While I Was Recycling, the World Caught Fire

I. The Day the Bin Lid Closed

The lid was the cheap green plastic kind, the sort that warps in summer and goes brittle in winter, and the instruction printed on a sticker inside it told me to rinse out my recycling before placing it in the cart. I had rinsed it once already, vaguely, before realising that the can in my hand needed a second pass because tomato sauce had clung to the rim. I stood at the sink, hot tap running, and I did what I do whenever someone tells me to add energy to a process. I started counting.

A litre of hot water from a Canadian municipal supply has been pumped, treated, and heated. The energy embedded in it is not large but it is not nothing, and it is paid for in carbon by whichever province the local grid runs on. The tin in my hand had already cost energy to manufacture, fill, ship, and chill. Now it was costing more energy to wash, more energy to truck to a sorting facility, more energy to bale, more energy to ship to a smelter, more energy to remelt. Somewhere in that chain, if the smelter was doing its job, the recovered aluminium would beat the energy cost of virgin aluminium by about 95%. For aluminium, the equation closes. For aluminium, even the rinse pays back.

For most of what was in the cart, I suspected it did not.

I was not, at that moment, a sceptic of recycling. I was a man at a sink running a back-of-the-envelope energy calculation and finding that it would not balance for the things I was washing. The economist that lives somewhere in my head woke up next. He asked the supply-and-demand question. If recycled glass cullet, recycled mixed plastic, recycled office paper had real market value, why was the city paying contractors to collect it rather than being paid for it? Why did the contractors then pay someone else to take it? Why, when I read the trade press, did so many of the bales seem to end up not in a domestic mill but on a container ship?

I did not have answers yet. I had a quiet, uncomfortable sense that the instruction on the lid had been written by a person who had not done either calculation, and that I was about to.

I should say which side I stand on, because what follows will sound like the other side. If the world were divided into two camps, those who believe we should look after the planet and those who believe we should exploit it, I would be in the first without hesitation, and I would not be a quiet member of it. I have spent the larger part of my working life building businesses adjacent to that camp, and I have raised children inside it. The disillusion in what follows is not the disillusion of someone who has changed sides. It is the disillusion of someone who has watched his own side waste 50 years, and who took a long time to notice that he was part of the waste.

II. The Two Equations

There are two equations any green practice has to pass before I will take its claims at face value. The first is energy: does the practice, taken end to end, return more energy or avoid more emissions than it consumes? The second is economic: does the practice produce something the market would buy at a price that covers its cost, without a subsidy that simply transfers the failure to a different ledger? These are not hostile tests. They are the tests an engineer or a founder runs on any process before scaling it. If a practice cannot survive them, calling it green will not save it; it will only delay the day someone notices it is not working.

When I started applying the two equations to ordinary green practice, the world broke into two halves with surprising cleanness. Loft insulation passes both. Better-glazed windows pass both. Heat pumps pass both in temperate climates and most of Canada. LED lighting passes both so easily it has driven incandescents from the shelves without a campaign. Domestic aluminium recycling passes both. Steel scrap, cardboard, bottle returns in deposit systems pass both. These are not the cases I am angry about.

The cases I am angry about are the ones where the equations fail and people like me pretend they don’t.

In June 2013, a Canadian company called Chronic Inc. began shipping containers labelled “plastic scrap for recycling” from Vancouver to Manila. By the time the Philippine customs service had finished its inspections, 103 containers, roughly 2,500 tonnes, had been opened to reveal household refuse: used adult nappies, soiled newspaper, water bottles, kitchen waste, the kind of contamination that makes any sorting facility weep. The diplomatic argument that followed lasted six years. In April 2019 President Duterte said Canada should “eat” its garbage, and in May the Philippines recalled its ambassador. Canada eventually paid Bollore Logistics C$1.14 million to ship the waste home. Sixty-nine of the containers came back on the Bavaria, arriving at Roberts Bank in Delta on 29 June 2019, where the contents were finally burned in Burnaby for energy. The other 34 had already been disposed of in Philippine landfills during the row.

