(gentle banjo music) - We use things.

If we don't need it anymore, we throw it away and then we make that somebody else's problem.

- If you don't see the value in that plastic bottle, it's worthless.

What do we do with things that are worthless?

We throw them away.

- There are 40 million Americans that do not have the same level of recycling access that they do to trash service.

- Recycling competes with all the other needs in a community and so local governments have hard decisions to make.

- You have to roll with the punches, unfortunately, in recycling, especially in the rural areas.

- There's a danger of this death spiral of: Small towns don't recycle because they don't have access to recycling infrastructure and no one builds recycling infrastructure next to small towns 'cause no one's recycling.

- In order to change a broken system, it requires new design.

There's about five or six big old bags of plastic right here.

♪ In the heartland ♪ We rely on ourselves ♪ And one another ♪ Hand in hand ♪ We must stand ♪ In the heartland - [Narrator] Production funding for this program is made possible by: - People will throw a mattress in anything.

Anything.

And it's, like, who at 2:00 AM decided to bring a mattress out here?

We do a recycling program here at the landfill.

At every location you'll have containers semi like this.

We have a lot of people come down from, like, DC and New York and one of the things that they don't always understand when they move here is that recycling doesn't work the same way.

You don't have a dedicated recycling truck or single stream.

You are responsible for disposing of it yourself.

There's no one coming to pick it up at the curb.

When I started, it was well established so I was getting the handle of running those programs and I got a formal letter from our recycler saying, "We are no longer taking plastics in two months.

Sorry for the change.

Thank you."

- China's ban on scrap materials, National Sword, fundamentally shifted at least short term the underlying economics of the recycling world.

- The end game was just ship it off to China, 'cause they'll take it.

So when China was like, "No," what do you do?

Like, what as an entire nation do you do?

- Where do you go when there's only one person doing recycling for you?

- This is Audrey three, the mean green eating machine.

You might even find some old little plastic bits in here from whenever that last shred was.

Oh, yep, there's some stuff still in there.

My name is Scott Tiernan and I re-fabricate local post-consumer plastic into furniture and home goods.

Comes out here, then gets turned into something else.

Plastic is not inherently bad.

It's a material.

Many people would be dead if it wasn't for sterilized plastics.

- We dove into as a society and as a world as a whole into plastics because it could keep things safer.

It could keep things cleaner.

It was extremely useful.

- There is no one material that is better than every other material.

I don't want to drink a beer out of a plastic pouch, you know, any more than I want my hazardous materials being in a thin glass bottle.

- Something comes in a shiny package and you want the something, but the shiny package gets thrown out.

But, like, that's physical stuff.

Where's it going?

This is called the Rainbow Reader.

It's designed for kids.

The white, I think was kitty litter containers.

- Market flux creates gaps and gaps create opportunities, and folks who are postured to fill those gaps can find themselves in a great situation.

- There isn't a beginning and an end to an item.

There could be a continuation of that item if we look at it in a different way.

- We are trying to go from a linear economy.

You make something and then you throw it out, to a circular economy where you're taking something and you are reusing it time and time again.

- I studied industrial design at James Madison University.

Go Dukes.

I had the amazing opportunity to go study abroad in Sweden and study Scandinavian design.

I discovered this sheet of re-fabricated plastic.

Like, I had never seen anything like it before, and it was just plastic.

So I did some research and realized, "Ah, I can make this."

This is the original oven that we used to use before POP Plastic was POP Plastic.

This is a commercial size oven.

- To deal with someone who is actually going to produce post-consumer items, to be able to come in and say, "Look, you know the Clorox jug that you dropped off here is now this potting bench or whatever."

That sort of full cycle recycling, that's very unique.

We in Staunton are stuck in what the American Public Works Association refers to as the recycling gap, between more metropolitan areas that have access to recycling infrastructure and more remote rural areas.

smaller towns like Staunton.

Engineers are problem- solvers.

We're not scientists.

The direct problem is our citizens want to recycle.

How am I going to hold that door open for them when there are a lot of forces conspiring to slam that door shut?

- In the US, recycling is a public service.

People depend on their local governments.

And the question is how do you pay for that?

- Oftentimes the person who's in charge of recycling in a given community is also in charge of plowing the streets and dealing with rabid raccoons.

- I had a source for number one and number two plastic.

No one in the area was taking number four and number five plastic.

