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The Current Transcript for August 21, 2018

Host: Ioanna Roumeliotis

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: It would have been impossible to compete in these conditions. You can't see more than four five hundred meters in front of yourself, similar to the Blade Runner movies. The new movies where the world is covered in smoke.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS: Chris McCormack is an Australian triathlete who traveled all the way to BC, but his event has been postponed like so many others because of the province's raging wildfires and their billowing clouds of smoke. He describes it as a sort of sci-fi dystopian scene like the world of Blade Runner. And there are real concerns about what the long term health effects of all those wildfire smoke can be. We're starting there today because where there's fire, there's smoke and there's a lot of both right now in BC. Then, Tara Westover didn't have the most traditional upbringing or childhood education, as was immediately clear when she talked her way into university.

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VOICE: You know I just didn't have the foundational education that a lot of kids do. So one of my first lectures that I attended, I raised my hand and asked what the Holocaust was cause I hadn't ever heard of it before.

IR: But the child of a hardline isolationist father who raised her and her siblings away from the world would go on to find her way into it through her love of knowledge and education, even earning her PhD. Her new book is on Barack Obama's reading list this summer. And we're revisiting our conversation with her in half an hour. Plus, prepare for impact with the fatberg.

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VOICE: Fresh fatberg smells like rotting meat, but dry fatberg has a bit more of a smelly toilet sort of a smell.

IR: Dealing with the off putting phenomena of fatbergs in our sewers, including some novel ideas for eradicating the problem altogether. That's in an hour. I'm Ioanna Roumeliotis and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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B.C. firefighters can't do much more than 'get out of the way,' says expert

Guests: Bob Keating, Sarah Henderson, Al Beaver

IR: Forget the smoggy metropolises of China and India, if you're looking for some of the worst air quality on the planet, look no further than BC.

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VOICE 1: There's a grey haze it covers everything. Everyone in Pelham has some sort of respiratory issue now. Like I've developed a chest cough.

VOICE 2: We've had a lot of smoke in the area to the point where it's like I haven't stepped outside if I don't have to just because it's kind of hard to breathe, like the air is pretty heavy. It smells like a campfire as soon as like you walk outside. And it's not a good smell, there's like ash falling from the sky. Like there's cars that have been parked outside for days that have a whole bunch of ash like on them. You know, it's horrible to see. It's horrible.

IR: You just heard from Charles Rensby of Burns Lake and Veronica Beltrán of Prince George, describing the scene outside their front doors. Across the province there are about 500 wildfires still raging, covering huge swaths of BC in smoke. And it's against that backdrop that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will address the situation in Nanaimo later today. His host, Premier John Horgan, declared a state of emergency last week and the Federal Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan will also be in BC today to tour the wildfires for himself. We asked the CBC's Bob Keating in Nelson, BC to step out his front door and tell us what he sees.

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BOB KEATING: The mountain directly across the valley from me is called Elephant Mountain. It's about two kilometres away, is huge and looks like an elephant lying down. Yesterday for the first time in days, we could actually see the elephant. The smoke here in Nelson and much of the interior of British Columbia has been so thick you literally can't see the mountains right in front of you. This thick, light gray billowing smoke has choked the air here. Bike races and triathlons were cancelled all over BC. In some places, like my closest airport, flights were even halted. They were cancelled because pilots can't see the mountains or the runway until they're basically right on top of it. Old people have been told to stay indoors, so is anyone with any kind of respiratory trouble. Almost no one is hiking or biking or even going down to the beach, which is what we do here in summer. It's also not that warm because the smoke has blocked out the sun. A few weeks ago it was 38 degrees here. Then the fires flared and the smoke came. Last week it was in the mid 20s because the sun literally stopped getting through. The smoke has just arrived and settled in. The province has an air quality rating here and we're off it. It only goes to ten and we're well past that. At this rate, the government warns people to and this is a direct quote. "Avoid strenuous activities outdoors. Children and the elderly should also would avoid physical activity or exertion. They should reduce or reschedule strenuous outdoor activity, especially if you have coughing or throat irritation." Most of us here do have some throat irritation, you can't not, as well as eye irritation. A couple weather websites said that BC had the worst air quality in the world on the weekend. Not Delhi or Beijing, the interior of British Columbia. And remember, this is the height of tourist season, when BC is clogged with people from all over the world. I went out and met a bunch of them yesterday. Most were understanding about the smoke, none were impressed.

VOICE 1: Oh, it's terrible. It's becoming every summer now, becoming terrible.

BK: Would you visit BC in August, considering what's happening here year after year?

VOICE 1: Actually, OK, so we have family here. So we do come, but it's true. It's an issue.

VOICE 2: We were supposed to do the MS bike tour yesterday and today and just decided. Well it got canceled officially, some people still went riding, but we just decided not to. Even walking, I'm being. You taste it. It's just really unpleasant.

VOICE 3: It's pretty bad. It's preventing us from doing some of the activities we like doing, like biking, running and all that outdoors. And right now we're kind of confined to the gym or the swimming pool indoors. So it's not as fun as we'd like it to be.

VOICE 4: This is the worst I've ever seen. We just came here yesterday for a little visit vacation and now we were hoping to see the area and see the mountains and yeah this is terrible. We did a little hike up the mountain over here and couldn't see anything.

VOICE 4: It's a really a disaster because I dream of this since a long time. And since 10 days we have a smoke and we going to Rockies and we see nothing. OK. So for me, it's a disaster.

BK: This of course affects locals too, who can't get out and do the type of things we do in BC in summer: hike, bike, paddle, even as I said beaches are empty and there is an elephant in the room here. It's ironic I'm looking at Elephant Mountain because the elephant in the room and the hard part for many people who live here is the nagging thought this is the new normal. Last year, it was smoky like this as well for a huge swath of the summer. Locals are worried every summer could be cut short by smoke and fire and mountains you can't see. It feels like we're losing a season, the one season in Canada that feels too short anyway is being cut off at the knees in mid August. Last year it was mid July actually. Parts of BC felt like they didn't have a summer last year and that's besides all the burnt up bush, lost property and people out of their homes worrying about the homes they've been evacuated from. Thankfully we don't lose many lives here like Greece or Portugal or California, but there is a sense we are losing something.

IR: The CBC's Bob Keating in Nelson, BC. So what is all that wildfire smoke mean for the people of BC? Sarah Henderson is the senior environmental health scientist with the BC Centre for Disease Control. She studies the health impact of wildfire smoke and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

SARAH HENDERSON: Good morning Ioanna.

IR: Sarah, you're normally based in Vancouver and I'm sure you've been following the news coverage. What goes through your mind as you've seen some of these images, some of them are apocalyptic. What it goes through your mind when you see your home province covered in smoke like that?

SH: Mostly, oh this again. You know we've really been trying to prepare the population of British Columbia for the fact that we might see these sorts of events more frequently than we have in the past. I'm not sure we expected 2018 to be another really severe season, but here we are. And yeah that sense that maybe this is the new normal.

IR: Is it, you know the health effects are a nagging issue and Bob mentioned that. How dangerous is it for people to breathe in this smoke right now and is there something about wildfire smoke that makes it particularly dangerous?