That story is not an isolated embarrassment. It is the structure of the system briefly visible. In January 2018 China’s National Sword policy banned 24 categories of imported solid waste. China had been quietly handling roughly half of the world’s recyclables since the early 1990s. When that door closed, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand became the next destinations, and they began rejecting containers in turn. Malaysia sent more than 3,700 tonnes back to source countries in 2019 and 2020. Indonesia inspected 1,095 containers and found 45% of them contaminated. The export of household virtue to the Global South was being refused on the grounds that it was, at root, the export of garbage.

This is the moment my view on recycling moved. It did not move because recycling is wrong. It moved because I understood what had been driving it. The motivator was not the energy equation. It was not the economic equation. It was an emotional and political equation. Local authorities collected what was easy to collect under the cart, residents felt better for sorting it, and the failures of the downstream economics were transferred quietly to other countries’ beaches and rivers. Recycling, in the form I had been practising it, was not a process designed to pass either of my two tests. It was a public ritual whose value lay almost entirely in being performed.

The scholarly literature, when I went looking for it, had been making this point for almost three decades. John Tierney’s “Recycling Is Garbage” appeared in the New York Times Magazine on 30 June 1996, and reportedly set the magazine’s all-time hate-mail record. His follow-up 19 years later, “The Reign of Recycling” (3 October 2015), reached the same conclusion with updated figures from the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste-reduction model: that recycling one tonne of plastic saves about one tonne of CO2 but at a cost that runs from $300 to $2,000, far above any defensible price on carbon. Daniel K. Benjamin’s 2010 study for the Property and Environment Research Center, Recycling Myths Revisited, drawing on Franklin Associates data, found that the average state-of-the-art kerbside programme cost $199 per tonne of municipal waste against $119 per tonne for landfill, even after netting out the resale value of recovered material. Bucknell’s Thomas Kinnaman, writing with Takayoshi Shinkuma and Masashi Yamamoto in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2014, concluded that the socially optimal recycling rate for Japan was around 10 per cent, far below the 30 to 40 per cent rates that programmes there and elsewhere had been mandated to hit.

The plastic story deserves a finer point, because it is the most cynical of the bunch, and I had not understood it properly until I read the reporting. In March and September 2020, FRONTLINE and NPR published an investigation, Plastic Wars, in which three former senior figures inside the American plastics industry went on the record. Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, said: “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.” Lew Freeman, former vice-president for government affairs at the same body, said: “There was never an enthusiastic belief that recycling was ultimately going to work in a significant way.” Ronald Liesemer, the industry veteran put in charge of “making recycling happen across the US,” told NPR he had known the projects he was funding could not be economic at scale. An internal speech from 1974, dug up by the investigation, contained the line: “There is serious doubt that plastic recycling can ever be made viable on an economic basis.” The chasing-arrows symbol on the bottom of consumer plastics, the resin-identification code adopted in 1988, was a piece of industry choreography designed to defuse a wave of state-level bottle bans. It worked. Roland Geyer, Jenna Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law, writing in Science Advances on 19 July 2017, calculated that of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced since 1950, 9% had been recycled, 12% incinerated, and 79% accumulated in landfills or the environment.

This is not the recycling I was sold. The recycling I was sold was a system in which my rinsed yogurt pot returned to the economy as another yogurt pot. The recycling that actually exists is one in which aluminium and steel and corrugated cardboard quietly do real work, glass varies wildly with transport distance, and most consumer plastic is theatre. The aluminium tin in my hand was honest. Half the rest of my cart was a performance I had been trained to put on.

There is a smaller piece of this that has bothered me for years, and the research now allows me to say where it sits. I remember being told, more than once, that recycled white office paper required more bleaching than virgin paper from sustainably managed forests, and was therefore the worse choice. The strong form of that claim is wrong. The lifecycle assessments I have read, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste-reduction model and the Environmental Paper Network’s Paperwork review of more than 20 studies, find that recycled paper still wins on energy, water, greenhouse gas, and solid waste once forest carbon and avoided landfill methane are counted. The weaker form has merit, however, and it is the form Two Sides North America argues with some credibility. Deinking produces real sludge, sometimes 22% of the weight of the wastepaper recycled. Recycled fibre does need a hydrogen-peroxide bleaching stage that virgin pulp does not. Fibre can only be recycled five to seven times before it shortens beyond use, so the system requires virgin input. The accurate position is that recycled paper from a well-run mill beats virgin paper from a well-run mill, but the gap is narrower than the recycling campaign material wants you to believe, and the comparison is best-against-best, not slogan-against-reality. Sustainability is not sustainable when it refuses to look at its own balance sheet.

