Earth Day Is Every Day. How SWACO and Columbus Partner For A Sustainable Tomorrow

Earth Day is a lot more than a feel-good day when you remember one uncomfortable fact: our trash moves. What starts as litter on a Columbus street or a bottle in a storm drain can end up far downstream, as in the Gulf of Mexico!  That’s why the choices we make at home matter at a city scale. For Earth Month, we sit down with City of Columbus leaders Kelly Scocco and Tim Swauger to talk about what “Our Power, Our Planet” looks like when you’re responsible for real-world waste, recycling, and neighborhood cleanliness.

Hanna and Joe dig into the practical side of waste reduction and why the best recycling program starts before you ever open the cart. You’ll hear how Columbus pushes reduce and reuse efforts first and how consistent rules across our region make participation easier.   We also talk honestly about population growth, the pressure it puts on collection systems, and why protecting landfill capacity is a long-term sustainability issue, not just a budgeting problem.

Then we get into the exciting news: SWACO and the city have partnered to open Franklin County’s only class two composting facility.  This creates a local home for food waste drop-off and a tangible circular economy win as organics become usable compost in about a month.

We also spotlight Keep Columbus Beautiful, the year-round initiative organizing cleanups, school outreach, and diversion efforts that help residents take action every day.

Don't forget to subscribe and share this with a friend who wants to live more sustainably, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome to Waste Dead. A waste and recycling podcast by Swaco. Happy Earth Month, and welcome to Waste Ed. If we're especially upbeat for this episode, it's because we're talking Earth Day, which is all about protecting our beautiful planet for future generations. Something that's close to the hearts of parents everywhere.

What Earth Day Means

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Absolutely, Hannah. And you know, being parents ourselves, you know, we're doing everything we can as parents to make sure that the earth is in a better place for them than we inherited. So not that our parents did a bad job, but we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can for the next generation. And today we're joined by two partners, and I will say friends, who are joining us, both from the City of Columbus. Director of Public Service, Kelly Scottco, and Division of Refuge Administrator Tim Swagger. Director and Tim, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you. Thank you. Let's kick things off and fill in the blank here. Complete this sentence. It found sound like we're in school again.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Earth Day to me means, Tim, to me, I I picture back when a few weeks ago we orbited the moon. And as they show that picture of the earth as they come back, that makes you think about Earth and Earth Day and how we're all connected and how what we do here matters everywhere, and what they do matters to us. There's there's studies that show like trash from Columbus, Ohio that gets into the waterways ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. So how we treat the earth here in Columbus, Ohio matters to other places, and how other places treat their earth matters to us. We're all interconnected, and that picture of the earth coming around there kind of reminds you of that. And that's what Earth Day is.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Well, I look at it like a global birthday, I suppose. You know, it's our one day to pause and really think about how beautiful and really give gratitude for how beautiful this earth is and the green trees and all the beautifulness around it.

SPEAKER_03 2:11

Yeah, and and I just returned from a trip with uh my wife and spent a little time. There was a big lake out in uh behind our lodge that we stayed at. And I got up one morning and it was a little chilly, so there was steam on the lake, and you just don't relax enough in life to notice those things. And I thought that was pretty darn cool. So um that that's what it meant to me. And it was actually on uh day that we couldn't get out, but we could just sit there and watch the water and just kind of hang out. So yeah, it's kind of what it means to me.

Childhood Earth Day Memories

SPEAKER_01 2:45

I love that. And I love thinking about it as a global birthday. That's such a great way to kind of pause and reflect on it. Do either of you have a special memory from an Earth Day where you celebrated in a way that was really meaningful?