And that's when I ran into Scott Tiernan.

- Ooh.

When he reached out to me and I said, "Yeah, if you can collect the plastic that I need, I think that I can help you out."

- From a personal standpoint, I want Scott to succeed.

From a professional standpoint, I need a place to take four and five plastics.

- Trying to, I'm just gonna put this down for right now.

'Cause it's gonna blow over.

So... What?

So we're collecting twos and fives.

Each number will be sorted into clears and whites.

Cool colors, warm colors and dark, like, black, brown.

Number two plastic is a lot of shampoos, laundry detergents, milk containers.

They don't make the cleanest plastic if they're not cleaned out efficiently.

You'd be amazed at how many nasty milk containers I've dry heaved over.

We'll see if people show up.

(gentle acoustic guitar music) - Creating a plastic- driven business in an area that has patchy at best plastic collection, if he builds it, maybe they'll come?

(gentle country music) - [Scott] Do you need a hand with that, Dave?

- Okay.

- So you're friends with Georgi, huh?

You just crush 'em, and then just kinda pull it off.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, great.

Well, I'm glad you were able to make it.

You've done a really great job on these.

Scott.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And they'll be for sale soon.

- We focus on climate change.

We focus on materials captured.

We focus on tons diverted or emissions, greenhouse emissions, but do we really focus on individuals?

Do we focus on people?

- I'm one that does care about recycling for the most part if it's convenient.

Like, if it's really inconvenient, then I might not care as much.

Yeah, I live close by, but I might not even recycle if I didn't have this here, honestly.

- We miss the curbside, which was very convenient obviously, but we know all the plastic problems in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and so on, and we'd love to be able to help more with that.

- If you don't understand their driver to really participating, well, how can you really expect to see change?

- The people who are deciding whether to invest in public recycling systems are often very disconnected from the realities of the recycling economy.

- You don't get anything out of burying something in a hole in the ground, but with recycling it does cost more.

You're having to maybe sort the material, maybe you have to send it a little bit further, what have you.

But the value you get out of that is exponential.

- A ton of garbage produces one job.

A ton of recyclables produces 10.

(gentle accordion music) - The trucks come in, they dump it here on the tipping floor.

It goes through a sorting process by commodity and those are getting sorted and baled separately and then getting prepared to market.

- Recycling is at its baseline a market, a free market, that is consuming materials to go into manufacturing.

- They're separating corrugated cardboard and then they're also pulling off contaminants, getting the stuff ready to go through the sorting system.

Two dimensional items ride up.

Three dimensional items fall through.

- From our programs, we recycle 37,000 tons a year that's collected at the curb.

We recycle another almost 10,000 tons that are dropped off at drop-off sites.

So about 47,000 tons a year.

- The speed bump associated with National Sword has been responded to by lots of investment in domestic capacity.

- When China went away for that market, we had to respond as a country to be able to build up the infrastructure to take that material.

- [Rob] The public recycling system can be part of a renaissance of US manufacturing.

- Recycling accounts for over $700 million of economic activity in Virginia, which you hopefully are having a single economy in Virginia, not a separate one for the rural and the cities.

- This baled PET is gonna go to what we call a reclaimer whose job is to break open that bale and turn it into rPET, or recycled PET, that will feed the next step in the manufacturing chain.

That's a commodity that could be worth 30 cents a pound.

And say that bale is 1,400 pounds, you start to get a sense of the recycling economy.

The scale is great.

Millions of pounds of demand is what it takes to be the other end of the recycling stream.

The community cannot plan their recycling program around an end user who may say, "Oh, I can't take that material today."

It's coming out of our homes whether the material is high value or low value.

Once it's here in a bale, it's supply and demand.

But at your home you're not responding to supply and demand pressures as you consume cereal and milk and laundry detergent.

That's not gonna stop you from ordering from Amazon.

(gentle string music) - It turns out that furniture fabrication, the creation of the raw material is considered industrial processing.

And because of that, I cannot operate the shredding and the melting on the property.

- I felt horrible, but at the same time I was obligated to throw the flag and say, "This is not a location that will work."

- I'm trying to find a location where I can legally do this.

I'm trying to be part of the solution.

(people chattering) (horns honking) - Oh my Lord.

I am.

Right here.

- Yeah, but where is your spot?

- I don't know.

I was told to go in front of Riverheads,but...