SH: We don't have a lot of research on wildfire smoke unfortunately because these events previously have been fairly rare, but for your average healthy individual, it's not especially dangerous. It's quite uncomfortable. You heard people saying that their eyes were stinging and their throats were sore. We expect those kinds of symptoms to go away as soon as the smoke clears and for people to regain their normal everyday health. But for people who do have preexisting conditions, especially asthma, COPD, heart disease, it's possible that they'll have more exacerbations of their conditions during these events and that they might have quite severe exacerbations. And that's when we really start to get concerned if somebody has a heart attack or a asthma attack that they can't get under control when it's smoky outside, then then it does become dangerous for those people.

IR: Who else is vulnerable though? Pregnant women, little kids, I can't imagine or elderly people, that must be difficult.

SH: Yeah. So anybody who's vulnerable to the impacts of the environment and air pollution on a day to day basis is also more vulnerable to wildfires smoke. We are particularly concerned about women who are pregnant and infants who are breathing in the smoke because infants have quite sensitive lungs. So we'd really like to see those populations protect themselves as much as possible. Children, their lungs don't fully develop until they're quite a bit older, so you know they like to run around and they breathe quite a lot, relative to adults. So we want to make sure that they are well cared for. It's a great time for indoor play, rather than outdoor play and just keeping an eye on those kids because they might not read their body signals as well as an adult does. And of course the elderly, as you get older you become more susceptible to all of these sorts of things.

IR: So how do you prevent the negative health effects, other than staying indoors as you mentioned? What do you recommend?

SH: In my ideal world every home across Canada has an indoor air cleaner. These are portable units that use HEPA filtration to pull the air out of a room, pass it through a filter and then push cleaner air back out into the room. They can be incredibly effective for keeping one or two rooms of your home quite comfortable, just like an air conditioner would keep your home comfortable when it's very hot outside. Wearing masks is a challenging one. If you have to work outdoors, we do recommend that you talk to your occupational health and safety professionals to make sure that you have the proper gear to keep you protected. But for the average person wearing a mask, it has to be properly fitted to work properly. And if you're having difficulty breathing, strapping something to your face might not make it easier for you to breathe. We really just prefer that people try to spend their time in a cleaner indoor air environment.

IR: So stay indoors and shut the windows I imagine.

SH: And get a portable air cleaner. So staying indoors and shutting the windows is a first step, but really these portable air cleaners can help so much to keep the indoor air comfortable.

IR: And they're pretty accessible?

SH: They're relatively accessible. You know if you go on Amazon or something, you'll see a wide range starting from maybe a hundred dollars up to $500. But if you look at the reviews and what people are saying about them, there's actually people now saying I used this during wildfires smoke conditions and it really helped. So do your research, but you can get a good one for a reasonable price.

IR: So you mentioned earlier that there's not a ton of information, but do you have a sense of how this smoke from wildfires impacts people's health in the long term?

SH: I wish that I did. This is something that's quite challenging to study from a study design perspective and also again we haven't had a lot of these events to study. So we don't really know. Obviously if you're one of those people who had a severe event during the smoke, you might never regain your health back and that's a long term impact. But in terms of average healthy people, do these smoke episodes have long term impacts? We don't know. We don't see why they would. The important thing to remember is that our health burden attributable to air pollution is really attributable to our lifetime exposure to air pollution. So one of these events, OK, but when they start piling up like this, it's changing people's lifetime exposure and that puts the population at risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease and asthma because they're exposed year after year after year.

IR: As Bob mentioned in his rant, it's becoming a new normal. So do you think there will be more scrutiny in terms of the health impact?

SH: I certainly hope so. I think you know seeing this in 2017 and then again in 2018 in British Columbia, I'm really hoping that that's going to draw a lot of attention to this issue and obviously research funding to study these sorts of questions.

IR: On that point, what would you like to see governments do to mitigate the health impacts of wildfire smoke?

SH: You know we don't have a lot of control over wildfire, but again, most of us spend up to 90 per cent of our time indoors. So ensuring that the indoor environment is as clean and comfortable as possible, even when it's smoky outside, will go a very long way towards protecting the population during smoke episodes. So you know, for me in a long term sense, policy changes related to the building code is what I think is probably most important. Making sure that any new buildings can keep smoke out even when it's quite smoky outside.

IR: And the takeaway message from you is get an air purifier.

SH: It really is. Yes. I can't say that enough.

IR: OK. Thanks for your time.

SH: Thank you very much.

IR: Sarah Henderson is the senior environmental health scientist with the BC Centre for Disease Control. She was with me in our Toronto studio. Bigger, hotter, faster and smokier wildfires seem to be the new normal in BC. That poses a real challenge for people in the business of putting them out and in some cases, there's very little that can be done, except get out of the way. Al Beaver is an expert in fire behaviour and risk management. He's worked on fire management for governments in Canada and Australia and is now an independent consultant. We've reached him in Gibson's, BC. Hello.

AL BEAVER: Good morning.

IR: Good morning, Al. You're just a bit northwest of Vancouver, how's the smoke where you are now?

AB: It's thick. I mean we don't have an elephant mountain in the background, but the mountains that are there, I can't see and there's definitely that smell of forest fire smoke.

IR: And how big a problem is that smoke when they're trying to fight these fires? When firefighters are battling them.

AB: Well it's exceptionally difficult. It can really limit the type of tactics you use. It can limit your air support, simply, can't fly. Air attack inference as an example, is it's low flying and it's slow flying. It's highly hazardous dangerous work and when your visibility isn't good, it's even just adds to that risk.

IR: When the fires are this big and they're moving so quickly, what kinds of things will firefighters be doing to try to get them under control?

AB: Well there's very little that they can do. When you see in the news, these towering columns of black smoke sort of thing, there's nothing that can be done except get out of the way. Manage your exposure for your communities, your people, get them out of the way of that. Fire suppression, current fire suppression technology is vastly inferior to the extremes of nature, extreme fire behaviour.

IR: You've seen a wildfire up close and most people haven't. Can you paint a picture of what it's like? You talked about those columns of fire and people have seen the images on TV, but what's it like up close?

AB: Well, you don't want to get too close. Yeah, it's hot. There's the radiant heat. There's the smoke and the embers and the ash falling, but one of the things that will stick with everybody is the noise. It's like standing next to a jet engine or a freight train going by. As that column rises, it's pulling in air to feed underneath that. It has to replace that hot air that's going up and it's incredible. I mean the force that it produces is really awesome.

IR: Did you ever fear for your life?

AB: I can't say I really feared for my life. I've had some times that were pretty close and I had to make a hasty retreat from the fires and evacuating briskly.

IR: How much can firefighters do? You talked about the fact that the fire suppression techniques are vastly inferior. So how much can they do to actually get these fires under control?

AB: Well, they really need a break from nature. They need the fire to lay down, the winds to stop blowing. A little cooler, a little moister air. And they can start building in lines, start suppressing the fire's edge, the most you know prioritizing the most important areas first. But even with that, you can work for a week establishing a control line and all it takes is moments for nature to get hot, dry, windy and they can blow away that entire week's work or more.

