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Matt and Sean talk about recycling plastic (will we ever get there?), simple home energy solutions (insulation!), and more.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Recycling Breakthrough That Doesn't Need Sorting https://youtu.be/D9Hd4KMoxds
Matt and Sean talk about recycling plastic (will we ever get there?), simple home energy solutions (insulation!), and more.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Recycling Breakthrough That Doesn't Need Sorting https://youtu.be/D9Hd4KMoxds
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined. We're talking about what we do with what we make when we're done using what we make and need to do something with it. Is that what we're talking about? I think so. Anyway. Welcome to Still To Be Determined. This, of course, is the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. With me, Sean Ferrell, I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, write some stuff for kids. It's kind of a mixed bag with me. We won't get into that right now, but with me, as always, is my brother Matt, the aforementioned Matt from Undecided. Matt, how are you today? I ask, as I don't know the answer.
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing well enough, let's put it that way.
Sean Ferrell: Yes. Yes.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I won't go into the details, but we're living through. We're living through life.
Matt Ferrell: Yes.
Sean Ferrell: And Matt and I had a. Had a call a few hours ago, which we were talking about some of that life, and it was a FaceTime call, and both of us were on speakerphone. And a little while after that, Matt may not know this, a little while after that, his wife sent me an email in which she said, you really sound like you're taking things in stride and in a way that's really like showing you're doing a good job. And I really greatly appreciated that message from her. So I appreciate that and say thank you to her through Matt right now. But also, here we are now a couple of hours later, and I got a migraine. That's just. It's just out there doing God's work. So, yeah, that was me yesterday, by the way. Sean's doing. Sean's doing great. And Sean, you really seem to be taking things in stride. That's terrific. Hats off to you. While Sean's brain tries to crawl out of his left eye. So here we are talking about.
Matt Ferrell: The Ferrell brothers are doing great. We're doing great.
Sean Ferrell: Here we are talking about. In a moment, we'll get into Matt's most recent, which is a number of companies that appear to be very close to, maybe not already there, but very close to a destination that looks like helping everyone with a pervasive problem in our society, which is plastic. And so we're going to talk about plastic. We're going to talk about the movie the Graduate. No, we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about what we do with plastic when we're done with it how the things that have been holding us back from being able to handle this challenge are sadly as always, economics. And what these breakthroughs might indicate could be changing about the math around all of that. But before we get into that, we always like to revisit our most recent episode here on Still to Be Determined and talk about what you've had to say about our conversations. So we've been, couple of weeks have gone by, we talked about sweating solar panels and if any anybody has not been following our conversations closely and thinks wow, that migraine is really getting to Sean, Sweating solar panels? No, that we actually did have a conversation about sweating solar panels because of a technology that is to aid solar panel efficiency by slapping a big sticky wad of gel on the back that moisture and releases moisture so they sweat. And what does sweating do for them? Well, it makes them more efficient just as it does me. Well we've talked about that off and on for several weeks now and yet again we have another comment about that very technology. Milo Hobo jumped in and our most recent to say solar panels for water canals, grazing lands and some crops are all useful use cases. The the sun is a deadly laser. Using solar panels for shade just makes sense. Plus solar panels need to cool off so water channels beneath really helps them cool off.