I was supposed to have, like, 45 minutes to get this all ready, trying to make it look pretty.

(festive music) - She's like, "I haven't seen this many people in my life."

Can you say POP Plastic?

- POP Plastic.

(Meg laughs) - No idea.

(bright festive music) - Wow, did you find you a present?

Can you go put the present back there?

- So I don't really know, Meg, where this is supposed to go.

All right.

Yeah, I have no gas, so hopefully we're gonna be okay.

- Soon as they go, you're gonna head on over and start your route.

- All right, so it begins.

(bright festive music) (drumline booming) Merry Christmas.

I love this sense of community.

Merry Christmas.

That's right.

Merry Christmas.

I think what this pandemic has really showed us is that, like, living in isolation and solitude, it's those closest to us, around us, geographically, but also communally who we can rely on.

Hey.

Hey, Kathleen.

Oh, good, good.

It's good to see you.

I hope in time, the politics of sustainability subside.

- Recycling's not a partisan issue.

Not wasting is a “small-C ” conservative value that's a way to be efficient, smart.

- This is very much a community-wide problem to solve, a statewide, commonwealth wide, nationwide problem to solve.

- Did you have fun, Thia?

You want more?

- I want more cat.

- She wants to see the cat down there.

That was a lot of extroversion for me.

(laughs) - It was a lot.

- Kids would, like, ask their parents, they're like, "What's POP?

(Scott laughs) - Now we can go home and- - Go to sleep?

- Go to sleep.

(laughs) - Meg and I, we met in Charlottesville.

She sat in front of me at the church that we were both going to at that time.

We didn't say anything to each other, but she noticed me apparently there that day too.

Yeah.

- Like, right there.

- Yeah, right over here.

It was very much the Dr. Seuss, like, when your weird meets somebody else's weird.

Just under a year later got married and then... um... we miscarried.

We miscarried our first son.

That was one of the defining moments in my life.

Talking about community, like, seeing the people that you thought were your community disappear in, like, one of the most vulnerable parts of your life.

So we started deconstructing kind of, like, what is community?

What is faith?

What is love?

What is support?

What is the world that I want to raise my child in?

We're trying to rethink and relearn what we've learned in the home, what we've learned in schools, and that's where it starts.

(gentle uplifting music) - This is not the most, like, accessible and equitable system.

The user journey is a huge part of designing a system or a product.

- We know that recycling is not provided equitably in America.

Our studies actually show that nine out of 10 Americans want to recycle.

But then considering that access gap, we know already that 40 million of them can't.

- If you go to the rural side of things, like, in Virginia, those communities are often underserved.

On the urban side of things, multi-family homes often don't have the same level of access to recycling.

- We're all gonna buy sodas.

We're gonna bring stuff into our home.

We have to manage that stuff.

You can go the easy route and you can put it in a hole in the ground.

Where are those holes in the ground?

They're often in rural communities.

- What you really want is a lift that's no more than about two foot in thickness.

If it gets too thick, it's really hard to apply pressure to it.

And then of course, the compactors, you see the big teeth on the drum.

Those are there to macerate the trash and help bust it apart for size reduction.

And then the weight of the machine and the repetitive passes continues to pack it down.

And this is all one big permitted landfill.

Thats cells one, two, and three.

That big knoll right there.

Five and six will lay in this bottom and then seven goes all the way out the holler there.

So eventually this will all be filled with waste.

A lot of construction jobs, you would've called it a day on a day as muddy as this.

Of course, we can't do that.

We have to continue to process trash no matter the weather conditions.

We process about 500 tons a day.

We're standing on waste.

We're sitting on top of a lift and we're constructing another lift.

You can see the compactor up on top right now.

It's amazing just how much care is taken to protect the environment when it comes to landfilling.

Like, most of what we do is if this is the best option, and right now it's the best option we have, we spend a lot of time and money to make sure that we don't impact the environment around us.

I don't think most people have any idea just how much goes into, you know, an actual landfill, how much work's here, how much infrastructure you have to build.

- Our modern landfills are becoming these super scientific, multi-layered, multi-functioning processes.

- The landfill itself has a complete liner system underneath of it.

It has a water collection system underneath of it.

All the water that comes off the trash has to be captured and taken to a treatment plant to be treated.

We bury it but there's a ton of infrastructure underneath this.

(gentle accordion music) - The only option we have for POP Plastic to work is if we moved here.