IR: So when you're looking at the picture in BC now, can you see it being volatile for a few more days to come at least?

AB: Oh yeah. Yeah. It's going to be, there's really no in terms of the forecast, there's some moderation, but nothing, no sort of fire season ending events.

IR: And those events would be like a major weather system?

AB: That's correct. Yeah, precipitation. They need rain.

IR: They need rain. If there's not much to do to actually suppress fires once they get started or at least get to a certain size, what can be done instead? You've been looking at this issue in terms of preventing the spread of them. What can you tell us about that?

AB: Well, one of the things that we're experiencing really is the perfect storm. This has been decades in development. When you have hot dry cycles followed with cooler wetter cycles followed back with hot and dry. In those cooler damper cycles, less area burns naturally. That creates a more hazardous fuel landscape. In those cooler damper years, your fire suppression is also more effective, therefore less burned area. So what we've created is this: hazardous fuel landscape and an unnatural one. And now that's being reversed. So we have this high hazard landscape and we also now want to build our subdivisions, our communities, next to it or into it. A wood frame construction is quite popular, so basically you're now building your home out of more fuel. And then we like to landscape it with more fuel again around that particular fuel property. So it's a fuel problem that we have. We need to get a hold that. We need to get a handle on this accumulating fuel and building homes out of fuel intermixed with high hazard forest fuels.

IR: What kind of designs would be protective?

AB: Well one part of it is you have to start right from the very beginning on that and say which is your subdivision, community subdivision, location and design period of that. Now we have a legacy of poorly designed located subdivisions and communities. We have to live with that and we have to correct that. What also we have is new designs. We shouldn't be adding to that inventory of poor design. So we need to start right from that. When you have fire losses, we never want to see, but it gives us a chance to also then build back better. So property construction, the right materials, the right design, the right distance between each property and then the property landscaping. The most important fuel is what you build your house out of and that fuel, that forest fuel, immediately adjacent to your home. And then you need to look at the bigger landscape and you need to manage the fuel out in that landscape to reduce that high hazard fuel, but also as an ecosystem process as well, for that design.

IR: OK. We'll have to leave it there. Al Beaver is an expert in fire behaviour and risk management. He's worked on fire management for governments in Canada and Australia and is now an independent consultant. We reached him in Gibson's, BC. The CBC News is next. Then, an education like few others. Tara Westover grew up on an Idaho Mountain in an isolationist home. She went on to find freedom inside her own mind and eventually in the halls of Cambridge University. A conversation with Tara Westover after the news. I'm Ioanna Roumeliotis and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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From isolated homeschooling to a PhD from Cambridge: How Tara Westover was saved by her education

Guest: Tara Westover

IR: Hello. I'm Ionna Roumeliotis and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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IR: Diapers, oil and baby wipe, they're just the tip of the fatberg. In sewer systems around the world, congealed masses of fat, grease and waste, some of the size of football fields, are clogging pipes and wreaking havoc. In half an hour, a tour of fatbergs at home and abroad and a novel idea for dealing with them too. But first, coming down from the mountains.

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VOICE: Randy Weaver brought his family to the top of this mountain nine years ago because he wanted to be left alone. Now a force of 200 police federal agents and the National Guard have surrounded the house. Weaver is wanted on charges of selling two illegal sawed off shotguns to a federal informer. When authorities went to Weaver's house last week to arrest him, a U.S. marshal and Weaver's 13-year-old son, were killed in a brief shootout. The FBI says they will not leave, until Weaver and his friend Kevin Harris who lives with him, are in custody.

IR: That's an ABC News report from August 1992 on what would become known as Ruby Ridge, a 10-day siege in the mountains of northern Idaho. By the time it ended, one federal agent would be dead and Randy Weaver's wife and son would be killed. It was a shootout that became a cautionary tale for Americans who were already suspicious of government and public institutions and it would loom large over Tara Westover's life. She was only five-years-old at the time, but what happened at Ruby Ridge influenced how her parents chose to raise their seven children. Keeping them out of school, away from all authority. And though she may have grown up in some of the most isolated conditions imaginable, Tara Westover's ambition and curiosity couldn't be contained. She'd go on to break away from that isolation and learn about the world even earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Tara Westover's memoir is called, "Educated." And former US President, Barack Obama, just named it as one of his top five reads of the summer. Anna Maria Tramonte spoke with Tara Westover in May. She began by asking how that standoff at Ruby Ridge motivated her father.

TARA WESTOVER: Well I think he had been someone who had been developing unorthodox ideas for a long time, kind of paranoid ideas about the government. And I think what was tragic about Ruby Ridge for my dad, I think for a number of other people, who were concerned about government overreach and had a certain paranoid view, especially if the federal government, it just seemed to confirm all of their worst suspicions. So for my father, who I think until that point had had more moderate views even though he wasn't happy when my siblings chose to go to school or to the doctor or to participate in some of these institutions that he was very skeptical of, I think after Ruby Ridge it became a little bit more of a real conflict in his mind. And he saw it as kind of a of a battle for us where if we wanted to go to school, he was a lot more concerned about us getting brainwashed and he seemed a lot more worried about the government turning up and kind of forcing us to go to school or maybe our family getting caught up in some kind of conflict like the Weavers because of the way that we lived.

AMT: So he was already an isolationist, he was also very strict Mormon. In terms of growing up, what did that mean for you?

TW: I feel like, most our entire town was Mormon, but everybody else they went to school, they went to the doctor, they had birth certificates, which you know I didn't have a birth certificate until I was nine years old. So it was very much something that my father, you know, he took this kind of extreme interpretation of Mormonism, which wasn't even extreme, it was just kind of his specific interpretation.

AMT: And you make the point, you didn't have a birth certificate until you were nine. Why?

TW: I'm not entirely sure. I mean sometimes I think it's that my dad was trying to avoid any entanglements with the government. We didn't have a phone for a while, I think he liked the idea of not having a lot of paper trail, but when I was nine, that was an age my older brother was old enough to get a driver's license and he wanted to become a truck driver eventually, so it just wasn't practical for him not to be able to get a birth certificate, which is when my mother started getting birth certificates for all of us who didn't have them, the younger four.

AMT: How much education did you get at home?

TW: I was taught to read by one of my older brothers, I think to win a bet with another one of my brothers. And there was certainly books around, there just wasn't a lot of formal education. So I never wrote an essay for my mother, I never, you know we were never gathered together and given a lecture. I was never given an exam. I do think, you know she would teach us a bit of math, kind of fractions and a bit of long division, but it just was really informal and the older I got, I would say the more erratic it became.

AMT: And your mom was a.

TW: Because she was a, yeah she was a midwife and she was an herbalist and she was you know very busy, she was delivering babies. She had seven children. There was a farm to run. I think it wasn't really practical for her to be educating us at home.

AMT: On one hand, you heard what sounded like an idyllic childhood. Tell us what you would do during the day, as a child.

TW: I mean we lived in this beautiful mountain. My dad ran a junkyard, which when I was little was kind of this exotic playground that we could go and whenever we wanted, we would essentially loot these cars. So you know, we had a lot of animals, in a lot of ways it really was an idyllic childhood. And of course it was the only life I had ever known. So to me, it seemed completely normal.