The phrase I keep coming back to is the obvious one. Sustainability is not sustainable when the equations are ignored. The rinsing instruction on the lid of my bin was the first time I started to suspect that nobody asking me to follow it had run the equations either.

III. The Convenient Fool

If recycling were the only piece of green practice that failed the two equations, this essay would be a complaint about kerbsides. It is not. Across the decades in which climate change moved from a scientific argument to a daily experience, larger storms, longer droughts, record temperatures, record snows, countries that had not needed air-conditioning installing it to keep their citizens alive, the movement most insistent on action has chosen, with a consistency that begins to look like a doctrine, the green practices that fail the equations and the political tactics that fail their own goals.

I do not put all of this down to bad faith. Most of the people I have met in this camp are well meaning. They are properly intentioned. They are also, often, fools, and I write that with sadness because I am one of them. The fool, in the sense I mean it, is the camp member who confuses doing something for doing something useful, who treats the discomfort of the gesture as proof of its value, and who, when challenged on the equations, retreats to the moral seriousness of the cause as if that were an answer.

The fool with a microphone has cost us a great deal. He has gone on television to glue himself to the road and bring a city to a standstill in the name of climate action. He has thrown soup at a Van Gogh in a glass case, which the police gently wipe clean while the painting stays unharmed and the public learns to associate climate with vandalism. He has called every supporter of nuclear power a stooge of the oil industry. He has presented wind and solar as the only honest answers, in language that does not survive contact with a transmission engineer. He has done all of this, on the whole, sincerely. That is what makes it so expensive.

Wind and solar are useful technologies. Where they pass the equations, they pass them well, and they have got steadily better at passing them as costs have fallen. There are sites where utility-scale solar is now the cheapest electron a grid can buy. There are offshore wind regimes where the load factor and the transmission story line up. The argument I am making is not against wind or solar. It is against the framing in which their merits become a substitute for engineering, and in which the people pointing out where they fail are treated as the enemy. The intermittency of wind and solar is not a smear invented by oil interests. It is a property of the sun and the weather. The storage required to firm them on a grid scale is not a detail. The land area required to displace a city’s load is not a detail. The mineral inputs required for that scale of storage are not a detail. Each of these is, in fact, where the next generation of engineering work will be done, and people doing that work do not need the rhetorical cover that says wind and solar are already enough. The rhetorical cover is what costs us.

What costs us most of all is the way it discredits the camp. Every time a serious person in finance or in industry looks at a piece of green advocacy and sees that the equations are not being engaged, they reach for the simplest hypothesis: that the camp is unserious. They are wrong about that, because most of the camp is desperately serious. They have been given the evidence they needed, though, by the loudest among us. The strategic position of the most important political movement of the century, the movement that argues for the planet, has been steadily eroded by people who believe they are advancing it. I cannot think of another movement that has so consistently mistaken volume for traction.

This is the disenfranchisement I mean. It has happened before.

IV. The Atom We Talked Ourselves Out Of

In the early 1960s, the mainstream Anglophone environmental movement was either indifferent to nuclear power or quietly supportive of it. The Sierra Club deferred to the Atomic Energy Commission on technical questions. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists framed fission as cleaner than coal. Glenn Seaborg, who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971 under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, made the case in unambiguous terms in his testimony to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy’s 1969 hearings on the environmental effects of producing electric power. David Lilienthal, the commission’s first chair and the man behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, had spent his postwar career arguing for the peaceful atom. The Sierra Club’s first major reactor fight, over Bodega Bay in California, was conducted not against nuclear power as such but against a particular plant on a particular fault line, and its conservation logic was about coast and seismic risk, not about the atom.

