How Styrofoam Works
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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's here too. And this is a good old-fashioned, rootin', tootin', wholesome, down-home hour of fellowship with Stuff You Should Know. Wow. You sound like the coolest youth director in the building. You nailed it, Chuck. You totally nailed it. That's right.

I'm also the only youth director in the building right now. That's right. I had to hang up my spurs. Yeah. You got run out on a rail, didn't you? They were like, if there's one thing that's certainly not cool, this youth director's in their 50s, so you're out. Right. I'm still in my 40s, so it's kind of like David Bowie said, don't trust any youth director over 50. That's right. That's right.

You know, he also sung about styrofoam. No, he didn't. I thought I could get you. No, I could see it. I mean, like it was when Bowie was Bowie, it was styrofoam was still this amazing wonder product. But I got to say, Chuck, I feel like in the last decade or so, maybe it started to get kind of a bad name.

I think you're right. And we're going to, I mean, we're going to talk about the science of it all, how it's made and clear up some misconceptions and reinforce some conceptions. But the first thing we should probably clear up, and big thanks to Olivia, by the way, she knocked the other one out of the park, is that Styrofoam is a brand name and Livia is keen to point out

that it's not just like, you know, Band-Aid or Kleenex. Like this one actually matters because the styrofoam that you and I think of, and most people probably think of is like,

you know, what, what, uh, to go container or, or an old school coffee cup or, uh, to go coffee cup might be. Yeah. That's actually not styrofoam. That's technically something called EPS expanded polystyrene. Whereas the brand name styrofoam is extruded polystyrene. And that's mainly just like used for insulation and, and,

you know, cut into big boards and stuff like that. Right. And you're like, well, what's the big deal? They're actually basically exactly the same products. They have slightly different properties, but it's all the same raw materials, very similar production processes. And the final product is,

for all intents and purposes, the same. The big difference is the styrofoam is used for years and years and years and years. Like once you put it in to insulate a radiant heat floor, you're not going to tear that up after a couple of days and throw it in the dump. With the other stuff that expanded polystyrene, the stuff we think of as styrofoam, that's the stuff we use once for a few minutes and just throw away and get another new one. And that's

Posing a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on. That's right. Unless you're at my house, then Emily collects every bit of styrofoam and drives it to the specific styrofoam place. Charm? Yeah, which still may not be recycling it.

Oh, no, really? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think charm does the right thing, but I just I don't know. I just think so much of that stuff is dubious once you drop it off. Like who knows what even happens to it? Yeah. And I don't mean that in a conspiracy minded way. I just mean that, as we'll see, recycling styrofoam, there's just not a lot of reason to do it if you're styrofoam people because you can just make it again so cheaply. It's true. And for those of you. Yeah, it is sad for sure.

And for those of you outside of the Atlanta area, CHARM is the one recycling center in the entire metro Atlanta area where you can take styrofoam. It stands for the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials. Yeah. I mean, God bless Emily for doing all that because I certainly wouldn't. I know. It's a haul. It's not really conveniently worth it. No. Neither is saving tons and tons of styrofoam to go to CHARM once a month or whatever. But she does it. So, you know, she does the right thing.

So let's talk about all this stuff because I find it pretty fascinating. There's some science involved. There's some environmentalism involved. There's some corporate tomfoolery involved. I'm excited about this one. Well, I'm glad. Good. Well, I'm going to kick it off because styrofoam – well, let's start.

We're talking about polystyrene, and polystyrene is a form of styrene. And styrene occurs naturally in a lot of different plants. It's just kind of part of the ecosystem. But it was first distilled out in, I think, 1839 by a German pharmacist. I'm going with Eduard Simmon in German. You know, I don't know. Simone? That sounds French. Yeah, that doesn't sound very German.

I mean, just call him Eddie Simon. Eddie Simon. In 1839, he was a pharmacist who got his hands on a sweet gum tree from America, which was probably very exotic in Germany at the time. And he got styrene out of there. And he figured out how to take styrene molecules, which are a monomer, and put a bunch of them together to make a polymer. And what he got was a rigid plasma.

plastic solid. What we're talking about is a type of plastic. And he's like, I can't do anything with this and just moved along. Yeah. And it stayed that way for close to 100 years, like 90 years or so. And finally, in the 1930s, again, a lot of stuff comes about because they're trying to figure out some sort of military use for something. That was the case here. As we were, you know, between wars, the military was like, hey, how can we how can we use this stuff?