AMT: The fact that you couldn't go to school though, at some point your paternal grandmother was subversively trying to show you another way of doing things. What did she do?

TW: She offered to kidnap me and take me to Arizona and put me in school. I think she had this hope that if I tried it, that I would like it because I had been kind of, you know I'd been very much convinced by my father. His world view was the only world view I had access to. So when he said the public schools were dangerous, evil, that they were run by the Illuminati, that they would brainwash me and take me away from God, I believed all that. I think my grandmother thought, if she could take me for a short time and get me to go to school, that when my dad came for me that I would kind of plead with him to let me keep going. But I think what she didn't realize is that, I think your loyalty in that situation is always to your immediate family. And it, you know, it would never have occurred to me to take her up on the offer.

AMT: As you say, you didn't really have other information coming at you and you were little.

TW: No, I didn't. So much so that you know, later when I was 16 and I did decide to educate myself and I kind of tricked my way into this university. I told them I was homeschooled, I really hadn't been. You know, I just didn't have the foundational education that a lot of kids do. So one of my first lectures that I attended, I raised my hand and asked what the Holocaust was cause I hadn't ever heard of it before. So this was the kind of education that I was getting. I had access to books and I could read and I read a lot of kind of 19th century Mormon lectures, but that kind of more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.

AMT: You also had a lot of violence and injury in your life. Tell us what happened the day you were in the scrapyard and you had to go into the collection bin.

TW: The scrapyard was an incredibly dangerous place. You know, my dad, this instant that you're referring to, I had filled a bin of scrap, it was about a tonne, about 2000 pounds and what had to happen is that bin needed to be dumped into the big semi-trailer. And how you do that is you'd get a JCB, essentially a forklift, with an extendable boom and you would lift up the bin and then you would raise it up and dump it and then someone would ideally climb and after and settle, settle the scrap. My dad decided that he didn't want to take two trips, you know dumping the bin, dumping the scrap and then going down and taking me up separately to settle it afterward. He just said, what would be faster is if I just rode up with the scrap and then he would kind of pause for a minute and I could crawl along the trailer and go sit on the cab, while he dumped it and I could climb down and settle the scrap. And I mean, I remember when he asked me to do it I thought it was a perfectly insane thing to do, but I was 10-years-old and I trusted my father, I assumed he knew what he was doing. So I climbed in the bin. And what happened is when he picked it up and swung it around to head toward the trailer, a bit of scrap kind of spike, just shifted and it just pierced right through my leg. And so when he was holding the scrap level, the bin level with the trailer, so that I could crawl out and crawl to safety, I couldn't move. And it was a really loud diesel engine, so even though I was shouting at him, he couldn't hear me. And what happened was he raised the bin and dumped it with me inside and I was kind of lucky because if I'd gone down the front, I would have, you know it would have been like going through a meat grinder, but I was able to throw myself over the side and then I just fell to the ground, just about I don't know, probably 15, 20 feet and I was OK at the end. I was injured, but there were a lot of instances like that that happened in my dad's scrapyard, not just to me, but to my siblings. People lighting themselves on fire or falling or just a lot of injuries and they always happened because we were taking shortcuts because we weren't being safe. And as a child I just didn't really know, how to interpret those things. I think when I got older and I went to university and I heard of mental illness and I heard lectures about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, that became a way that I began to understand and reinterpret my childhood because until that point, I just didn't understand that people could have limits to their mental ability in that way. And I thought, I thought that people were either sane or insane and I didn't realize that you know, someone could just not be able to process risks. Someone could just not be able to learn from their mistakes, in the way that my dad he just was not able to understand, kind of the consequences of the things that he was doing. He had this belief that if something bad happens that it was kind of God's will and that really nothing terrible would be allowed to happen that God didn't want to have happen. And this would apply even to himself. So the worst injury that happened in my dad's scrapyard, you know, happened to him, which I always use as kind of evidence that I don't think it's a he didn't care about us, I think it was much more complicated than that.

AMT: You talk about the potential that he's bipolar, he was never, has never been diagnosed. This is your reading.

TW: No and I'm not a medical professional, so I can't really say, but I feel like you know there's a couple of things I know. I know that my dad loved me and I know that he valued my safety, but I also know that he was completely unable to keep me safe and in many cases, was the reason I wasn't safe.

AMT: And as you become a teenager, your brother Shawn becomes violent toward you. What would he do?

TW: My brother is an extremely complicated character and person. You know, he could be incredibly kind person, he could be really self-sacrificing. He saved my life once when we were breaking horses. So he was capable of this incredible self-sacrifice, but he also had, I think more self-loathing than anyone I've ever met. And he had a tendency I think at certain points to need to externalize that and make other people feel that way about themselves. So as I got older, he would sometimes, he'd be kind of pretending that you were having a game that you were just wrestling and he would be laughing, but you know, what he would actually be doing were things that were quite painful or sometimes he would choke me or he would grab me by my hair and haul me down the hallway and shove my head in the toilet. And he had a name for me, he called me "whore" quite a lot. I was a 15-year-old girl and that would just really enter into my self conception, so much so that when I was 16, I wrote a journal entry about my brother that included the line, "It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you." And I think my brother had more power over me than I really could have even imagined. He defined me to myself. And I don't think there's a greater power really than that.

AMT: And you did what so many people in those situations do, at times you tried to make a joke of it and hide it from outsiders.

TW: Yeah I would really often and you know there was a time that he attacked me once in a parking lot of a grocery store and I was screaming, trying to get him off me and people started to look and immediately I just started to laugh because I wanted them to think it was a game and it was also a really common way that my brother would distort what was happening for me. I have this theory about abuse. I think all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind. And I think if you're going to abuse someone, you have to invade their reality and you have to distort it. You have to convince them of two things: you have to convince them that what you're doing isn't that bad, which means you have to rationalize it or euphemize it or downplay it. And the second thing you have to convince them of is that they somehow deserve what's happening to them. And I think the second thing kind of happens naturally cause I think people take on blame, when they're hurting, but the first thing takes a lot more active rewriting of what's happened. And my brother, he was just very good at it. He would laugh, even when he was you know, cutting off your air supply. You know after that incident in the parking lot, he came into my room I remember, and I had written this journal entry about it. I'd written what had happened, which was kind of the first time I'd done that and I had written that I've been afraid of him. And I'd written that I begged him to stop and while I was writing that entry, he came into my room and he said, you know I'm sorry that I hurt you, but it was really just a game and we were having a really good time and if you'd said something, if you'd asked me to stop, of course I would have and next time we're having fun, you just really need to tell me. This was a cycle that we had repeated hundreds of times and that was probably the only time where or the first time where after he left, what I continued writing in my journal wasn't necessarily just his his opinion of what had happened. I kind of wrote both. I wrote that he'd said it was fun and games, but I also wrote that I didn't know what had really happened, but that I knew that for me what I had experienced, you know, I hadn't been having fun. I had not been having a good time and I'd been terrified. And I think that was probably the first time, I was 17, I'd done one semester at the university. I think it was the first time that my brother attempted to dominate me in that way and at the end of the process, there were still two distinct minds present. You know, two totally distinct minds and not just one mind having gained control over the other.