I wanted to share this because this is a continuation first of all of the topic which I find really interesting. The various ways that solar panels have byproducts that benefit us in ways beyond energy production. I think it's fascinating to say oh you put these panels over the cows and you know what you end up with? Happier cows, healthier cows and here we go. But I also just wanted to share this just because Milo accurately describes the sun as a deadly laser. Yes, it's about time somebody had the bravery to say it. There was this from PathfinderGM, who I mean I don't know that we know this person Matt but we know what they're talking about. Matt recently started a game of Pathfinder with a couple of friends of ours who work on who work in the background of Matt's production. So I read this and I was just like is this. No, he wouldn't jump in here and no, that's not. No, no that's not. No. Anyway, Pathfinder GM I hope your games are going well but Pathfinder also jumps in to say about houses, more and more insulation is a direct other half of heating and cooling. I had part of my 1910 house ripped off in a windstorm. I'm really sorry to hear that? That sounds terrible. Ripped off in a windstorm to find almost no insulation underneath beyond the normal repairs. I sealed up the home and insulated it and it cut my costs in half. I wonder if Matt ever looked at the cost graphs of more insulation to conditioning needed and looked for lowest total cost. I have seen a passive home that has a tiny half ton geothermal. That's basically just for the erv. And that was amazing to me. So, Matt, I brought this into the conversation because I feel like this is one of those topics that I know you know, and we have talked about it before, we have touched on it before, but it's one of those simple steps that kind of gets lost in our conversations.
Because our conversations about your channel are about newest technologies. So of course it sounds like we're talking about, well, if you want to remove that pimple, here's a laser that will remove the pimple. And so we're not talking about the simplicity of washing your face regularly.
Matt Ferrell: So to get rid of those pimples.
Sean Ferrell: To get rid of those pimples. So it's like, yeah, there are conversations in which we're like, here, you know, there's solar panels and there's all these different ways of using batteries and cooling and heat pumps and. But yeah. Do you want to talk about insulation just for a moment?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. If you're at your home and you're like, I want to be more energy efficient. I'm looking at heat pumps, I'm looking at heat pump dryers, I'm considering getting solar, all that kind of stuff. The first thing you should do, the first thing is look at the insulation in your house because I will guarantee you it might need some help. And it is the most cost effective way to reduce your energy use in your home, full stop. I've experienced it myself. In my previous house, we got more insulation blown into our outside walls because we had it looked at and it was like over the years it settled. So it's like you end up with these huge gaps in your wall that have no insulation. So you basically just top it up and then you notice, oh, my, my heating bills have gone down. Huh, that's weird. It saves you a lot of money even if you're still in a natural gas furnace. So it's definitely the first thing you should be looking at. It's the most cost effective way to do everything, full stop.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, you have. And here, this is unplanned. And I swear to viewers and listeners, I do not get a kickback. Oh, no, don't you have an energy efficiency guide that people can download from your website?
Matt Ferrell: Yes, I have a course on achieving energy independence about getting solar in your home and the things that go into it. This does come up in that briefly, but that course is more around learning all the different components that will go into a solar panel system so that you are fully armed with information and knowledge before you go and hire somebody to put it on your house. Because if you're not asking the right questions, you may end up paying more than you need to, you may end up getting a bad installer. So it's just basically trying to give you as much knowledge as you can before you start hiring somebody. But I do in that talk about, you know, energy efficiency of your home briefly in there.
Sean Ferrell: Right. And then of course there are consultants that you can hire, contractors you can hire who come in and do a whole top to bottom scan. But you don't even need to go that route as a first step. A first step could be as simple as, do you have a crawl space? Go into that crawl space. Look around that crawl space. If you don't see insulation in that crawl space, yes, you might need insulation. So it's the simplicity. There's a little story on your own. You can even put it in yourself. I have very fond memories of our parents bringing in literally bales of pink insulation and being told do not eat this. And thinking, why would I eat that? I was a child and Matt was a child and. But our parents responded to us like we were scavenging rats. We, we, we were told in no uncertain terms, do not touch, do not eat. We weren't going too, the pink panther image on the side, a cartoon character notwithstanding, we didn't think it was cotton candy. So our dad would go into the crawl space and put insulation in all the crawl spaces. This is something you as a homeowner can do on your own. So YouTube is there for a reason. Look up a few videos about easy installation process and take a shot at it.