The literal brand name styrofoam, which again is the XPS, the stuff that's used in radiant flooring and wall insulation and stuff like that. That was invented a couple of times. The first time by a Swedish inventor named Carl Munters, who developed it in the 30s, but again, didn't have a lot of practical use for it. And then Dow came along, the Dow Chemical Company during World War II, and they had an engineer named Ray McIntyre who said...

I'm looking to try and get a synthetic, or I guess he was charged with trying to develop a synthetic substitute for rubber. Yeah, he was facing five years for it. Yeah, to use as a flexible insulator. And he combined styrene with isobutylene. And what he got was something he didn't expect, which was this very airy,

The isobutylene formed bubbles in the styrene, so it was, you know, what we think of as styrofoam, this super light, very airy, very insulating, water-resistant, flexible material. Yeah. So imagine taking something, like imagine taking a CD jewel case, because that's polystyrene, and chopping it up into little tiny pellets.

And then you're messing around with it and adding isobutylene. And all of a sudden, those pellets turn into little foamy balls. The exact same thing that if you have a very lightweight beanbag chair, it's full of those. It's polystyrene foam.

That's the that's the basis of the whole thing, right? These little tiny pellets. And he must have just been as surprised as the day is long. Yeah. Well, Dow was certainly surprised and delighted. And they were like, hey, let's just start manufacturing this stuff. We got plenty of things we can do. And somebody said, wait a minute.

There's this other guy named Carl Munters who already developed, you know, and has patented this concept. And Dow said, great, let's just write him, cut him a check. And now we can patent capital S Styrofoam. And they did so. And they started saying, hey, you know, we can build like floating docks out of this stuff. And there's all sorts of marine uses, basically, because it floats really well. Yeah, because that extruded polystyrene, the actual Styrofoam brand type,

That is very water resistant. It's extremely lightweight. It's very buoyant. So it just automatically made sense to apply it to different like water-based situations, right? Yeah, for sure. As far as the stuff that we think of as styrofoam, around the same time in the 1930s, a German company called IP Farben, who I know we've talked about them before several times. They're the ones who created the gas that was used in the gas chambers. Ah, okay. Yeah.

They've come up a time or two. They don't have a great reputation these days. No, I know we definitely talked about them a few times, but they were developing the EPS, the polystyrene foam, the stuff, again, that we think of as styrofoam, like, you know, the cups and the to-go containers and all that stuff. And both sides in World War II were...

Started saying, hey, this stuff is super light and super insulating. Works good as a shock absorber. We can use it in various parts to make them lighter. So let's get going with it. Yeah. The thing is, I guess it's part of the extrusion process. It essentially is only made in board form, long boards.

Finish boards, right? Kind of like it looks like drywall, but it's foam. If you've ever been to a do-it-yourself hardware store and they have like big rectangles of foam, that is Styrofoam. It might not be Styrofoam brand, but it's that exact same thing, right? And there's not that many uses to it, but the stuff it does do, like –

block out heat, insulate is another word for it. It does really, really well, right? So the XPS has like some limited applications. The EPS, the stuff we think of like the styrofoam cups and all that stuff, that has like limitless applications because you can take that stuff as part of the production process and push it into a mold and mold it into any shape you want.

And they definitely did that in the post-war era of prosperous, better living through chemistry. Styrofoam was a big star of that at first. Yeah. And, you know, you can probably name any sort of insulation product.

application that it was used for. Everything from, you know, ice cream containers, like, you know, when you go to taste all the ice cream and then finally settle on one. Those big coolers, those are lined with thick styrofoam. They used them for Christmas ornaments because they were super light and won't weigh down a tree. All kinds, again, of marine applications, you know, buoys, floating docks, in boats. Again, you can mold it however you want.

But the styrofoam coolers that you pick up at the gas station because you just have a hankering for cold beer and you're on the road, you want to drink and drive. Smart. Just kidding. But those that you see in the convenience store, those started popping up in the 1950s, but we didn't see the cups until the 1960s, right? Yeah. Apparently, Chick-fil-A was one of the first restaurants to adopt styrofoam cups for to-go stuff, right? Yeah.

That was in 1960, I think. Yeah, right on the nose from what, the Dart Manufacturing Company of Michigan? Yeah, so Dart Manufacturing got into this and they got into it so heavy that they actually ended up changing their name to Dart Container Corporation. They're one of the leading companies or leading producers of what you would consider styrofoam containers. Yeah.

So they were the ones that started producing this, started kind of getting it out there like, hey, you know how you don't like your customers sitting around taking an hour and a half to drink their Coke? Yeah. Buy one of our styrofoam cups. They'll just get right out of your hair and somebody else can come in and patronize your restaurant, right? So it caught on pretty quick. I think 7-Eleven was the first chain to actually start using styrofoam cups for coffee, which as we'll see was a bad idea right out of the gate. Yeah.

