to the community.

One of them was about garbology, and I begged my parents to let me do it.

They gave in, and it was just so fascinating.

This is what I did when I was nine on the weekends, right, everyone else was playing sports whatever.

But I had never thought before about the fact that a lot of what archaeologists dig up is just ancient garbage, right, like broken pottery, things that people discarded.

So it makes a lot of sense that modern garbage can tell us a lot about modern people.

So I got really into it, and then I got in a lot of trouble for sneaking around my school and digging through the classroom garbage cans.

I love that they just didn't get your vision.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, scientists study human activity in all kinds of ways that could seem invasive.

Right.

Besides, garbology has a unique ability to reveal super accurate information even when we're hiding the truth or covering it up.

And I can give you example this.

So a few decades ago, historians studying China's Cultural Revolution, realized that they could learn a lot from papers and documents that have been tossed out by households and also by government officials.

So they started collecting these artifacts at flea markets, and when word got out, locals sifted through trash to find documents, which they then sold to researchers.

And because of this, historians discovered concrete evidence about things that happened during the Cultural Revolution, like government officials who deported people from cities to rural areas with that whole.

Sent down youth stuff.

Garbology has also been used to track changes in North Korea.

So if you think about trash that washes up in South Korea, like there was a recent increase in more colorful candy wrappers, that actually reveals how their culture and economy has evolved over time.

Even corporate America has gotten into the garbology game.

So before everything we bought was easily tracked by barcodes and online shopping, some companies conducted dust bin audits to see how well their brands were doing well.

Speaking of fascinating finds in the trash, I was really excited to look into this for this episode, and you would not believe some of the crazy things people have discarded and then discovered.

So give me an example, Okay.

In twenty nineteen, an episode of Antiques Road Show featured a man who worked at a dump in England, and there he found a bunch of artifacts that once belonged to former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, including a top hat, a cigar case, and a signed photograph.

That is an incredible three it of it is.

And it gets even better because these items were verifiable as belonging to Churchill because they were accompanied by two hundred letters that he wrote to his cook, which it does seem like a lot of letters to write to one's cook, doesn't it.

Yeah, but the show estimated that all these items that had just been thrown away were worth ten thousand pounds.

I mean, in some ways, it feels like they should be worth more than ten thousand pounds, right like Winston Churchill's letters to his cook feels like a book that could deserve more of an advance in that.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think the guy he wrote a lot of letters though, if you.

Think about it, right, Yeah, that makes sense.

So do we know how all of this ended up in the trash.

No, and we will never know because the guy who found the stuff refused to reveal the name of the dump where he wanted to keep it secret.

But you know, ten thousand pounds worth of trash is chump change compared to this next one.

In two thousand and four, a nurse named Melanie Steve found a plastic cello case with a cello inside, leaning against a dumpster in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, and so she had this kind of quirky idea.

She decided she'd have her cabinet maker boyfriend fix some of the cracks and scratches in the cello and turn it into a case for her CDs.

This was two thousand and four.

She had CDs.

What she didn't realize was that the cello had been stolen three days earlier from the front porch of the lead cellist for the La Philharmonic Organ and it was an irreplaceable vintage instrument built in Italy in sixteen eighty four and insured for three point five million dollars.

Luckily, Melanie saw a news report about the theft before her boyfriend started turning the cello into a CD case, so she was able to contact a lawyer who helped get it returned.

And that is your lesson.

If you ever find a priceless cello in the trash, have a lawyer handle it.

I mean, I'm glad we give our listeners tips about what to do if they find but you know, maybe a rare Italian cello filled with Maroon five CDs would have been worth even more.

On the other hand, come on, let's not assume the worst about Melanie's taste in music.

It's not fair, Melanie.

We know you're better than that.

Okay.

Here is one last story that also has a lesson for you.

Always double check what you're bringing out to the trash.

In twenty fifteen, the jewelry store Jay Bernbock Incorporated here in New York City was undergoing renovations and some workers accidentally threw away three wooden boxes of diamonds worth five million dollars.

The security guard spotted the mistake, grabbed the boxes, and brought them into the bathroom.

He then put all the diamonds into one box and walked right out the door.

But the store had surveillance footage from the night of the theft, so it was pretty easy to identify the culprit.