Matt Ferrell: You can get home energy audits, but you can do it yourself. My previous house, I mentioned our water pipes froze one of the first years we were there. And I was like, the mechanical room was very drafty. It was very cold. I was like, why is it so cold? So I went in there and I did a little inspection and kept putting my hand in the air, trying to feel where the cold draft is coming from. And there was this little mini door that opened up into this little cavity and you could kind of see the cement foundation behind the finished basement wall. And you could kind of see up. And I got on a ladder, crawled in there and stuck my head up and saw the outside. From the inside of my house. I could see outside there was a little window, basement window, and there was nothing above it. Like, nothing. It was just completely open. And so I got some. That great stuff, you know, spray foam and a couple cans of that up in there. And suddenly our pipes never froze again. And that room was never freezing. It was. It was great. So just, you can just do little inspections, find the places that you need to top things up, and you will save a lot of money. Yeah, a lot of money.
Sean Ferrell: Alan Hatt. I love that name. Alan Hatt jumped in of a recent discussion around Matt's video that discussed the research that shows that a quick zap of electricity into nickel batteries can actually remove dendrites that have formed, thereby healing them. He writes, people were zapping dendrites from nickel batteries before NIMH batteries were on the market. Published authorities didn't mention it, probably because they thought people would explode their batteries. Now, I'm not questioning Alan on his logic or his information. Yeah, it sounds real to me that somebody somewhere at a company was just like, we can't tell them to do that because they will do it wrong. I'm wondering, did you see anything in your research around that discussion about has there been a long standing under. Has there been a long standing aspect to nickel batteries where this was a known component going back further in time than the research that you focused in on? And as a secondary question, do you know of any other rumors around current tech in this area where the rumor mill is saying do a thing and you're just like, yeah, that's not backed up by science, but maybe it has a whiff of being accurate. Like, let's talk about the rumor mill a little bit.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. I was going to say for, like, when we put together the video, we didn't find any, like, research that showed that this is actually a viable path forward for the charging of the battery. That was a new kind of discovery of how you could use it in this way because there is a serious concern about overcharging the battery. And batteries tend to go boom when you do that, it tends to be very dangerous, so you shouldn't do it. That may be in the case. He may be right. Allen Hatt may be completely right of they knew that this was a case, but of course they're not going to tell people because you can seriously cause serious damage. And now they've found a way that it's like, oh, no, you can do this in a safe way. Here it is. Here's this chemistry that's doing it just great. That could be the case here. Yeah, but what was the other part of your question? The rumor mill.
Sean Ferrell: Are there any other rumors that you've ever heard around current battery tech or any of the stuff that you've researched where you get a whiff of like, oh, here's this thing, and it sounds like it might be reasonable, but you can never quite track down actual hard evidence that it's true all the time. I mean, have you ever thought about doing a video devoted to the. Yeah, these are a bunch of rumors, but there's nothing out there to back it up.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, this actually just a little behind the scenes. This happens all the time. Like, there'll be a news article that comes out. I could make battery videos every week because, like, the amount of press releases that come out. Breakthrough, breakthrough, breakthrough. Please don't. I'm not, I don't. I don't want to. But when you dig into some of them, it's like it quickly starts to fall apart. It's like, it's not that the. It's. It's a lie. It's just they omitted. Omitted a lot. It's like, oh, there's. It's interesting research, but there's really nothing there. And it just kind of falls through your fingers as you start to look at it. And that just happened. A couple weeks ago, one of my researchers was digging into a topic. We thought, oh, this could be a really cool one. So she started digging into it and she came back was like, oh, no, there's. There's nothing here. Like, it made it sound like this was the best thing since sliced bread. And she said, but they kind of left out this important factor about the anode that they're using, which is a very specific anode. And it may be the reason that this is working the way it is. And that anode's incredibly expensive. It would never make it to market because the battery would be so obscenely expensive.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: So it's kind of. It's like one of those things of in research. It's fascinating and it may be cool for researchers because it, like, unlocks new thinking of like, oh, well, let's try this then instead of. But for the public, it's like, that's never going to be a thing because it would cost a fortune to make.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: So, yeah, that, that happens a lot.