And by the 70s, it was like anywhere you went and got coffee, it came in a white box.

And again, I'm sorry, I realize I keep using the word styrofoam. You couldn't do any different than I am right now trying to talk about this. It's impossible. But they that just became the standard for this whole thing, like a styrofoam cup. That's what your coffee came in until Starbucks came along. Yeah. I mean, for decades, basically. And then Starbucks did lead the charge to sort of, you know, get rid of that. And then, you know, a bunch of people followed suit, thankfully.

But, you know, when fast food came along and takeout food got more popular, obviously that's going to grow, grow, grow the styrofoam business.

I'm very glad Livia included this because I would have if she wouldn't have, and you probably would have too. But if you grew up a kid in the 80s, then you remember the McDonald's McDLT. If you don't remember, I think we've mentioned it before, but the idea was they were like, hey, no one wants all this hot droopy lettuce and steamy tomatoes on their hamburgers. They want that stuff to be cold, and they want their burger to be hot, and they want to do it like you do at home is you add that stuff right before you put it in your mouth.

for the right mixture, and that's what the DLT was. It was not only an offending styrofoam container, but it was a double

Because you had one side that keeps the hot stuff hot and the cool side cool. That's right. And none other than Seinfeld's own Jason Alexander sang and danced in a TV commercial in the 80s extolling the virtues of the McDLT container itself. Yeah, wearing a skinny tie. I think he's wearing a blazer with the sleeves rolled up even maybe. Probably pushed up. Like he stinks of 1985. Yeah. Yeah.

The thing about the McDLT container, and yeah, if you don't know what we're talking about, just go look it up. Once you took the top off, you could actually close the bottoms together and...

Put your sandwich together like that using your styrofoam container. Oh, really? For those who were like really good at it. Yeah. See, I don't know. I never ate that because that wasn't my jam, but it seemed like it would just kind of not do a very great job of that. Yeah. No, a McDLT never passed my lips either because of the L and the T. Yeah.

But I have to say, one of the things that makes me really nostalgic from my childhood is looking at old Styrofoam McDonald's containers. Yeah. It's hard not to just see that yellow thing.

with all the M's all over it. Yeah. And not pine for it, but just, you know, just like nostalgia does. Definitely takes you back. What knocked me out is, as we'll see, it wasn't until 1990 that they stopped using those things. Yeah. And we'll get to, you know, how it's been sort of weeded out here and there, but it's still a booming industry. I think last year worldwide, there were 15.2 million total tons of polystyrene produced. Mm-hmm.

And about 60% of that is in the Asia-Pacific region. Apparently, it's a growing thing, but it's growing much slower in Europe and North America than it is in industrializing areas around the world. Right. Most of it goes in the packing industry. I think a third of it is used by packaging industry. Those packing peanuts were invented by a guy named Robert E. Holden back in 1965.

Household appliances uses another quarter of it. I didn't understand that. I think some of it is packing materials. You know, you have to pull all those boards of styrofoam out of your new refrigerator. Yeah, I think it's also in some of the units, like in a washer. Aren't there like big chunks of styrofoam? Is it just like air? Yeah. Take up airspace? Yeah.

I think that's part of it. And then also like in that same fridge, there's like around the dials and controls, they'll use some for insulation. They don't actually insulate the fridge with it because you can't create an airtight seal between two boards. But they do use it in other places in the fridge where you don't need an airtight seal.

Well, I think this is off to a capital start. Shall we take a break and let you take over? Sure. I think that's a capital idea. All right. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

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That's right. I'm a podcaster and I'm a proud cat dad myself. Beautiful. Here's the deal, everybody. Cats lose their cool. Treat a cat in your life to Temptations Treats and discover what makes cat dads irresistible at TemptationsTreats.com. Okay, Chuck, so we're back and you said that I would be taking over. And since I'm taking over, I'm in charge and I'm delegating it to you.

I can start this part, but you know when to come in because it's part of, you know, it's chemistry. And that's famously the only class I ever failed. I'm just fascinated by it. So, yeah, this works out just perfectly. That's great. If we're talking about styrene today, another name for it is vinyl benzene because it is a vinyl, as we'll see. It does not come from a plant like Eddie Simon used back in Germany in the 1830s.

The modern process starts with, you know, it comes from petroleum products these days, and specifically a couple called benzene and ethylene. They're combined with a catalyst called aluminum chloride to eventually produce ethylbenzene. You get that in a gas state, process it at a high temperature with another catalyst. It's a process called dehydrogenating. And finally, you have your styrene.

