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Part One:
We discuss recycling with Nicole Javorsky, an editorial fellow at The Atlantic magazine’s Citylab project. Since early 2018 when China adopted a new policy called National Sword, we have experienced something of a crisis for recycling in American municipalities. China now bans many scrap materials unless they meet extremely *strict contamination standards* (a maximum of 0.5% contamination rate, compared to the 25% rate for U.S. recyclables before sorting). National Sword reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its own domestic waste. What will the U.S. do, now that it can’t rely on China as the destination for 40% of our paper, plastics, and other recyclables?
Part Two:
We check in again with Steffen Schmidt, Professor of Political Science at Iowa State University, about the latest developments in politics, including:
— possible problems that might be created by the large number of candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination;
— the current status of the race to become one of the candidates who will appear in *the debates* where they will have a chance to pitch their policies and political philosophies to the American voters;
— the idea that a voter, at this early stage of the 2020 campaign, might want to think about *dividing up the money they’ll contribute among a group of candidates, rather than giving it all to one candidate;
— the outrageous way that Pres. Trump and Fox News bias their discussion of immigration issues, spewing out vile words and accusations, unwarranted implications, and so-called “facts” that are absolutely untrue. They stereotype entire groups without considering each person as an individual; and
— Stacey Abrams’s eloquent paean to identity politics, celebrating all the vibrancy, creativity, excitement and “spice” that we get to enjoy when our neighbors share their different cultures, their experiences, their food, and their perspective on life, rather than all of us being assimilated into one homogeneous soup of sameness.