AMT: And that made all the difference in the end, over time.

TW: It did. I do think that it had to do with this really broad idea of education. I was quite used to having the world interpreted for me by other people and I think when I went to the university and I learned about the Holocaust and I learned about different versions of history, what I was developing was the ability to have my own view of things that was distinct from my family's view, especially my father's views. So that, you know there was a time my senior year at the university, my dad visited me and he launched into this kind of anti-Semitic lecture about you know, he said that the Jews were trying to start World War 3 so that they could consolidate their power. And I knew that he was quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion cause I'd taken an entire course in Jewish history and I knew the history of that text. I knew that it had been discredited as a forgery and I knew that that hadn't stopped Adolf Hitler from quoting it in "Mein Kampf." And I also knew that my father would have hated to be quoting Adolf Hitler, that he despised Hitler. So it was kind of the first time in our relationship, where there was a real reversal of the parent-child relationship because I knew what he was saying and he didn't, but I think he would become something I would learn to do about the present as well. When my brother would say this is what's happening, I would start to have that ability to say to myself, you know interestingly you think that, but that's not what I experienced.

AMT: So how did you go from that isolation growing up to university?

TW: Yeah, I wish I understood that. So I was 16, I was working in my dad's scrapyard, which wasn't the safest place. I had this really tumultuous relationship with my older brother and my older brother Tyler had gone to university. He had been allowed to go to school because my dad got more radical as he got older and so my older siblings had had that opportunity. And he came back when I was 16 and just told me I needed to get out. And then he just said to me, look to get into this university, all you have to do is pass the ACT. It's one test and you can do the reading, you can do the English bit, just learn a bit of math. I just bought some textbooks, I bought an Algebra textbook and I just started teaching myself and you know I didn't do great, so I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but it just was the situation that I arrived at university when I was 17 and just had, you know, no formal education, having convinced this university that I did.

AMT: And you made the point that there were certain areas that you knew nothing about like the Holocaust, that you were learning.

TW: Almost all areas.

AMT: By going to university, it didn't just help you learn, as you point out it helped you think. It helped you learn how to think.

TW: Well and it's one of the reasons I wanted to call the book, "Educated," because I think that word has become really overburdened or are almost kind of hijacked by issues that we're having with inequality and privilege. I think when we say someone is an educated person, it seems like increasingly we mean institutionalized or we mean that they've had access to this really elite set of institutions. And I was really lucky, you know, I did get access to them, some of those institutions. I was able to go to Harvard, I was able to go to Cambridge. But I felt like in writing this story, the bits of my education that were, that I thought made me educated, had a lot more to do with changes in the self. And some of that took place in classrooms and a lot of it took place on my own when I was reading books or when I was writing things or when I was meeting different people or just getting access to different points of view. You know, that's what I've been lacking when I was a child, that made me uneducated was the absence of different perspectives, that I could sort through them and decide what I really thought because I'd only had access to my father's point of view.

AMT: And you eventually get your PhD from Cambridge, which is an accomplishment for anyone, but the further you go into that academic world, the further you're pulled from your family. What kind of a struggle was that for you?

TW: You know, they were becoming more and more radical. We were having a hard time negotiating that, we were managing it, but as I moved more into the mainstream, I didn't know how we were going to continue to be a family. And that's not what broke us apart. What would break us apart eventually, would be when I would confront my parents about my brother's violence. My father and I'm not sure why, but for some reason when I told him about my brother and told him that it needed to be stopped, I just got shifted into that category of all the things, you know, the Illuminati, doctors, schools, things that he was afraid of. He said that I was lying, he said I just wanted to destroy our family and eventually he began telling people that I was possessed, as a way to explain why I had said the things I'd said about my brother Shawn.

AMT: And do you have a relationship with your parents today then?

TW: I don't with my parents and so a lot of the, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was because I wanted to tell a story about estrangement. And I think estrangement is a story that people tell, but they tend to tell it when they're towards the end of their lives. What I really craved, what I really wanted was to hear stories of people, while they were going through it, while they were young. Cause I think what's hard about estrangement is not knowing the future and not knowing if you're going to regret it. Is there going to be a car accident, is someone getting a cancer, are you going to regret your decision and trying to come to terms with it, without knowing how the rest of your life is going to unfold. And then just trying to work out how you feel about that decision. You know, I was in a situation where I was I was trying to figure out how do I believe that I'm a good person, when I know that my mother doesn't believe that I'm a good person cause she had accepted my dad's explanation and she was also telling people that I was possessed. And that was just not. I didn't know where to find the answer to that question and I felt like that should be something that I could find the answer to in stories cause I think that's what stories are for. And so once I had kind of come out the other end of the kind of, well I had a real mental breakdown actually when I was becoming estranged from my family, when I came out the other end of that, I thought, I really felt the absence of this story when I was going through it and maybe it's just a story I can write.

AMT: I was really struck by the fact that at one point you actually thought you should, you considered maybe, you needed to just give that up and go back into that cocoon of isolation.

TW: Yeah. And he offered me such a clean way back. He visited me. My mother and my father visited me when I was at Harvard and it was about a year after they'd told my brother what I'd said about him and he had disowned me. So this first phase of disownment wasn't my choice, at all, I would've done anything I thought to get them. And then my dad came to Harvard and he offered me a blessing, which would have been in his mind I think tantamount to an exorcism, where I could have subjected myself to that and then blamed everything I said about Shawn on this possession and then been welcomed back into the family. And there was this bizarre period of about three days, when I was walking around Boston, you know, sight-seeing with my parents that I really thought that was a deal I could make and that there was some dignity in doing it to win the love of my parents. In the end, I think I had to come to this realization, you know when my dad actually offered the blessing, I said no. And I think the reason I said no is because I realized, the person that my, the daughter that my father had come to reclaim, just didn't exist anymore and I had changed too much. And all the reading and thinking I'd done, I'd just become a different person. I'd become a different, I'd had a different mind than I'd had when I was younger. And the person I'd become just had no tolerance for violence and I just couldn't give way to it in the way that when I was 16, would have been so easy or was so easy.

AMT: How has your family responded to the candor in your book?

TW: So I'm estranged from my family and I don't know cause I haven't talked to them about the book. The half the I'm close to, you know, they were reading it the whole time I was writing it and they were giving feedback and they've been pretty supportive. It's hard on everyone, I think telling stories like this in a public way, I think it's hard.

AMT: And I guess, you know, we have read your parents have made it clear that your view of how you grow up is not the way they see it.

TW: No they don't. I mean a lot of the ways that they've responded at least publicly to the book, they seem to focus on the home school quite a lot, that they think the home school was a lot better. And it's kind of funny because I don't actually have any problem with the home school, particularly. I mean there are things about my upbringing that I really value. I value that they taught me that I can teach myself things and I value the fact that they instilled in me a kind of feeling that my education is my own, it's my own responsibility. I think for my parents it's a lot easier to talk about the home school than it is to talk about my brother.

AMT: You know there are many people who are deeply suspicious of government and public institutions, not unlike your dad and mother and maybe in different degrees, but how do we as a society reach people who are that suspicious?