Yes. Styrene is C8H8. Lots of carbon, lots of hydrogen together. Yeah. And in that styrene molecule, there are carbon atoms that have a double bond between them. Right?

Right. Which means that they can share one. So when you take styrene, a monomer, and put a bunch of them together to create a polymer, one of those double bonds kind of opens up and connects to another one and another one and another one. It forms a carbon chain. Right. But if you look at the...

I don't know what it's called, but like the chemical drawing, you know, of like the molecule with the lines and the C's and the H's and everything. Yeah, I feel like in most movies that's rendered 3D so you can zoom it around and stuff. Right. This is more like the written out shorthand that I'm talking about. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I don't know what mine's called, but...

whatever that is for the polystyrene, if you look at it, it's a nice little carbon chain, but then there's these like medallions dangling off of them. Those are called phenyl groups. And because of those things, the, the polymers can't form a really nice crystalline structure. Right. Well,

Which means that it's see-through. It's not particularly thick. It's brittle, so it can break. And it's not flexible very much, right? And I was like, well, wait a minute. Crystal, you think about, is already see-through. But as far as chemistry goes, the more crystalline a structure is, the tighter the whole thing is put together. So the thicker and less see-through it is. So like steel...

has a very crystalline structure, even though, you know, I think rose quartz when I think of a crystalline structure, but that's wrong, wrong, wrong. Yeah.

See, that's why I'm not good at chemistry. It's not very intuitive, is it? No, but I mean, this is pretty late in life. It's not like I was a chemistry whiz in high school. I'm not even sure if I took a chemistry class in high school. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I got out of a lot of stuff. Never took trig. How'd you get out of that stuff? I had my ways. Oh, okay. I won't ask any further.

So again, if you take the stuff, this polystyrene, you don't have anything that even resembles a foam cup. You have like what looks like a bunch of pellets that if you mash together, you would again create a seedy jewel case because that's exactly what they do to create those. You have to go add a couple extra steps to create polystyrene foam. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we said that that stuff was prone to cracking and very breakable if you came about in the seedy jewel case era. Yeah.

Red Solo cups, too, are also the same thing. But you know those CD jewel cases, if you had one long enough, it was going to have a crack in it. Oh, yeah. Just impossible. And then you had to throw out the entire thing. No, no, no, no. It was almost a badge of honor. Like, look how long I've had this thing. You can't even see through it anymore. It's cracked all over the place. You can't even see Billy Joel's face. Right. By the way, well, I think we'll just follow up with the Billy Joel listener mail. But he announced he has a...

in medical condition and he's canceling his tour for now. So it was very sad to see. Oh, man. What did you do, Chuck? Kind of right after we talked about him. I know. Jinx? Hopefully he'll be okay, though. But anyway. I'm sure he will be. So these XPS boards that we keep talking about, the capital S styrofoam that's used in insulation and stuff like that, how they make that is they melt those little beads that you were talking about, those little granules,

add chemicals, one of which is a blowing agent, and then they force that thing through a die, as in a D-I-E, as in like die cast metal kind of thing. Right, right.

And then they're constantly pushing that stuff through and it's melting it and pressing it together. And that final product, those boards of polystyrene are really smooth. They're really thick. They're not very, they just look really uniform. And the reason why is because all of those cells, all those polystyrene foam pellets that you use in a beanbag chair, they get pressed together so tightly with so much pressure and heat that there's no space between them basically. Yeah.

With expanded polystyrene, the stuff that you make cups and containers out of, it's slightly different. You take those same pellets, and like you said, there's a blowing agent in there. Both kinds have a blowing agent, but they use different ones. And the blowing agent is this kind of gas that...

is put into in little tiny bubbles into the little polystyrene foam pellets. That's what makes it foamy. But if you take those same pellets and you expose them to steam, they swell up because that blowing agent suddenly boils and vaporizes at very low temperatures.

And the pellets expand to like 40 times their size and they melt together very easily. And what you have now is essentially the raw material for expanded polystyrene. That's why they call it expanded, which you can make everything from a coffee cup to vintage Santa Claus door ornament face.

Yeah, exactly. Do you remember those? Oh, totally. I mean, that's another nostalgic thing. I think you can get them still on like eBay. There's a lot of...

Nostalgia around styrofoam, if you kind of really think about it, if you're a Gen Xer. But that, I mean, that goes to show just how, what a huge part it was of 20th century life. It really was. Yeah, for sure. So we mentioned, you know, those boards are really great at insulating, which is why they use it in like siding sometimes and stuff like that or in ice cream coolers. Yeah.