SPEAKER_02 2:57

When I think about my first memories of like Earth Day and really recognizing, you know, what Earth Day means, which is, you know, taking that pause and appreciating the fact that the planet might not, you know, be as healthy as we really think it is. I'm gonna show my age a little bit. And I uh I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I remember wearing this t-shirt from Hallmark. It was actually a sweatshirt, and it said, save the world, we may need it later. And there started to be this was long before, you know, um the inconvenient truth came out and started really showing the evidence. I mean, this was just, you know, we've got a hole in our ozone, and this is a problem, and what are we going to do about it? And I really think it was all of that aqua net from the hair in the 80s that was not doing us any favors with that ozone hole. Um, but you know, like even as of late in the 1980s, you know, growing up in southeastern Ohio, right outside of Marietta, I think about it. My parents, I lived in town. They had a burning barrel in our alley.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Yeah, we did too.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

They were burning trash in the 1980s, you know, all that that waste going up into the sky. There wonder we were eaten into our ozone hole. So I think that that recognition there in the late 80s and the 90s that, hey, we've we've got to start really paying attention to this, that we've got a problem here. I think it was really important.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

For myself, uh, it goes back to when I was in fifth grade again, my age. I'm in early 80s there. Uh in fifth grade, we went to, it was called Camp Tampel, which was the Trumbull Area Multipurpose Uh Educational Earth Educational Laboratory. And it was run by the ESC, and they uh would take you to there twice a year in fifth grade. Every school in Trumbull County area went to that, and you'd go learn about the earth and butterflies and all those types of things. But the one thing we did do is you'd go in the fall and you would have lunch there, and you would bury your lunch scraps when you were done. Oh, and then you'd go back in the spring and they'd have you dig them up to see what it was, and then they'd teach you how composting and all that worked. Okay. So back in the early 80s, uh, I that was my first real experience with Earth Day, Earth Week. We would go in the spring, and that's when we dug up what we had not completed, or you know, your scraps from your fall meal.

unknown 5:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Was it a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Uh mine was a banana peanut. They they actually made sure we brought something that kind of was organic with information that you could dispose of. So yes. But they even we'd even bury like bones from, you know, like uh if you if somebody bought brought like a piece of meat that had a bone in it, they'd bury that and show you what it looked like. So kid. Uh back in fifth grade. So unfortunately that I did look up that place closed in 2004 due to budget cuts. But uh that's how uh everyone in Trumbull County learned about Earth Day.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Oh wow. Well, this year's Earth Day theme is Our Power, Our Planet. It focuses on renewable energy, redo reducing plastic waste, and promoting sustainable lifestyles. You and we do those things every day. Tell us a little bit about how Columbus invests in these areas.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

So on reducing waste, we work every day on reducing waste. Uh there's a lot of different ways we're doing that, obviously, education. Uh one of the big things we're working on is trying to get people to, when they consume things, think about the amount of waste that that produces. So when you're buying things, buy right size what you buy, the meal, just because it's, you know, five for whatever, if you buy five of them, if you end up throwing three of them away, you didn't really get a bargain there and you created extra waste. Type those types of consumer uh waste type things that we're working on because we're we're dealing with a growing uh population of growing waste. So we're really trying to look at reducing just how much waste and and different ways to get rid of that waste. Uh and then a lot of that is in partnership with you guys here at Sueco. We do a lot of partnering with you guys on on different programs and different areas where we've set up uh educational, we've done the door-to-door, we've done the the cart tagging, things like that way where we're really trying to get folks to understand the value of it's reduce, reuse, recycle.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

And and everyone goes to recycle. And we really want to talk to people about reduce, reduce your footprint, reuse what you can, and if you can't do either of those, recycle. So it's really just working on that educational side to me is getting people to understand that recycling is we love to recycle in Columbus, but it's actually our last option. It's reduce and reuse before that and and kind of pushing that messaging.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

But I think on the recycling side of things, we are making big strides in Columbus. Uh a couple of years ago, we went from bi-weekly to weekly recycling and really supporting, you know, folks not, you know, those blue cans are starting to fill up, you know, after week one as people are starting to dump stuff into the the green can because they have no room left. You know, so that weekly recycling really helped that impact. Tim, did we and we've increased our recycling quite a bit from that weekly recycling move, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Yeah, we're up around 20% as a result of that uh in the total tonnage, which is even more impressive because the plastics have gotten thinner. So when we talk about waste and recycling, the tonnages tell the story, right? Because that but it's actually volume because when we really talk about the landfill and what goes to the landfill, it's not just tonnage. It used to be when we talked household hazardous waste or or just household waste. But when we talk about recycling, uh the fact that we've increased our total tonnage by 20% means we've even increased the volume greater because if you ever had a water bottle 10 years ago, it was nice and firm. Now they barely stand up on their own. Uh that's because the plastics are thinner. So when we recycle all of that, it's a thinner plastic, which is great. We're not complaining about it, but we also recognize that tonnage cannot increase won't increase as much as you think sometimes, but the volume of space that you would have taken up at the landfill is even greater than the tonnage increase.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