TW: I don't know. I mean I don't know if I have a solution for every family that chooses to isolate itself. I mean my worry now is I'm not sure I would have the experience that I had, if I had it now because I feel like universities especially have become a lot more ideologically puritanical. There were a lot of things I said, when I first got to university that would have been considered, sexist, racist, homophobic, all kinds of just ideas that I had, that I had been given. And I've never had them challenged and I never thought about them. And I feel like I was given the benefit of the doubt so much and people would engage with me, rather than just turn their back on me, they would try to figure out why I thought that and they would present me with better arguments, which over time would really begin to change the way that I thought. But my worry is that we have become so tribal, that we don't do that anymore and that we tend to go straight from, you have a prejudice opinion to you are a bad person and we don't try to talk to people.

AMT: We are a much more polarized society, in general now, aren't we that way.

TW: Yeah and I think just that tendency to reduce people to their opinions and not, just not see that people can be very good people and have strange ideas and that's something I really hope people would take from the book. I think my dad is a good person. I don't know why he's so fearful of the things he's fearful of and I don't know why he responded the way he did with me and my brother, I don't know. But I still think he's a good person and I think he's worth reasoning with.

AMT: You know after all you've been through and all that you've learned, how you raise your own children?

TW: I don't know. I feel like my parents, you know, with education, I think John Dewey and education is two things. He said it had two components: the individual or what an individual brings to their education and the social, what society brings in. I feel like my parents took the individual way too far, but I like some of the ideas that they had about individual ownership, but equally I sometimes worry that mainstream education has taken the social a bit too far and that just isn't enough scope for people to have real ownership or real buy-in over what they learn and that they don't feel like they get to make any decisions about the shaping of their own mind. So I don't know, if I have to make that choice, I think I would maybe try to do some kind of hybrid.

AMT: Tara Westover, it's really good to talk to you. Thank you for sharing your story and for your insights.

TW: Thanks for having me.

IR: Tara Westover is the author of, Educated. She spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in May from Cambridge, England. Coming up, think before you flush. Baby wipes, grease, oil, fat and more are getting together underground and forming fatbergs. The revolting, but true tale and some ideas of what to do about it in about 90 seconds. I'm Ioanna Roumeliotis and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Only you can prevent gross, smelly fatbergs from clogging up city sewers, says inspector

Guests: Justin Pachebat, Barry Orr, Scott Lewis

IR: I'm Ioanna Roumeliotis and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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VOICE 1: I smelt it first hand. It's one of the biggest ones we've found. A congealed, concrete-like massive, all the stuff that people flushed down their toilet and flushed down their sinks. They all mixed it together and congeals just to form this Fatberg.

VOICE 2: Fresh Fatberg smells like rotting meat, so rotting dirty nappies. But dry Fatberg has a bit more of a smelly toilet sort of a smell.

IR: It's real and it's disgusting. The fatberg, a giant blob of congealed fat and waste clogging up the sewers of London, England and other cities around the world. Fatbergs are born when millions of us pour grease down their drains and flush who knows what down their toilets. They are doing serious damage to sewer systems and have I mentioned, the result is disgusting. Nevertheless, British TV's Channel 4 brought together a team of scientists to dig into that city's notorious fatbergs, to find out for the first time exactly what they're composed of in all their glorious and disgusting detail. Justin Paschebat was one of the scientists who participated in the program's dissection. He is a lecturer in Microbial Genomics at Aberystwyth University in Wales and he spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in May.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

JUSTIN PACHEBAT: Bore Da, hello Anna Maria.

AMT: Hello. So you were in a room ready to autopsy this giant deposit of congealed fat, set the scene for me, what does it look like?

JP: It looks a little bit like slightly unset cement or plaster. The only problem is it really smells, as well.

AMT: And how much fat did you have there? There were I think three tonnes of fat in the actual room, we only analyzed probably about five kilos of fat for our samples. So there's lots and lots more to analyze.

AMT: So you had it on a table and you basically went through it. What did you do?

JP: We looked for parasites. So we looked for parasite eggs and also live worms. So my colleague Professor Joe Hamilton who's a colleague here at Aberystwyth University was looking for basically parasite eggs and she found eggs, which were either Fasciola or Alaria eggs, which are quite unusual to find in the middle of London, where as I was looking for bacteria.

AMT: OK and again this is like concrete, you have to chip away at it, it's not all like kind of gushy and squishy?

JP: It's like soft slightly unset concrete. We tried to, we have to deal with it very, very carefully in a Category 2 safety lab, where we were double gloved, we had special equipment, on goggles, masks, etc. And it was in a hood and we were trying to break it open and in the end we had to use metal tools to force it open and to actually split it open to get to the inside of it.

AMT: Wow okay and so you have all this gear on, did you have nose plugs too, it must've really smell.

JP: They did smell quite a bit, but the the hood we've got basically sucks out all the air and it keeps us safe as well. So it kept most of the bad smell away.

AMT: So you started to tell me what you found, what surprised you in that glob of fat?

JP: The fact that we found quite a few worm eggs for either Fasciola or Alaria. So Fasciola hepatica is generally found in sheep, but it can also infect humans, but humans are dead-end hosts, so the eggs would have come from sheep. So they could have come from one of the farms in London or the Alaria alata eggs, they come probably from either dogs or from foxes, but they're usually found in Europe, not in the UK. And they have an intermediate host, which is a frog.

AMT: So if that's in the sewer system, is that dangerous for the public?

JP: You wouldn't want to get infected with the Fasciola eggs. So it's probably more of an issue for the people working on the Fatbergs themselves.

AMT: And what else did you find in there, what did it reveal to you about human behaviour?

JP: The fact that people flush from too many single use plastics down the toilet and we found n appy wipes, wet wipes, which aren't degradable and even the biodegradable ones, they clog up the system and the fat congeals around them. We found condoms and femidoms and also lots of plastic earbuds as well. And these are all basically form a matrix around, which the fact conjugates and then of course you then start to get bacteria layering in the layers of fat and parasites.

AMT: And so remind us how big these things get in the sewer pipes.

JP: Well the beast, the Fatberg that was discovered in White Chapel was 130 tons and about 820 feet long.

AMT: How do you get rid of that?

JP: So it was almost as long as London bridge itself.

AMT: How do you get rid of that?

JP: The workers basically chip away at it with tools. They break it up into large lumps, they put into sacks and then they pull them out of the manhole covers.

AMT: And that's what you got for your autopsy.

JP: And that's what we then got for the autopsy. We also found quite a lot of bacteria, campylobacter and listeria, obviously lots of E.coli and all sorts of other bacteria. And when we tested them, we found bacteria resistance against every single antibiotic that we tested for.

AMT: So this stuff would be going through the sewer system and it gets clogged in the Fatberg as well, where would that stuff go normally then?

JP: It normally gets melted down. Sometimes it gets turned into biodiesel. Other times it just gets burned.

AMT: Okay, so you're saying the people working with it could be susceptible to stuff, but it doesn't go back into any system that makes the general public susceptible?

JP: We have very efficient water treatment and filtration systems in the UK, which remove all bacteria and so on, but they could potentially be a source of antibiotic resistance mixing between bacteria because bacteria can communicate via horizontal gene transfer.