One reason is because it is water-resistant. If you have an insulating material that has moisture in it, that's no good because water conducts heat really well. So that's one good thing. But they do degrade over time. The board, you know, that blowing agent will leak out of those cells a little bit over time, so it's a little less insulating. And while it is water-resistant, it's not completely water-resistant. So when it does degrade,

not resist a little bit of water. It has a really, AKA absorption, it has a really hard time getting rid of it again. So that just kind of knocks it down over time. But even considering depletion, it still has a really good thermal resistance and is still a really good insulator. Yeah, it's like twice as, twice as,

good, I guess, than that rollout insulation that you can buy. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned early on, you know, they used to put like foot thick cork walls in like industrial refrigerators and stuff, and they could get that down to like two inches of styrofoam. So it was really useful. I don't know if we said this too, it's like really, really cheap to manufacture as well. Yeah, super cheap. And so it sounds like just this wonder product that's everything about it is great.

But here's where it goes dark. Here's where the VH1 behind the music is probably like 35, 40 minutes into the VH1. Right before the commercial break, they'll say, and that's when things got dark. Because, of course, styrene is dangerous. Yeah.

If you're just talking about health problems, central nervous system problems, headaches, depression, fatigue, obviously, if you're breathing this stuff in, it's no good. It's no good for your skin and your eyes. And you might think, well, what's the big deal? Because we're not breathing that stuff in. But if you work at one of these places that manufactures it, you totally are.

Yeah, and they've followed people who work in styrene plants and found that the neurotoxicity makes them kind of dull and a little dippy, kind of like you're drunk and your reaction times are slower. And we're talking styrene itself, the monomer that's the basis of polystyrene foam, right? Yeah. It's been shown to cause birth defects, reproductive defects, cancer. Like you said, it's a bad jam.

So polystyrene seems to be not nearly as dangerous. The problem is the way that we make polystyrene, there's still styrene that can break off essentially from the polymer and float around and get into your body. And that's no good. Yeah, I think they've, since the mid 80s, they've found styrene in samples of human fat tissue. Of course, the public health

Organizations are saying like they do with everything like that, like it's not enough to really worry about it.

Everyone's got a little styrene in their fat. Don't sweat it. But in 2018, it was bad enough as a potential carcinogen that the World Health Organization raised it from possible carcinogen to probable carcinogen. And I imagine it won't be long until they're just like, can we all just admit it's a carcinogen? Yeah, I'm sure that the polystyrene companies are fighting that last one tooth and nail. Yeah.

So we should say that most of the studies that have shown, like, styrene's bad for you, like we said, looked at workers who work around styrene. And we don't work around styrene. We're just podcasters. You probably don't work around styrene either. So like you said, it's not like they're not clutching their pearls over this or whatever. But it does seem like this thing where the more that we look at it, the more problems we find from it, and the more we come to understand that actually styrene

there's probably more exposure to styrene than we thought. Like, if you look across the board, everyone will tell you, anyone who knows anything about polystyrene, I should say, will say, do not microwave your

polystyrene to-go container. Yeah. Ever. Never. Just don't ever do it. Because they found that that polystyrene can leach styrene into your food and you eat that stuff. You don't want to do that. And there's even types of containers, polystyrene containers, that have like three little wavy lines and says microwave safe or microwavable or something like that.

And those supposedly you can microwave your food with. No, because what that refers to is the container will survive it. It has nothing to do with whether or not there's going to be chemicals leaching into your food. They're just saying this container won't melt in your microwave. That's it. So never, ever, ever do that. Just take the extra step of dumping it onto a plate for Pete's sake. Yeah, for sure. And, you know,

especially hot things, especially acidic things like, oh, I don't know, hot coffee. They found that, you know, that stuff can leach into your body as styrene. Yeah, I think they said that it starts leaching out at about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Celsius, not that hot. Yeah, and it's used specifically to keep liquids and foods hot, I guess, or cold, but, you know, but hot is the problem. Yeah, yeah, I think it still can leach out.

when it's even cool or room temperature, but heat is where it really starts to jack up. Yeah. So, hey, if you get a salad and it's in one of those stupid things, put that in a nice ceramic bowl as well. Put it in a solo cup. No. There's a bunch of other impacts that it has specifically environmentally. Should we break?