The guard was caught and he was arrested.

Oh man, that is rough.

I mean, I feel like the security guard thought he had a short thing.

It is always fun to hear about historical artifacts and stolen diamonds turning up in the garbage.

And I always love when someone sees a print that they think is really beautiful and it turns out to be like a famous art piece or whatever.

But unfortunately, most trash is made up of something far less exciting, and that is styrofoam.

So according to one estimate, styrofoam accounts for approximately thirty three percent of landfill volume and it takes five hundred to one thousand years to decompose.

But Stanford researchers have found one potential solution mealworms.

They can live on a diet of styrofoam and other plastic, which could help break it down faster.

And not only that, but the researchers have also determined that yellow mealworm guts can break down the toxic chemical additive HBCD without it building up in their system, which is really incredible because that means that these same mealworms that feed on plastic could still be used for their other common purpose, which is as a food for other animals, including chicken, snakes, fish, and shrimp.

What a sad life though, eat a bunch of plastic and then become someone else's snack.

Henry had a pet mealworm in kindergarten which he named George Harrison, and I felt so sad to lose two George harrisons of my life.

Rip George Harrison and also George Harrison.

So here is another upsetting fact for you.

Picture this, if every coastline on Earth had fifteen grocery bags filled with plastic trash sitting on each yard of beach.

That is how much plastic waste goes into the oceans.

Yearly, yearly.

Isn't that so sad to think about?

That is so depressing And a lot of the newer waste related innovations are focusing on that issue, so this bit will make you happy.

One of these innovations is called mister trash Wheel.

Is that an actual person?

No, Mister trash Wheel is a fourteen foot tall trash interceptor that sits in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland, and he does exactly what the name suggests.

Trash in the water gets funneled onto a conveyor belt and then transferred to a dumpster.

It's run by solar and hydro power, and this wheel is incredibly strong.

It can even suck up things like tires or mattresses, so it's pretty formidable.

The smart folks at the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore decided to decorate the wheel with big eyes so it would look like a cartoon character gobbling up the garbage.

And they gave it, or excuse me him, that funny name, mister trash Wheel.

And because of this great branding, mister trash Wheel has become something of a social media celebrity.

He has over forty three thousand Instagram followers, probably more after this episode, but that's not his most impressive number.

Since his debut, he's removed over four point three million pounds of t debris from the harbor.

What's also interesting is that his family is expanding.

There are now three more trash wheels in Baltimore which have contributed another million pounds of trash removal.

Their names are Professor trash Wheel who got a PhD, Captain trash Wheel, and Gwinda, the Good Wheel of the West, who sits at the mouth of a stream called Gwinn's Falls.

You know, I don't know how much the people at the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore get paid, but I do know it is not enough.

I agree, it's definitely not enough.

Now, if you enjoy ethropomorphized wheels, I think you're really gonna like this next innovation as well.

It's inspired by one of my favorite animals, the whale sharks.

So whale sharks are known for moving slowly through the water and doing something called filter feeding.

Basically, as they swim, they suck in a bunch of water, hoping to nab some food in the form of plankton, small fish, and fish eggs.

And in twenty seventeen, a robot inspired by the whale shark called the Waste Shark was launched into the canals of the Netherlands.

Like a filter feeder, the waste Shark floats through the water and collects debris.

Unlike a filter feeder, this robot then disposes of that debris on land.

It can help remove about a one hundred pounds of unwanted material in the water every single day, and it operates autonomously or with a person remote controlling it.

Now, when the battery is low, it heads for its shark pod, where it charges up for more crash guzzling, which I just love.

I love that the charger is called a shark pod.

That's really great idea.

But now I'm wondering what other animals could we use as inspiration to help deal with waste, right, Like a litter rat, trash raccoon, a garbage seagull.

Yeah, I mean all those would be incredible, although I do feel like a trash raccoon is just a raccoon.

I was just brainstorming.

This is a starting point as we go, you know.

Well.

As fascinating as these waste disposal innovations are, the fact is our only way out of a garbage choked future is by generating less trash in the first place.

The zero waste movement has cut on in many communities, including the city of Keel, which in twenty twenty four became Germany's first certified zero waste city.

