Trash Trail

For the first time in Singapore, we embed GPS trackers on 30 discarded refrigerators to find out what really happens to the appliances we throw. Our refrigerators contain harmful gases and should be recycled properly. Are they?

We drink 630 million cups of coffee a year, and throw out at least 50 kilograms of paper cups every day. In fact each person drinking one cup of coffee out of a paper cup every day for a year, creates 10 kilograms of waste. Some of us try to recycle the paper cups, but what really happens to these cups when they’re collected?

Every year, Singaporeans throw out 80% of the clothes they buy. Jason Godfrey follows the trail of these unwanted clothes, and finds that recycling is not the answer. He needs to convince Singaporeans to throw less. Will he succeed?

Compared to your current smartphone, the old 2G phone in your drawer is more toxic when incinerated, and more precious when recycled. We only recycle 6000 phones a year. Instead we trash some half a million phones every year. #Trashtrail tallies the environmental costs of not recycling our phones.

In this final episode, we go on a different kind of trail. We store our data on our hard drives and on cloud. Passwords, photographs, work documents. When you delete them, are they completely gone? What happens if you can't?