Sean Ferrell: On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent, this one. Have we finally solved the plastic problem? This is just from a few days ago. And right off the bat, right at the top. Well, let's set the tone, shall we? BJ McCurley writes Betteridge's Law of headlines. Quote, any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no, followed by Taro Dinero, who writes, have we accepted the fact that when Matt says finally, that means we're still very far from what he's talking. About? Okay, so one is more of a general Internet conversation. Oh, whenever you see a headline with a question mark, the other one is calling you out specifically. So just. I know, respond. Respond as you will.
Matt Ferrell: Okay, so there's two things I want to dig into on this. The whole Betteridge's Law. I get that a lot. You know that because like every week we joke about how, like, you would read the title of my question. My title, and you go question mark at the end of it. Because I always have a question at the end of it. The Betteridges Law. It's a gross oversimplification to say that it can always be answered by no. And all you have to do is do a little Google search and you can find academic papers that have dug into this. That Betteridges law. It doesn't hold up once you start to look into it. Like if you analyze news headlines that have questions that should be able to be answered by a no, it's like, no, it's not the case. They've done studies of like, this article could be answered yes 40% of the time, maybe 20% of the time, and no, 16. Whatever it is, it doesn't hold up. It's a nice pithy thing to say because it's trying to fight back against what's perceived as clickbait by asking a provocative question. What I would say is I like the idea of the question because these are unanswered. It's a scientific study or engineering study that is still being evolving. It's still learning. We're still kind of growing it. So we don't know the answers definitively to a lot of these things. Hence the name of the channel called Undecided. So it's like my response to that is, I don't buy into betteridges law completely, which is why I use those second thing. And this is a fun little fact behind the scenes. YouTube has these tools now for creators where we can do A, B, C testing. So we can test three things against each other. And we've had the ability to do ABC testing on thumbnails for a while, and. And people were accusing me of changing the thumbnail to dupe them into seeing the video. Again, it's like, no, this is just the testing tool.
It's like it's doing, like, which ones get the best results. And to be very clear, it is not a how many thumb. Which thumbnail gets the best clicks? What thumbnail gets the most watch time. Because YouTube is obsessed with viewer satisfaction. They want a video that they serve to you. They want you to watch that whole thing and be happy that you watched it at the end. They want to give you things you like. So whatever thumbnail wins is the one that actually gets not just more clicks, but more people watching it right in completion, or as much of it as possible. They recently rolled out the ability to also do title testing. And so somebody commenting on this specific video I find hysterical because I tested three or four titles on this video, and the one that won was the one with the question mark that could be answered with a no. So it's like I had titles that were not that followed Betteridges Law, and they lost. And it wasn't that they lost to clicks. They lost to watch time, to viewer satisfaction, to people wanting to watch the video. So again, my on a soapbox response to that kind of thing is, no, Betteridges Law is bunk. I don't buy it. It's like, it doesn't. It just doesn't makes sense to me. It's like you can ask a question, a provocative question, to make you go, huh, that's interesting. Maybe I want to find out about that and join in and watch the video. So that's kind of my response. And then for the second one, the whole finally thing. Yeah, I get it. I get it.
Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I like that response. So let's deal with the finally and the room that, to me, smelled a little bit like a comment from, like, tongue and cheek. People go to the Internet to be funny. People engage in conversation or other thing when they've read the headline, but they haven't read the article.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: Do you want to talk about some of the things you talk about in the video that are actively doing what they say they can do? These are companies. These are companies that are doing a thing, doing it. So it's not. That's. That's for me, like, your response of like, okay, fine, you're gonna say, finally, okay, I get it. I take it. And then my response is, yeah, but because, like, yeah, like, this isn't it's never gonna happen. They're doing it. They're doing it right over there.