Are we going to break? Okay. I feel like that's a third act sort of thing. Okay. Well, man, I'm glad you caught me because I was about to take off. All right. You're grounded. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

Hey, everybody. We want to let you know about the Temptations brand, America's number one cat treat brand, because they are on a mission to show the world just how irresistible cat dads truly are and make 2025 the year of the cat dad. Not a bad year, because cat dads are some of the most tempting, caring, and compassionate men of all. And two out of three Gen Z adults believe that cat dads make better bows, too.

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Visit WashableSofas.com today and save. That's WashableSofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. All right. Since I rudely cut Josh off when he was trying to talk about, or Joff. That's a good new name. G-E-O-F-F? Your favorite spelling of Jeff. Yeah. But you have to say it like Joff. If you're going to go to the trouble of spelling Jeff like Joff, you should say Joff.

Anyway, I cut off Joff when he started to get hot on the environment. And so I'm gonna let you take it away because the environmental disaster is basically into three categories, right?

Yeah, air pollution, threats to marine life, and then solid waste. Those are the big three environmental impacts we found that it poses. Yeah, the air pollution, you might be thinking like, well, I don't get it. Like, it's just blowing into the air. It's in the manufacturing process. Those blowing agents that we talked about used in making both EPS and XPS, for decades and decades, they were using CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons.

And then everyone's like, no, we can't use that stuff anymore. So we stopped using that stuff. And they switched over to hydrofluorocarbons. In this case, specifically HFC-134 little a. But that stuff's awful, too.

Yeah, it's a really powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat 1,430 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Man. That's a lot. They have other stuff that's way worse than that, but that's still not good, especially considering how much styrofoam is made every year, right? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. But so that's a problem with the extruded version. Apparently the expanded version, it doesn't have nearly the same problem because it uses a different blowing agent. The,

Best reason I could come up with, and this is all supposition, is that the extruded version keeps its blowing agent trapped into its structure. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that's why it uses a different one than the expanded one. The expanded one, when its blowing agent vaporizes, it creates, I guess, essentially pockets that get filled with air. So the blowing agent gets replaced with air. So they use a much less dangerous method.

or potent greenhouse gas-wise gas, pentane, it's like 10 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. So, you know, big whoop. So the big problem as far as air pollution goes is with the expanded version, the styrofoam version. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned threats to marine life. That's a pretty obvious one because it's used so much out there.

Buoys, again, and like any like boogie board or kind of floaty thing that you're using. Floating docks that I mentioned a few times. Fish boxes that hold the fish that you catch when you're out at sea. Isn't that the same thing as that 1957 ice cooler? Yeah, sometimes. That's a good point. But the problem with all this stuff is that when a buoy is floating out there that's made of styrofoam or there's a floating dock,

it's not going to stay pristine. You know, it's going to chip away and it's going to degrade and it's going to start to float away in little bitty pieces. Birds are coming along and eating that stuff when it's floating on top. It'll get heavier as it goes. It'll attract other organisms that make it, you know,

not floatable. Right. And it will sink. And then all of a sudden it's eaten in the water and on the bottom of the seafloor by other marine animals. Yes. And the reason why it starts to break down, like say if it's part of your marina dock, is because it's exposed to sunlight. And UV radiation of different types break down polystyrene, actually can break it down within a few years, as a matter of fact, when it's exposed to sunlight.

The problem is, is a bunch of that stuff never gets exposed to sunlight. We throw it away and it gets buried in a landfill. And there are plenty of other, you know, types of waste that are not great to throw into a landfill, but they're biodegradable.

As far as we've known until very recently, styrofoam is not biodegradable. It's only chemically degradable. And it takes centuries for it to chemically degrade within a landfill. And because they're so big and bulky, even though they're very light, they're still usually in large shapes.

Or they can be. They take up a lot of space in those landfills. So they take up a lot of space and they don't break down to free up space for, again, centuries, which someone pointed out, I believe, that essentially every piece of styrofoam that was ever made is still around in some shape or form on Earth. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's not the kind of like staying power that should inspire you. Right. Well, the thing something that stuck out to me, Chuck, when you said earlier about how they're derived from petrol, petrochemicals. The fact that styrene is found in petrochemicals.

Petroleum is compressed ancient plant matter, right? Yeah. So that styrene that was originally in plants is still around millions and millions of years later in the petroleum that we're extracting from the ground. That just goes to show you the kind of staying power that thing has. Yeah. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. Because of all these problems, of course, there's been many movements over the years to get rid of it.

It depends on the state you live in, probably, or maybe even the community that you live in, what kinds of bands have been put into place. I think Berkeley, California, no surprise. And Suffolk County, New York, again, no surprise. We're the first communities in the 1980s to put a band in place for this stuff. Yeah. 14 different states have enacted bans on styrofoam.