AMT: So now that there's a better understanding of what people are flushing down their toilets and pouring down their sinks, what has to happen?

JP: People shouldn't pour cooking oil down the sinks and also they should try and avoid using soaps and fatty-based makeup etc. But the main thing seems to be cooking oil and we think that in many of the cases it's cooking oil coming from fast food restaurants.

AMT: OK so it's not only solely households.

JP: So Kentucky Fried Chickens and a number of other type of fast food outlets like that.

AMT: So it is the congealed oil that then traps all this other stuff and doesn't let it move and makes it grow and everything.

JP: It does and it then sets solid as well. So it's not soft squiggy oil it then literally sets solid like concrete.

AMT: Has this changed what you flush or pour down the drain?

JP: I've always been very careful with what I put down the toilets anyway and I would never put things like wet wipes down there anyway, but I think it should change people's behaviour. Particularly people who've seen the program because they will hopefully stop putting wet wipes and plastic single-use plastics down the toilet.

AMT: You're going to gross them out and change their behaviour.

JP: Yes. Have you seen it?

AMT: I haven't actually seen it, no. I've seen the stories here on CBC about the hunt for the Fatbergs, but I haven't actually looked at the detail. You want to watch it, it's fascinating actually.

AMT: OK well Justin thanks for your time.

JP: Thank you very much then. Bye-bye.

AMT: Bye-bye. That's Justin Pachebat. He's a lecturer in Microbial Genomics at Aberystwyth University in Wales. While Fatbergs are not unique to Britain, we have our own two tonne monsters clogging municipal sewers in places across Canada and since clogged sewers cause backups that flood your basement, increase your insurance rates and damage the environment, there is a push to do something to stop the growth of the Fatberg. Barry Orr is the sewer outreach and control inspector for the City of London Ontario. He is also known as Captain FOG, fog as in fats, oils and grease. He represents Canada on the international stage when it comes to finding solutions for consumer and business behaviours that lead to Fatbergs and Barry Orr is in our London, Ontario studio. Hello.

BARRY ORR: Good morning Anna.

AMT: So Captain FOG, where'd you get that moniker?

BO: That came about in 2008 when I started to inspect restaurants around the city of London and it just sort of followed me around.

AMT: And is it true you have your own Fatberg in an aquarium?

BO: I have had a Fatberg in an aquarium for many years to help show students the situation down below, that most don't get to see.

AMT: Kind of like a pet Fatberg?

BO: Well yes. Unfortunately working in the sewer system nobody else gets to see what you're dealing with, so you have to really bring it up above, so you can get people's attention about these bad behaviours that are going on within the system, right.

AMT: So tell us what it's like to go in search of a Fatberg in a sewer system.

BO: It's not much fun and you have to suit up and have some gas meters and safety equipment and all kind of protective equipment on because all kinds of things are being flushed down toilets and poured down sinks and so, yeah it's quite a bit of work and we have a lot of dedicated professionals right across the globe doing a great job in fighting these Fatbergs.

AMT: So when you come across one it's like, what's it look like?

BO: Well for the most part, a lot of people are dumping bacon fat down the drain. And so bacon fat is sort of this yellowish-whitish colour and it's got all kinds of non-flushable material in there such as wipes and feminine hygiene products and cotton swabs and flossers, I just, these plastic flossers out there by the hundreds of thousands. People are flushing them and I just don't understand it. So that's what it sort of looks like.

AMT: And we really have to stop that. Who flushes that? Who does that?

BO: We have to stop a lot of things from going down the toilet. The only thing that should be going down the toilet is human waste and toilet tissue. That is it.

AMT: OK, so when you come across this, is it like a big ball, sitting in half the sewer or does it start congealing around the pipes and then just keeps moving inward to make the actual pipe outlets smaller, like what is it actually physically look like when you come across it?

BO: So what happens is we usually put cameras down in the sewers, most of the time to see what's going on. And as you're putting the camera along you can see that it's collecting on ridges, it's collecting on sections of the pipe and then it just starts to grow and so certain areas of the sewer might collect more fats and garbage than other parts and so it literally can block an entire sewer line.

AMT: Kind of like a clogged artery.

BO: Exactly.

AMT: And so when you have something like this we talked about, you know, the basements rising insurance costs, what are the other problems that are caused?

BO: Well it could overflow on the road and you know the square things on the side of roads and in parking lots are storm drains so they're only for rainwater and snow melt. There's absolutely no treatment on that. So if you have raw sewage bubbling up through the manholes, getting into the storm drains that's going directly into our creeks and rivers. And so this is what really concerns me because I see so many of these products that should never be flushed, now entering our natural environment and so people need to be aware of what to flush.

AMT: And you've got them in London, Ontario so you don't need a population of of multiple millions to have these things growing in your sewers.

BO: Well back in 2008, when we started, yes we had about 40 percent of our blockages related to fats, oils and grease. But then we started a program of inspecting restaurants and visiting restaurants and instantaneously we saw a difference in our sewer lines. But we also saw problems with our residential areas and so we created a program for residents to put fats, oils and grease into a cup here and it's been very successful. We're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year here in London and we haven't had a blockage related to fats, oils and grease in over four years now here in London, Ontario.

AMT: Just by putting out this, it's like a, it looks like a disposable coffee cup essentially.

BO: Yeah, it's basically a cup that is degradable in a commercial composting facility and all you do is put your fats, oils and grease in it and what we found was people would do it, first off, and then secondly that we found that it was very valuable to collect the fats, oils and grease and get it over to an anaerobic digester that would produce methane gas and that methane gas would then be able to burn electricity or create clean electricity for the grid. So last year we collected over six thousand kilograms of fats, oils and grease at our enviro depots here in London.

AMT: OK. And that was solely from households or was that also from commercial cooking.

BO: Nope. Solely from households.

AMT: Fascinating. So, but how do you collect it, do people just stick it in their garbage or do they actually have, like there's a special collection for this stuff.

BO: Yeah. City of London has four depots called enviro depots and we've set up bins and totes at these depots so the residents can bring their cups full of fats, oils and grease to us at those depots. We put it into a tote and then we're able to get it over to this anaerobic digester facility. So this is really incredible that our community is A, using the cup, saving us money, but B, also dropping it off for us. We've taken a waste product and we've turned it into a resource now.

AMT: So that's hats off to the people of London, Ontario, huh.

BO: Our community has really been engaged in this. There's all kinds, church groups and environmental groups and students and businesses are asking for us to come and drop off cups for their employees and so we've handed out over 100,000 cups.

AMT: And so if it sounds pretty straightforward why aren't, why isn't every city doing this?

BO: A lot of cities are doing things related to proper disposal of fats, oils and grease there and so some cities have picked up on the cups and have started it. We've had inquiries all across Canada for municipalities, we've had inquiries from the States and Australia and Japan and even the UK. I was over in the UK and I went to the Museum of London and I saw the Fatberg that was over there in their museum.

AMT: OK, well thank you for bringing us up to date on a solution, Barry Orr.

BO: Well thank you for having me and everyone just remember that toilets are not garbage cans.