Matt Ferrell: They're like, well, here. Well, it kind of. It does tie into Betteridge’s Law. It's like it can be answered with the word no, which is assuming that the question can be answered yes or no. Because that's the whole thing. Can the question be answered with a yes or no? It makes it very black or white, but there's shades of gray in here. And so it's like this stuff is happening, it is coming to fruition. There are companies that are actively bringing this to market, but it's not like a household thing yet.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And so it's the finally when people complain about that, it's like they want it to be. I can only do this once as a household thing. I can't talk about it in some mid term state. And that's where I don't subscribe to that because clearly I keep saying the word finally and stuff like that. So it's like, yeah, you can call me out on it. I have no problem with that. But at the same time it's like, I clearly don't buy into that argument because I should be allowed to talk about this stuff in progress. It's like it doesn't have to be something you can go into Walmart and pick up off the store shelf or the recycling center takes all kinds of plastics now. Problem solved. At that point I wouldn't be making this video because it's a household. It's like, come on.
Sean Ferrell: It's like if Apple was to be like, we're giving you a sneak peek at next year's iPhone. And everybody's response, let's wake me up when it's here. Yeah, like it's okay. Well, yeah, but also really, this one from Iberman, not his superhero name, I believe it's his secret identity name. Iberman jumps in to say, as a university student who is currently doing a project on breaking down PET with a mutated cutinase enzyme, it is quite exciting to see this method actually being used in the real world. Although the high performance enzyme we are working with has been around since 1999 and yet it has seen no use in breaking down plastics outside of research. Mostly because there is no economical interest in recycling plastics with how cheap new plastic is to produce. This is a topic again right there in your video. Like you talk about, the main thing holding these technologies back is not we don't know how to do it, it's well, doing it actually costs a little bit more than just making new plastic. So why would you do this if you can just make new plastic? Another problem with using enzymes to break down plastics like PET is that some plastics are semi crystalline and enzymes can't break down the crystalline part of the plastics due to steric hindrance, meaning the PET chain can't reach the active site of the enzyme because of the compact and stable crystalline structure. So my question to you.
Matt Ferrell: Great knowledge drop, by the way.
Sean Ferrell: Great knowledge drop. Thank you so much, Iberman, for jumping into the comments and good luck on your research. I mean, it's terrific when people with knowledge jump into Matt's comments. It's always very interesting to see what they have to say. But it's also very interesting when people who are actively involved in either learning or applying these jump into the comments and you get a peek into the next phase of university students looking at this as active research that they're taking part in. It's really, really cool. So good luck on your work and hopefully in 10, 15 years you're out there doing this work in a way that you find rewarding. So the various types of plastic you do talk in the video about, there are different types of plastic and there are different ways of approaching this. Would you say that all the plastics, all the different ways of breaking these down in the way you talked in your video, are they covering all the plastics out there or are there some aspects to this that are. Are there certain types of plastic where it's just. Yeah, that's. That would be so expensive, it would be so outside of doable in an easy and efficient way that we're just gonna have some plastics that are just gonna sit in the landfills for forever.
Matt Ferrell: It's essentially that there's. We kind of danced on this issue in the video a little bit of like, you know, it's better to keep sorting it and then doing the low, cheap stuff for the plastics we know how to do very quickly and efficiently. And then the more, the more difficult stuff, we could be very like, streamlined and target it because there are. From what we've seen and what I've seen, there's basically a way to break down pretty much every plastic. Like there's a way to deal with it, but some of them, it's like that's never going to be a thing, at least not now because it's so energy intensive and so expensive to do. It's like it's not even remotely close to being a thing we could actually do in practice. That's the, the challenge is that some of this stuff would end up in a landfill no matter what. But the thing that I find interesting, the stuff that we can target cheaply and effectively, especially like the enzymes, like what carbios is doing, that's like some of the majority of plastics that are out there. So it's like we don't have to solve the plastic problem 100% right now. Good to go. It's like if we can hit 40% of the plastics with some of these systems right now in an effective way, that's a huge win. And then it's like, oh, there's this other thing we could possibly do down the road that's still being refined and we're still trying to find ways to make it more efficient. Like maybe then 10 years down the road we find a solution to that. And that's you and I have also talked about this. Plastics typically are just sit in the landfill for forever in giant air quotes. You can put it in its own little landfill and then dig it back up and recycle it later once we figure that stuff out. So there's ways we could handle this in the near term and long term. But yeah, it comes down to costs and efficiencies and that's what's holding a lot of it back.