So with that in mind, welcome to our new home.

The bassinet's gonna go right here.

It's so peaceful and so cozy and so calm.

And we don't have all the distraction of all this other stuff that we don't need.

Okay, come on.

Whoa, those are deer.

Good boy.

Do not run.

This is gonna be the shop.

Plenty of space for sorting and furniture creation.

- [Jeff] He's got a location.

He has initiated the process of being able to operate at that location, and I'm eagerly awaiting Scott opening that door.

So fingers crossed.

- Do you wanna do this?

First week of February we apply for the special use permit- - And have a baby.

- Then we have a baby that week.

I didn't even think about... Ah.

- We'll be birthing lots of things.

- Yeah.

- [Scott] Getting ready to go into the zoning board meeting.

This is the final yea or nay that we need to make it work.

- There was supposed to be no businesses on any of the properties.

So I don't, like I said, I don't have a problem with the saw mill.

I mean, we can't stop it, but I was wanting to do the saw mill.

I'm in construction and- - Megan also may be going into labor any minute so... - Next item on the agenda is a request by Phillip Scott or Megan Leslie Tiernan for a special use permit plastic fabrication facility within an existing building.

It has yearly educational classes in conjunction with the plastic fabrication and it has short term rental within the existing dwelling.

- Good afternoon, chairmen and zoning board.

My name is Phillip Scott Tiernan.

POP Plastic is my business that I'm starting up.

And... um... we were operating within the city of Staunton, but came up against some zoning things with our process.

- You're using, like, a regular commercial stove like you see at a restaurant?

Is that what you said?

- [Scott] Correct.

As of right now, yes.

- Could you explain a little bit about how the ventilation system works containing the odor in this spot?

- Any sort of odor would be, um, contained in those filters, and then um... to speak to that matter...

I apologize.

My mouth is very dry today.

My wife is also nine months pregnant and potentially going into labor this afternoon right now.

So I'm just a little on the antsy side.

She would be here, but she would be probably causing a little bit more of a scene than I am right now, so.

(board members laughing) Let me just take a breath.

So we utilize a lower temperature of about 350.

The higher the temperature, the more fumes and off gases are released, which is why you're taught never burn plastic.

Teaching our community how we leave this world a better place than we came into it.

That's what I want to give to our community.

That's what I want to give to my children.

- Another question?

- Are you using cloth diapers?

- (laughs) That's a great question.

This is a step forward.

This is a huge step forward.

- All those in favor, raise your right hand.

It's approved.

Good luck to you.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- Done.

All right.

- Thank you.

All right.

- If you need help with the little one.

- Thank you.

And now we're moving all the stuff.

Getting POP Plastic going.

(Scott laughs) - Use your imagination.

- Watch your head.

There you go.

Got the bolts.

Nice.

- [Friend] We got this and this.

- [Scott] Yep, we got this, we got the vise grips.

(gentle uplifting music) - [Jeff] We're all in the same boat, you know, out here in the Shenandoah Valley, and when things change, we will change with them.

Closing the equity gap to recycling in the US, that's not something that is a one-off.

That is something that takes time, and it's gonna take a collective effort to really do that.

It shouldn't be a privilege to contribute to the world being a better place.

- When I think about recycling, or when I think about making the world a better place, I think about when I was born.

I was born one pound, nine ounces.

Individuals like myself who may have been sensitive to environmental factors.

- Whoa, those are all mommy's milk bags.

Can we pick them up, please?

- Oh, goodness.

This is the pace of life that we like.

That's the world that I want my daughter to live in.

A place to experience sustainable practices and actually see them happening firsthand and learn about them.

(gentle uplifting music) - [Jeff] Recycling isn't the end all be all.

It's just one little Lego in a much, much bigger, more complicated structure.

- When I started those conversations, I was really naive.

I was really new to it and really excited.

But I gotta start somewhere.

(gentle uplifting music) I've learned a lot and with learning and with knowledge hopefully comes wisdom.

You just have to start.

Like, they don't have to be exactly perfect.

(gentle uplifting music) You just have to start somewhere.

- [Narrator] Production funding for this program is made possible by: (gentle country music) ♪ Who belongs ♪ Is there room enough for all?

♪ Who belongs ♪ Do we stand or do we fall ♪ And is there room ♪ In our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room ♪ For us in the heart ♪ Of the land (gentle piano music)