They don't always hold up because, of course, you've got these companies that are going to fight them tooth and nail, like you said, fight them in court. You've also got city governments that aren't necessarily going to enforce stuff too, right? Yeah, they tend to be very shy about getting sued, especially when their budgets are kind of tight, right? So if you're a big, bad plastic company, apparently Dark Container is one of the more aggressive players in lobbying for Styrofoam to stick around.

All you have to do is show up and be like, you know, we would hate to sue you guys into bankruptcy. This seems like a really nice town. And the city is going to be like, I don't even remember the styrofoam ban you're talking about. Yeah. Or we'd hate to close down these warehouses that employ people in your state. Right. Which is what they did in Maryland. They Maryland banned the foam and the dark container company shut down two warehouses. They're employed close to 100 workers.

And that is how they play that game. Yeah, they did it in California, too, in 2024. They put 175 of their workers out of work and they always say, well, it's because of this ban. What I understand, these bans don't affect like warehousing or transportation of this stuff within the state or outside of the state. It just seems like it's a vindictive move.

It probably helps her bottom line, I would imagine, in some way. I guess. I don't know. But from what I understand, the aggressive lobbying that they engage in, I don't know. It seems like, I mean, they really want Styrofoam to stick around and they're fighting a tougher and tougher battle each year now. Yeah, I think what I meant was I bet they're not financially hurting their company by shuttering these warehouses. No, I'm sure not. I'm sure.

I'm sure not. I'm sure even if they do, it's negligible, you know, to punish a state into submission. There's also pressure campaigns. You know, McDonald's is one of the early ones in the 1980s. And I guess if they quit it in the 90s, it was kind of fully in the 80s when people like human beings would, you know, protest or just sort of raise a ruckus over this stuff. And they got together and there were a few tries at like, hey, you know,

You shouldn't worry about it too much because we do it this way. We only use this much. They really want to hang on to them. But finally, like you mentioned, in 1990, they said, all right, we'll use paper. And, you know, you should be housing that cheeseburger the second it gets into your car anyway, right? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, just tell them to put it in your hands without even a paper wrapper. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you've got to get it and you can't eat it in your car and you have to carry it somewhere, it's not going to be as hot, but –

I don't know. I mean, housing fast food in the car is a rich tradition that needs to be upheld. For sure. Ever since there were cars and ever since there were fast food. Yeah. How else are you going to find, you know, three-year-old french fries under your car seat when you vacuum it? They look exactly the same as they did the day they got down there. They don't taste quite the same, but they do look like it, don't they? Yeah.

So a lot of people say, OK, well, we got all this polystyrene and it does provide a lot of benefits, even though it seems like the health and environmental benefits are kind of racking up against it. Maybe there's something we can do to recycle it instead. And kind of at the outset, you were pointing out just how hard it is to recycle this stuff.

And one reason why it's so hard is because these are big, oftentimes bulky items, especially when you put a bunch of stuff. I mean, you can attest if Emily's collecting this stuff. It's a nightmare. Yeah. It takes up a lot of space, even though it's all light. You could lift all of it with one hand, but it takes up a lot of space. Right. So if you have a truck that is spending a bunch of money on gas to haul recyclables to a recycling center and then they get paid for that load in return.

That styrofoam, I mean, they get paid by the pound. So that styrofoam takes up a whole truck, but it does not add up to a lot of money. So no one wants to haul this stuff.

That's one problem. And that problem also belies a pro-styrofoam argument that you'll frequently run into. And that is that it has a small carbon footprint because it's so light, it takes so little gas and fuel of all kinds to transport it by ocean rail truck. The problem is, is you still have that bulky thing. So you actually are probably...

hiring more transportation to move styrofoam stuff because, yeah, it's light, but it takes up a lot of space in the truck. So I think that that's kind of a disingenuous argument in favor of styrofoam. I think you're probably right.

Another problem with recycling it is a lot of the foams will have pigments in them. They might be colored or they may have flame retardants that make it not as or completely unrecyclable, along with food contamination.

And then, like I mentioned at the beginning, just the cost of this, it's pretty cheap to make. So there's not a lot of incentives for a company to try and recycle it. There's a little more promise in upcycling it by breaking it down into its various chemical constituents, some of which have some pretty high value. But as far as recycling, it just doesn't make a lot of cost-effective sense for a company or a recycling firm.