They've implemented a bunch of policies aimed at cutting waste by fifteen percent per person per year by twenty thirty five.

For example, they give new parents grants of up to two hundred euros to buy cloth diapers so they don't have to buy disposable and garbage fees are based on the weight of the waste that each household throws away, so residents are coming up with their own ways of contributing, like restaurants that now give uneaten food away to people in need, or a local hairdresser who collects hair trimmings and this is true, turns them into mats that are used to absorb oil from sewers.

Oh, I love that for a whole city to be able to create zero waste is remarkable.

It does remind me of the old phrase reduced reuse, recycle, which you know, makes me think that we haven't actually talked about recycling yet.

Ah well, don't worry.

I learned some truly shocking facts about recycling and I'll tell you all about it after this quick break.

Welcome back to Part time Genius.

Now, before the break, I was telling you about Kiel, Germany's first certified zero waste city, and that is an actual standard that was created by a nonprofit called Zero Waste Europe.

And what I find really interesting about this is Germany was already known for its commitment to recycling in twenty twenty one, Germany recycled over two thirds of its municipal solid waste, more than any other country in Europe, and according to Bettina aust, the president of the Keiel City Council, that actually lulled people into a false sense of complacency.

She told her reporter from The Guardian that a lot of people are so focused on recycling they forget about reducing the amount of stuff they buy in the first place, or finding ways to repair or reuse it.

Which is not to say recycling hasn't helped with the trash problem right here in the United States, recycling is a relatively new phenomenon.

Curbside recycling didn't become a thing until the nineteen seventies, when we realized our landfills were starting to overflow.

In the nineteen eighties, about ten percent of municipal waste got recycled, but these days it's over thirty two percent, and thanks to recycling programs, we're sending about half as much waste to landfills as we used to.

But here's the dirty truth.

A lot of American recycling just ends up getting shipped overseas, where it piles up and causes serious problems.

That feels kind of depressing because we spend so much time recycling.

I guess what you're saying is that recycling doesn't get recycled.

Not always.

And we could probably do an entire episode just about this phenomenon.

But it has to do with a global waste trade.

So approximately one third of United States recycling gets sent overseas, and for a long time most of that plastic and metal scrap went to China, which used it to fuel manufacturing.

But in twenty seventeen, China banned foreign waste imports, citing public health and environmental concerns.

With our biggest customer gone, many US municipalities had to cut back on recycling or they scrambled to find other places to send stuff.

As a result, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia were quickly flooded with our discarded yogurt cups and takeout containers, and it's way more than they can handle.

The author Alexander Klapp, who wrote a book called Waste Wars The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, described seeing remote areas in the highlands of Java that he called quote hellscapes of Western waste, toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia, stacked knee high as far as the eye can see.

And because it is literally impossible to recycle it all, local Javanese street vendors have taken to burning it for a cooking fuel, filling the air with toxic fumes.

That is so horrifying.

And it's what former Kenyon president Daniel Larotmoy called garbage imperialism, and he coined that phrase in the nineteen eighties when countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America were angry at the United States because we were dumping our toxic waste on their land.

But as Alexander Klapp points out, back then it was easy for people to realize that hazardous waste is bad.

Today, the stuff we dump can be just as dangerous, but we don't consider that because if it's labeled recyclable, we think it's good for the planet.

I mean, the truth is we really have to emphasize the reduce part of that reuse recycle slogan.

Yeah, the words are in that order for a reason.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is the last resort.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And now for our last resort, why don't we turn to the fact off.

I'll kick things off with the Trail of a Thousand Trolls, a project by the Danish artist Thomas Dambo which definitely leans into the reused part of that slogan.

Along with his team, Dambo creates massive troll sculptures made from discarded items like wooden palettes, old furniture, and wine barrels.

These trolls can be up to forty feet tall.

Dambo installs them in places like forests, jungles, and grasslands.

There are one hundred and seventy of them now around the world, everywhere from Australia to South Korea to Chile.

And each trash troll has its own lore, its own backstory.

Yes, so, for example, Little Bibby, who's located in Dayton, Ohio, comes with a story about how she wanted to learn to fly like a bird.