Sean Ferrell: Unfortunately, another aspect of this is before you want to recycle the plastic, it's the making and the using of the plastic, which is what Mark Hubwells points out. Mark jumps into the comments to say the fundamental problem in plastics and the global consumer economy generally is the failure to design recycling into the product from the beginning. Most products are not initially designed with their ultimate disposal in mind. Firms offload the recycling disposal problem under society at large. Another example of privatize the gains, socialize the loss cost. This is as true of cell phones, autos and clothing as it is plastic bottles. We'll only really solve this until we require that no product may be marketed until the producer has accounted for how it will be disposed of or recycled. In short, the disposal problem needs to be put back on the product originator and the, and the cost of its disposal recycling needs to be included in the original production. I don't know that I have any question for you on that other than to say, yeah, Mark, yes, 100%, yes.
Matt Ferrell: I was in Germany, Sean, at the end of last year with my producer Lewis, who also, he lives in Europe and he kept saying to me, like, we kept talking about like, I can't believe you said these. You sell these kind of products in store shelves in the US where here it's like you couldn't even sell that because it has red dye 20 in it. Or you couldn't sell this because it X, Y and Z.
Sean Ferrell: And I got God bless America and punched him in the nose.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I punched as hard as I could. But we were out in Germany shopping and getting some snacks and stuff like that. And I saw firsthand what he was talking about and I was like, yeah, we need to do this everywhere. Store shelf, refrigerated section, yogurts, stuff like that. All the yogurts were a little glass container, Sean. Glass containers, what a radical thought. It's like the US from the 1940s. Why we did it then, why can't we do it now? It's like, it's so frustrating. It's like you wouldn't have these single use plastics that we, we as consumers would have to deal with. We have these glass things we have to deal with. But guess what? Glass can be recycled and reused forever. So it's like, I don't understand why we're not doing this. I completely agree with Mark. It's like it should be not on us to figure out the recycling. It should be on the person who makes the thing and brings it into the world. Should figure out how it's supposed to exit the world. And you'd find very quickly that companies would probably start using glass products for their, you know. Yeah, milk. Milk used to come into a glass jug, Sean. Why can't we do that again? Come on.
Sean Ferrell: Whatever happened to the milkman? Won't somebody think of him.
Matt Ferrell: Be a milk robot soon?
Sean Ferrell: Finally, this from Feliz530. Thank you for the video, Matt. Two years ago, as I was graduating from MIT, I commented on your recycling video that my goal was to be featured in one of your videos. And and now our team is that much closer to that goal. Since then we have spun out Macro Cycle Technologies, a venture that can recycle pet and polyester waste at price parity. We can chemically recycle heavily contaminated materials without ever having to break them down into virgin quality while bypassing the need for complex sorting or the petrochemical industry. We know it sounds too good to be true, but we are out of Boston, so let us know if you ever want a tour of our facilities to check it out firsthand.
Matt Ferrell: Yep. Yes. Yeah, I made a note of this in my to do list. I'm going to be reaching out to you about this. I'm very curious. I'm very curious to talk to you guys.
Sean Ferrell: So listeners, viewers, what did you think about all this? Is there anything that you think we missed? Is there anything you were hoping we'd bring up but we didn't? Jump into the comments and let us know. And as you can tell, the comments really do drive the content of this show and they help inform undecided as well. Thank you so much for those. And don't forget, while you're doing that, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, calling your mom, telling her you love her, all those things really help the show. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the become a Supporter button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about what to do with the things we're done with. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.