Right. I was reading a JSTOR Daily article on this, and they profiled a company in Oregon called Agilix, and they upcycle styrofoam into polymers.

again, they turn it back into crude oil, which can in turn be used for like jet fuel and other like really high quality fuels. But that they're definitely not, they're in the minority as far as recycling companies go. Yeah, for sure. Another thing, if you're, you know, into helping the environment and recycling and stuff like that, don't, don't be fooled just because you see the little chasing arrows recycling symbol, because that is on so many things. You have to look at the number of,

and then know what that number means. And, you know, you can look all that stuff up, but ones and twos are generally all

Although not entirely consistently recycled, they have the best chance at being recycled. But something with a number six on it, it's probably not being recycled. No, that's polystyrene's number. And it, I mean, for all the reasons we just said, it, like you said, it's probably not being recycled. And apparently some environmentalists say that whole chasing arrows application for the plastics, right?

was basically made up by plastic companies to make you feel like, oh, okay, this thing can be recycled. I don't have to feel bad about using it for two minutes and then throwing it away. Yeah.

So there are, like I said, up until very recently, styrofoam was considered to be non-biodegradable. And there are not many things, including plastics, that are not biodegradable, right? They're starting to find that there are some microbes out there that have an ability to break it down. Apparently, they're found in the guts of mealworms, waxworms, some kinds of insect larvae. And that these things will feed on...

styrofoam and they will break it down so thoroughly that you could actually eat these worms afterwards. It's just metabolized into harmless stuff. And even the solid waste they excrete, you just keep it in the soil and eat food grown from the soil. The problem is, is this is a really new kind of revelation as far as I know. And it takes a lot of those things to break down styrofoam. And we're making way more styrofoam than these worms can possibly handle.

Yeah, for sure. The size of that worm farm would be tremendously large. But you did fine. I mean, boy, you texted me yesterday.

that something can actually melt styrofoam. I'm going to let you say what it is. But my question, my friend, is does that, is there an application for that or is that just a factoid? This is something you can do. Like if you, I hate packing peanuts. And so I've done this before with them, but it's a slog. So probably people aren't going to actually do it. But any organic solvent and in particular acetone, that's the one I've always used, can dissolve styrofoam into basically nothing.

You can take an entire beanbag chair worth of pellets and melt it all down into nothingness in a cup of acetone. It's really neat to see. And just like very slowly adding it in. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Little by little. But it doesn't take very long for it to break down. It's not like...

instantly dissolving, but it's not, you know, days or anything like that either. And doesn't that create probably some awful thing? I mean, you don't want to chase that down out of the Solo Cup, right? No, I still have that mason jar of acetone with styrofoam in it because I have no idea what to do with it now. I think you just bury it in the backyard and forget about it. I'll just drop it off at a number six recycling center. Oh, great.

You got anything else about styrofoam? I got nothing else. Try and avoid it if you can. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Since Chuck told you to avoid styrofoam, obviously, everybody, that means it's time for Listener Mail. That's right. Promise to Billy Joel. And here we go from Levi in Hangzhou, China.

was giving me a little bit of a break when I bagged on one of my favorite performer songs, We Didn't Start the Fire. He said, Chuck, you're in good company because Billy Joel himself has called We Didn't Start the Fire the worst musical thing I've ever written, calling out the simplicity of its musical structure. Someone who has only recently gotten into his music, but has personally ranked all of his 117 studio recordings. Wow.

You went hard. I tend to agree. Fun song, but it doesn't hold a candle to the rest of the catalog. As for his best and favorite, he cited Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. Great song. And You May Be Right. I know that one. Great song, off of Glass Houses. Okay. It's two of his favorites. And if Josh hasn't heard Miami 2017, the one you mentioned, make sure he starts with the live version from the Songs in the Attic album. Miles better than the studio version, in my opinion.

Keep reppin the piano man and that is Levi and Hangzoo China and he sent a link to the YouTube of the Howard Stern appearance where Billy Joel called that his worst musical outing and He was like the lyrics are fine. He said I don't hate the song, but he just said musically. It's just very simplistic and Not my best work. Hmm

I mean, I think everybody can basically agree that. Yeah. But, Mr. Joel, we wish you good health and recovery. You got a lot of fans thinking about you and your family right now. Yeah. That's great, Chuck. I think that this Billy Joel saga should just continue. Every third, fourth, fifth listener mail should be about Billy Joel, I think. I hope so. And, you know, I didn't even mention the deep cuts. So maybe we'll just surprise people here and there with those. Yeah. Just pay them out slowly, man. Patience. Yeah.

If you want to be like Levi and you're in China or anywhere else and want to get in touch with us about Billy Joel or anything else, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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