AMT: Okay, well thank you. That's Barry Orr, the Sewer Outreach and Control inspector for the city of London, Ontario, known as Captain FOG. Now before we go any further, we do want to hear from you, what do you do with your used oil, do you have anything like a cup or a tin to save it? What goes down your drain? Admit it. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Go to our Facebook page. Email us from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. And let's get some more perspective on the Fatberg problem, someone who sees only opportunity in all that used cooking oil. Scott Lewis is the executive vice president of commercial operations and strategy for World Energy. It's a renewable energy company with eight biodiesel and renewable diesel plants across North America. He's with me in our Toronto studio. Welcome.

SCOTT LEWIS: Thank you very much, Anna Maria.

AMT: And so our last guest talks about the cup system, how do you capture used cooking oil?

SL: Well we buy it as a finished product. We deal with more of the commercial and industrial side of grease collection. So it's been the law for many, many years that businesses and industrial operation, food operations aren't able to put that product to the waste greases and oils from cooking operations down the drain. And so it's been collected for many years and what we do is we buy it from the companies that process it. Basically they collect it from the back of a restaurant. If you look at the back of a restaurant you'll see a barrel of some sort that they pour all the grease that they use in the cooking and it gets collected, basically takes, goes back to a central facility where it gets boiled. They boil off the water that collects in there, they strain out the french fry bits and so on and then we buy it. And so we turned it into biodiesel and renewable diesel. Our plant in Hamilton, Ontario processes about fifty-two thousand tonnes of that per year, just to put a little perspective on, you know, having on a residential side and finding 6000 kilograms, which is a huge number when you think about it on a per capita basis, but you know we're processing 52000 tonnes in Hamilton. When our second facility in Ontario comes up next year, it'll be about the same amount again. And we have plants around around North America that do even more.

AMT: OK, I have lots of questions.

SL: O kay.

AMT: So first of all, how much a barrel like how expensive, how lucrative is one barrel of cooking grease then sitting outside a restaurant?

SL: Well, oh that's an interesting calculation. Basically the restauranteur used to have to pay to have that product taken away. It was a cost to them. So there were lots of places for slippage and I'm sure that more than one did put it down the drain to avoid the hassle and the cost. Now because of programs like having the Greener Diesel Program in Ontario, where you get a benefit, an added benefit for taking waste products such as yellow grease and animal fats and turning those into energy, that the values have grown considerably. So now it is the restauranteurs and the actual creators of that of that grease are part of the value chain, so they get paid to have that taken away.

AMT: OK, OK. And does anybody try to steal it?

SL: I think they do. I think that, right now we've seen the value for that today in US dollars per tonne, the way it trades is about 450 to 500 dollars per tonne in when the market, because it's a commodity, the market goes higher and lower. It's been as high as 800 to 900 dollars a tonne in past years and so at that point you do get people coming out of the woodwork and in the middle of the night going and stealing those barrels and trying to sell it. I'll tell you it's very easy to run a profitable business if you have no cost attached to it. So when they steal it, it means a lot of profit. I don't think it lasts for very long and I think that the actual collectors that have contracts to pick this up, they have been policing it more and more. They've been getting the authorities involved and slowly, but surely I think they're tamping that down.

AMT: So interesting and this is called yellow grease?

SL: Yellow grease or recovered vegetable oils, recovered cooking oils, you know the trade names for it, they vary in different areas.

AMT: OK so you say 52,000 tonnes of this gets processed in Hamilton?

SL: Yeah, just at our facility alone.

AMT: Okay and how does that translate into, you make biofuel with that?

SL: We make biodiesel at that particular plant. We could also make renewable diesel at our other plant that would, coming online next year. And so these are direct replacements for or additives to diesel fuel. So currently with the Greener Diesel mandate across Ontario, it's mandatory that producers and importers of petroleum products need to blend four per cent of their total pool with biofuels, such as biodiesel or renewable diesel.

AMT: Okay so that's a fairly large volume.

SL: Very large volume.

AMT: A fuel you're creating from our french fry orders.

SL: That's exactly right.

AMT: OK. And you say there are government mandates. First, where is this industry headed, is it only going to get bigger?

SL: Well we certainly hope so and we're trying to do that. The benefit is that when we are able to take a waste product like yellow grease and convert that into biodiesel, we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions when compared to petroleum diesel of about 102 percent. We can actually go above 100 percent because we upgrade our co-products such as glycerin which go to replacing petrochemicals in the industrial sector.

AMT: And you can get carbon credits for, can you not?.

SL: We do. Yes.

AMT: And so you're talking about fueling vehicles and fueling with biodiesel fuel, what about the grid? What about the electrical grid, is some of this going into that?

SL: Certainly you could use it for stationary power as well, we don't have a mandate for that yet, but we do see that on the horizon. We hope that it happens. Right now the transportation sector is the single largest emitter of carbon in our society. So it's about 25 per cent comes from transportation. And so the idea is to tackle the biggest things first. Ontario has a very clean grid itself, with wind power, nuclear and hydro. So I think that the places where you can make the biggest inroads into both ethanol and gasoline, as well as biodiesel and renewable diesel into diesel fuel.

AMT: So as you look to the future, how dominant could yellow grease become in fueling our cars and providing electrical power?

SL: Well I think it's important to realize that it's both yellow grease, it's also animal fats that go into that at our rendering facilities. And so between the two there certainly is a limit. Because society produces, you obviously, this is a byproduct of the food industry. This is not the reason why that food happens. And so it really is taking every bit that you can and looking for new sources as well. So from here you're going to go into cellulosic processes that are going to take all matter of waste and once waste has has a place in the economic chain, then it's no longer waste and it derives value and people start to preserve it and start to take care of it, as if it's going to be a finished product.

AMT: So there have been regulations about the kind of the dumping of grease obviously from commercial businesses. At the same time this kind of thing where there's actually monetary value in hanging onto it, just provides greater incentive, right?

SL: That's exactly right. This is about the real grassroots of what a low carbon economy is, when you can take waste products that people formerly thought there's just, I have to pay to have this taken away or it's a difficult thing for me to deal with and you create value in it. And that's exactly what is the best thing for society right now.

AMT: And then the Fatberg will be an endangered species.

SL: Wouldn't that be wonderful.

AMT: Scott Lewis thanks for coming in.

SL: Thank you so much.

IR: Scott Lewis is the executive vice president of commercial operations and strategy for World Energy, a renewable energy company. He spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in May in Toronto.

[Music]

IR: That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Redd Pepper may not be a household name, but you definitely know his deep gravelly voice from hundreds of movie trailers. He joins guest host Laurie Brown to talk about his unique career in the movies. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again or listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or tablet. Hear the day's top stories, even make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally today, we've just been down in the sewers talking about the infamous fatberg. Let's end today's show on a lighter note. Comedian and actor Art Carney portrayed a New York sewer worker, Ed Norton, on the classic TV show, The Honeymooners. And in 1955 he recorded a novelty single in character. Here is Art Carney with the Song of the Sewer. I'm Ioanna Roumeliotis. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Song: "Song of the Sewer" by Art Carney]

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Aug. 21, 2018 episode transcript

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