Yeah, and Tim, you had on a good point earlier talking about the education and just making people aware. I know, you know, m decades ago, um, there were different messages coming from different organizations. And I think we've done a good job as partners to keep that same message of what's recyclable, what's not, reducing your waste as opposed to just buying everything that you can. So, you know, I think that has changed a lot over the decades, um, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Well, and and to speak to for the Swaco side of it, for us, what you guys have done as a regional authority has helped standardize. So no matter where you live at in the region, everything is the same for recyclability. Uh, prior to you guys taking the lead on that, that wasn't always the case. If you move from one community to another, they might have had different materials that could have been recycled. The fact that we've now standardized that through your guys' contracts and working with us, that's helped tremendously. Uh just for the, you know, because we have population that moves in and out of different suburbs in the city of Columbus. And to be successful in this, we have to make it easy. Recycling is all about making it easy for people.

New Composting Facility Opens

SPEAKER_03 9:59

We are also celebrating something on this episode. Uh Swaco and the city have partnered again to open up Franklin County's only class two composting facility. Uh, let's spend a little time talking about that. Um, what is it? Where is it? What can be dropped off there, and what makes this facility different?

SPEAKER_00 10:20

You know what it is, you guys are very well aware, but we are excited for it. Uh uh the fact that we're gonna have a location in the city limits that we can drop food waste off that we're currently uh collecting and through our drop-off locations and transporting counties away will now be able to be used right here in Franklin County and donated back. Uh, it's gonna be located at 2100 Alum Creek Drive at our convenience center. Uh, for those that may not be aware of what the convenience center is, it's a uh one of two that we have. The other is at Georgesville Road, uh, that residents uh can come in and drop off items of all sorts. And uh, director, if you want to go into some of what can be dropped off there and all the different types, that'd be fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

Well, yes, uh the convenience stores our convenience centers are super convenient. Uh my husband uses it quite frequently um to drop off big boxes. You know, if you get something at the house and there's a huge box, and you're like, well, this isn't gonna fit in my recycling container. Um, or if you're cleaning out your basement and saying, Well, man, I really don't want to throw all this stuff in the trash. Or if there's something that you needed to call bulk and you know you don't want to wait for the bulk pickup and you want to get rid of it immediately, uh, these convenience centers are wonderful options for the residents here in Columbus. Um, one in on the west side near Georgesville, and then of course at 2100 Alum Creek Drive. And you can take nearly everything for residents that consumers use, all recyclables, paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, metal, anything currently accepted, you know, curbside, electronics. We accept all sorts of electronics, furniture, yard waste, that's a big one. If you miss your yard waste day and think, oh, this only comes every other Tuesday, and I thought it was this week, and it's actually next week, you can take your yard waste before it gets all rained on and destroyed. Um, styrofoam, that's a big one. You know, that is a big one. And then, of course, food waste.

SPEAKER_03 12:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

And they're completely free to use for residents? Completely free.

SPEAKER_03 12:26

That's great. And and, you know, going back to the compost facility, um, you know, we're we're purchasing the equipment from a Green Mountains technology company that's manufactured right here in Ohio, and it's pretty simplistic if you think about it. It's basically uh a shipping container with an auger in the middle, and it just grinds up the food waste and any of the other organics that we put in there. And eventually, within 30 days, I believe, you you're gonna have a soil conditioner or a compost uh material that can be used in in gardens and in some of our community gardens around the city. Um, you know, the new facility was really part of our overall green print uh initiative here at Swaco. Um, you know, we came out with that about a year ago. We wanted to focus on three big goals uh to reimagine our current programs, uh any emerging opportunities, and then new technology and infrastructure. So we're we're pretty excited about it. Um I know you guys are pretty excited about it because now you have an outlet that with a partner um that you can put your food waste in. So we we do appreciate A for letting us use your land uh to put that on there, and two for being such a great partner with that.