The statue of Little Bibby, which at seventeen feet is not little at all, holds winglight contraptions and has one like up in the air to show that she is about to take flight.

Oh man, I've got to look these offs now, So we talked about garbology, and I'm going to take it one step further, which is virtual garbology.

In twenty twenty, Jared Hansen published a paper titled quote an Abundance of Fruit Trees a garbology of the artifacts in Animal Crossing New Leaf.

So I'm sure people out there know about Animal Crossing the video game from its massive popularity, especially during the COVID nineteen pandemic.

New Leaf was the twenty thirteen edition of the game for the Nintendo three DS, So in his research, Hanson visited a random selection of Animal Crossing towns to see which items players had left lying around like trash, and he found that the most likely items to be discarded were fruit with pairs and lead, which makes sense if you've ever played the game.

There's definitely a lot of fruit.

But he also discovered that there wasn't much litter in Animal Crossing in general, and he concluded quote, it seems as though the economic systems of the game, which encouraged the player to pay for upgrades to their home and public works, lead many players to forego conspicuous consumption, and the waste or trashing of items related to accessories and clothing instead, items of trash and garbage are those with utility and economic value instead of personal meaning.

Thanks.

Oh, that is so wholesome, unlike my next fact, which is not wholesome at all.

In two thousand and one, contractors hired by Procter and Gamble, which makes Panteen and head in Shoulders shampoo, were caught doing corporate dumpster diving.

They were going through the trash of the Chicago offices of Unilever, a rival company that also owned haircare brands like Finesse, and they retrieved eighty pages of confidential planning documents.

Procter and Gamble confessed to the espionage, although they claimed that they hadn't used the material the contractors took, but either way, the whole debacle culminated in Procter and Gamble paying a ten million dollar settlement.

That's crazy.

That's in two thousand and one, right, that's nuts, and it's like a watergate but for Dandriff shampoos well.

Another rivalry with trash at the center is the one between Bob Dylan and the New York City writer aj Weberman.

So during the sixties, Weberman became a huge Dylan fan.

In fact, some say he was completely obsessed, but over the years he grew dissatisfied with Dylan's music and persona, saying he turned his back on radical politics.

In nineteen seventy one, he tried to confront Dylan by knocking on his door, and Dylan slammed the door in his face.

So Weberman took it to the next level.

He started going through his trash and if you remember from earlier that I teased Weberman as the inventor of the word garbology, this is actually why.

So he started publishing pictures of Dylan's garbage, including private letters and photographs.

He did this in an underground paper called The East Village Other Now, unsurprisingly, Dylan stopped putting personal items into trash and asked Weberman to stop invading his privacy.

Weberman alleges that this issue came to a head with Dylan attacking him on Elizabeth Street, and he claims the event was memorialized in Dylan's song where Are You Tonight.

According to Weberman, this lyric is about him getting beaten up by Bob Dylan quote, it fell out of place, my foot in his face, But he should have stayed where his money was green Wow.

It's poetic.

I guess it is.

I guess okay.

I think by bringing our conversation about garbage all the way around to Bob Dylan lyrics and for telling us about mister Trashwheel and his entire family, you've earned today's trophy.

Mango.

I think it's more about mister Trashwheel than anything else.

But okay, I promise I'm never gonna throw this this trophy away.

So that is it for our dumpster dive into the world of trash.

Research and writing for this episode was done by our friend Meredith Danko.

Thank you, Meredith.

But now we want to hear from you, and specifically, we have a very odd question that we need answered.

We want to know what your favorite or least favorite type of pasta is.

It is for an episode we're working on.

Give us a call at three oh two, four oh five, five, nine two five.

We want to hear your very strong pasta opinions.

You can also send us an email at high Geniuses at gmail dot com.

Do not hold back.

We cannot wait to hear your hot takes on pasta and big news.

Next week we're going to have five brand new episodes for you.

It is a week long series all about curiosity.

If you've ever wondered why do I wonder so many things?

Then this is for you.

We'll also have daily activities contests, so follow us on Instagram and blue Sky at part Time Genius so you don't miss out on all this fun.

We'll be back on Monday to kick that off, but in the meantime, From Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself, thank you so much for listening.

Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongashtikler and researched by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy.

Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.

The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shoring.

For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.