How Behavior Change Really Happens

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Something else that is pretty cool about the new Green Mountain Technologies, too, is this idea of circular economy. We talk a lot about this. So just thinking about the circularity of turning that food scrap into something beneficial for our community is just um so exciting. And so, Administrator Swagger, I have a follow-up question for you. Columbus residents are increasing their recycling and composting. We just talked a little bit about that. Uh, what messaging and initiatives are working to drive these changes among families and residents?

SPEAKER_00 14:14

It's actually different messaging for different uh demographics, uh, age group, uh economical, uh, all types of things. So you have to what we've learned is we have to uh standardize our message to the to that focus group that we want. But we see when students come out of OSU or their large population that stack stays in our area or move to the off-campus uh uh region, they've uh uh learned a certain level of recycling and food waste on campus. So it's important for us to continue that. So we're working with them to make sure that, hey, if you're gonna stick around Columbus, uh, this is what we expect of you as as residents and as good citizens. So we want to catch them there. We also recognize that uh in the the elementary schools, and I've I've told this story to a few other folks, that my father-in-law used to never recycle. I would get on him and say, Look, I'm in charge of recycling. I need you to recycle. And he he still wouldn't recycle. My son was 10 years old at the time, went over there and said, Papa, where's your recycling bin? Oh a week later, he has a recycling bin. And to me, that just shows you have to get the youth to get involved. And and and some of your other folks that may not be driven, they know it's the right thing, and when they see their kids doing it, then they want to support their kids in that type of thing. So that's another angle of messaging that we we go after as well. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Kids are great ambassadors.

SPEAKER_03 15:36

They are, they're great ambassadors. And I always say they shame you into doing things. So they're very persistent.

Recycled Materials In Street Work

SPEAKER_01 15:41

They can be. Well, last month, uh Joe and I had the pleasure of chatting with a local asphalt company who shared that they are using recycled asphalt to lay new streets in Columbus. In fact, I think you guys made that introduction for us, and we really appreciated meeting with the team at RAP. Um, it was very cool to learn about that. But what are some other ways the city uses recycled materials in various projects?

SPEAKER_02 16:01

As you said, with uh RAP management, that's a that's a big one, right? Yeah. Uh we are that's a new technology. That company is one of the only companies in America doing that high of asphalt, like that percentage. And there's a whole lot of engineering and science that goes into asphalt paving and how much you know can be virgin materials and to get the the binding that you need in order to um, you know, have that pavement really last. Uh they started when they built their company um here in Columbus and they built their their factories, they started in parking lots because parking lots they don't get as much traffic. But in order to put them on a roadway, you know, and use that recycled asphalt on a roadway that gets 20,000 cars a day, we have to have a lot of confidence that it's going to last. So um I'm really glad you went and talked to those folks. That what they're doing is really special. Uh, we're trying to do some other stuff here at the department ourselves. We recently got a grant for, what is it, a tromble that we can, you know, when we're out there doing, you know, potholes and, you know, getting that old crappy pavement out of there, and we can run it through the trauma and we're able to, you know, if we're in an alley and we're doing uh, you know, the repaving of the alley, a lot of times because of how we do it, we put down a lot of gravel. If you've recently in the last several years had your alley repaved, you will see a lot of gravel out there. And we can sweep up that extra gravel. But when we're sweeping up that extra gravel, we're getting some other material that we don't really necessarily want to reuse. So we can run it through that trauma and not have to, you know, go buy all that gravel every single time. It's a nice way to reuse that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:42

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna take my time on this next question because I want you to think about this. Because part of each of your jobs as a community leader is always to be thinking about what is next, what's the next thing? So here's a question for both of you What recycled materials could be used in municipal projects in the next five to ten years?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

For our side, Joe, we're constantly looking at we know plastics are continuing to be used and and that that growth is going. So we're always looking at how can we use those plastics? Can they be in building projects? Can they be in in furniture? Can they what can we do in those areas? So the city's adding stuff into their contracts continuously to add more recycles as a requirement for doing the building projects. But it goes beyond that. We start looking at parking blocks used to be of concrete, can you make them of pl recycled plastics? There's a lot of little details in the in in a major building project that you can stick a lot of recycled materials back into. So it's constantly looking at what is not uh currently being made of a recycled material, but is is using our valuable uh virgin material and what can we then add recycling into it. So in the building process, we're we're constantly evaluating and trying to add that. But then we look into the roadway construction projects and and as we talked about the wrap and and adding things into that, it's it's how far can you push the envelope without devaluating the the longevity of the product? So it's just really fine-tuning all of that and and looking at where we're going.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Yeah, I think I would add, I mean, this is kind of an out there thought, but you know, stop signs or you know, all that metal that we use for all the signage, you know, can our sign shop start using in, you know, in that time frame in the future years, you know, in the next decade, can we start using recycle materials for that?

SPEAKER_03 19:28

Yeah. And and, you know, in a previous episode, I I was talking about what keeps me up at night. And and it's not watching a great Netflix show or HBO Max show that I just gotta wait until the end of it. And I said it was just the population growth that is coming to Columbus keeps me up at night. Only because that's more people we have to educate, that's more waste that can possibly be produ uh produced. And and what are we doing to try to stay in front of that?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

We've got almost 350,000 households a week that we visit. That's a large task. Uh, and we do an excellent job at it, and we've got a great staff to do that. We are looking at that growth and looking at how we can right size the ship, make sure that we're being efficient in everything we do and getting that all done. What keeps me up is that growth and figuring that out and extending the life of that current landfill. Uh your landfill down there, Joe, is a is a godsend to this community, and we have to protect it at every cost to me, because there is no next landfill that's going to be anywhere in this region. And if you go out uh not to if you go out to some of these other large cities on the east and west coast, they're shipping their trash and they're they're running trains, and and that's why uh a lot of the the cost to do some recycling out there may look better because it cost them so much to uh tr uh throw their trash away. So keeping that landfill in existence and keeping our transportation costs down because if it's further away, that's a cost that's tremendous. And and being general fund uh division where we're uh we're competing for those general fund dollars, keeping it efficient is critical uh to the success of the division and the city, quite honestly. If we can't keep it to a minimum increase at that landfill, and and right now we've been able to level off with our growth. So we're not reducing the amount of trash going to landfill, but we're keeping it the same despite uh a large growth in the city. So we're reducing it per person, but overall we've kind of flatlined, but that's actually a success right now.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

This is why we love Earth Day so much, is it motivates more people to get involved, and Columbus residents can get involved through a year-round initiative called Keep Columbus Beautiful. Uh, tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, so Keep Columbus Beautiful, they're part of the division of refuse in the in the uh Department of Public Service, and they organize a lot of different uh community groups uh to do cleanups throughout the whole uh Columbus. City of Columbus limits, and we'll we'll give you uh let you borrow all the equipment you need to do those litter cleanups. We do waterway cleanups, we do you know just roadways, neighborhoods, alleys, anywhere we can get groups to go, we organize those. But we also we run a litter league, a couple of a competition with the Columbus Clippers. We do a lot of different creative ways to get people involved. We've got a ton of people in this community that are dedicated to keeping the city of Columbus clean. We need to keep continuing to provide them the ability to do that and the motivation. Unfortunately, litter's never going to completely go away. Uh you know, I I see people driving down the road still throwing out cigarette butts. I'm I'm the person that's yelling at people when they're the person that comes up next to you at a light and will say something to you. Thank God I quit smoking.

SPEAKER_03 22:48

No, I never smoked. I just wanted to be on the record, I never smoked.

Why Public Service Still Motivates

SPEAKER_00 22:52

But those types of things, Keep Columbus Beautiful is dealing with it. It's the reality. And then they're also going into the schools and doing education, teaching them why that's a problem. Why is that litter being an issue? Uh and then they also work in in some of the other areas on food waste, and we've done organics and we've done pumpkin, you know, collections, a whole bunch of different ways, really looking for diversion, but also uh Keep Columbus Beautiful, that program is helping run the convenience centers where we're actually looking to for diversion. So therefore, if you bring in a bicycle and we can re give it give it to someone that can repair it and fix it, furniture, we're working with furniture banks, clothing banks, we're looking for the electronics we're recycling. It's not just collecting it all, it's keep finding another resource to use it. And that's where Keep Columbus Beautiful does for for the city of Columbus residents. That's great. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Well, as we start to wrap up our conversation, Joe, we have to mention a little personal history for you here. You devoted nearly 30 years to the city of Columbus, and you know Tim and Kelly personally. How far do all three of you go back?

SPEAKER_03 23:54

Well, man, you aged me. Um So Tim and I probably go back the entire 30 plus years um as young bucks in the City of Columbus. And and uh, you know, we've worked together over uh that 30 plus years, and uh I believe director we probably a decade at least, 10 years or so. Um so um, you know, I had the pleasure of being uh finance director for a few years in the city of Columbia. Everybody was my friend then. If you could only imagine how friendly everyone was, but now they're only when you were in the room, yeah. No, they they they were great people. Um, and that's why I said at the be at the onset, I I consider them friends.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

You know, Hannah, I will add that I am so proud of our partnership between the city and Swaco. I really feel like we've worked hand in hand together, and it is it is a great partnership. Yeah, we agree.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Thank you for that. Well, let's be honest, unless you work in the industry um or public works, city services, or trash collection, they aren't always the most interesting topics. But the truth is that our community won't be healthy or able to thrive without them. You both have dedicated your careers to this work. How does it still motivate you and what excites you about the work before you?

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Well, for me, uh public service. I've been in public service for ther almost 33 years now. Public service is exactly that. So every day you come through and and look at I can actually impact the residents of this city. Every day, decisions I make, things that we do, efficiencies we gain impact the life in a positive way. Our drivers, I tell them all the time we have 344,000 chances every week to have a positive or negative impact on this city. We want them to all be positive. So every day we come in with that attitude, and and we have a motto in refuse, it's find your way to yes. When somebody needs something done, we're gonna find a way to get to yes. So that's what motivates us is how do we get to yes every day.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

I'd say what motivates me, I mean, what doesn't, I mean, what a great city we live and work in, right? This is an amazing city. And, you know, on the transportation side of things, I mean, safety is our number one and making sure that we improve the safety and save lives every single day. I see folks walking alongside roads that don't have sidewalks, and it breaks my heart. But I just keep driving by them saying, someday we're gonna get there. Um and a lot of them are projects that we have under design.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:23

And just making sure that the teams out there delivering for the residents every single day and you know, getting those projects done, doing those ribbon cuttings, and getting to see people actually out there enjoying the infrastructure we're we're building, you know, changing the city a little, you know, a little project at a time, one mile at a time, you know, one bicycle um path at a time, one sidewalk at a time. You know, it might not mean a lot to to all the people, but it means a lot to the people that are using them. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:53

And and I I if if I can, um I'll I'll date my, I'll go back and since we talked about my history. I remember uh a former mayor sometime back, probably Tim, when you and I were just first starting, uh, had said at a cabinet meeting, a friend of mine told me I definitely was not in the cabinet meeting at my at that time. But um, you know, this the residents expect a few things out of their city, and that's they want to make sure to police and fire come when they're called, they want to make sure their roads are plowed when there's snow, and they want to make sure that their trash is picked up. And and two of those come out of public service. So you are a core service when you break it down, what a city should be doing.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Well, you know, at the beginning of our conversation today, we talked about how important it is to protect the earth for future generations. And as I look around here today, I see a lot of young faces. Tell me a little bit about what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Well, the you know, today is bring your child to work day.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

Yep. This so the day that we've recorded this is, you know, bring your child to work day.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

And we have a special guest, Julie Anna. What do you think is the coolest thing about your mom's job? Uh being like the boss of everybody and whole people.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

I don't know if we like that answer, Jules. I know.

SPEAKER_03 28:15

And do you do anything special at your school or home to celebrate Earth Day?

SPEAKER_02 28:19

Um, recycle unused um electronics. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 28:25

Perfect. Great. Well, thanks for joining the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Thank you. Thank you both for joining us and for your public service and for your partnership with us at Swaco. And to our listeners. If you'd like to know more about what we do, visit our website anytime at Swaco.org. We also want to hear from you. If you have ideas for future podcast episodes, connect with us on any of our social channels, or you can always drop us an email. Until the next time, this is Waste Ed, a waste and recycling podcast by Swaco. Happy birthday!