The pivot, when it came, was less about new science than about an internal political fight and a different sort of money.

David Brower, then executive director of the Sierra Club, refused the compromise that would have traded Nipomo Dunes preservation for a reactor at Diablo Canyon. The Club’s membership voted in 1967 and again in 1969 to accept the trade. In 1969 the anti-Brower slate, fronted by Ansel Adams and Richard Leonard, swept the available board seats; Brower was forced out. In July of that year he founded Friends of the Earth on the back of a personal gift from Robert O. Anderson, the chief executive of Atlantic Richfield, the oil company that had just announced the Prudhoe Bay strike and was trying to push the Trans-Alaska Pipeline through approval. Brower’s own memoir, For Earth’s Sake, recalls the founding gift as roughly $200,000, about $1.6 million in current dollars. Atomic Insights, a pro-nuclear site that should be read as one, puts the founding cheque specifically at $80,000, with continued funding through the Atlantic Richfield Foundation in subsequent years. Anderson was a quiet personal supporter of nuclear power. He bankrolled an environmental voice that opposed it. That is a story you can read in several places now. It was not visible at the time.

The body charged with merging the public memory of the reactor and the bomb was less interested in oil money. Helen Caldicott, an Australian paediatrician who had begun her activism against French Pacific weapons tests in 1971, revived the dormant Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1978 and used it to frame nuclear power and nuclear weapons as a single medical risk. Physicians for Social Responsibility grew to around 23,000 members. The film The China Syndrome opened on 16 March 1979. Twelve days later, on 28 March, Three Mile Island Unit 2 partially melted down in Pennsylvania. The University of Pittsburgh’s 20-year follow-up of the exposed population (Talbott et al., 2003) found no statistically significant excess cancer deaths and an average dose to nearby residents of about one millirem, roughly one-sixth of a chest X-ray. None of this mattered. The combination of an apocalyptic film, a real but contained accident, and a movement increasingly trained to read every reactor as a small Hiroshima did the political work that decades of patient public relations could not have done.

The cost of the pivot is the substance of the argument, so here are the figures and the names.

Markandya and Wilkinson’s analysis in The Lancet in 2007, updated and expressed per terawatt-hour by Our World in Data, gives the comparative safety record of electricity sources. Coal: roughly 24.6 deaths per terawatt-hour, almost all of them from air pollution. Oil: 18.4. Natural gas: 2.8. Hydro: 1.3, skewed by the 170,000 deaths at Banqiao in 1975. Wind: 0.04. Solar: 0.02. Nuclear: 0.03 to 0.07, depending on how the rare events are amortised. Chernobyl, on the figures of the World Health Organization and the UN scientific committee on radiation, killed 31 people in the immediate aftermath (two from the explosion, 28 from acute radiation syndrome, one from a related cardiac event), plus about 15 thyroid-cancer deaths confirmed since; the WHO’s 2006 upper-bound projection sat at up to 4,000 eventual cancers in the most-exposed cohort. Fukushima killed nobody by radiation; one lung-cancer compensation was awarded in 2018 and the roughly 2,200 deaths usually attached to the accident were caused by the evacuation, mostly of elderly residents from care homes. Three Mile Island, again, killed nobody and produced no measurable excess. These are not the numbers of a uniquely dangerous technology. They are the numbers, if anything, of the safest serious source of electricity ever brought to scale.

What did the pivot cost us, then, if those are the numbers? Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen, writing in Environmental Science & Technology in 2013, found that nuclear power as actually built between 1971 and 2009 had already prevented 1.84 million air-pollution deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent. That is what we did get. The counterfactual is the harder, more uncomfortable number. Peter Lang, an advocate of nuclear power writing in Energies in 2017 (“Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates; Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone”), modelled the divergence point in the late 1960s and early 1970s where nuclear shifted from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rising costs and stalled deployment. His counterfactual finds that the technology would have substituted for between 69,000 and 186,000 terawatt-hours of coal and gas generation; would have avoided up to 9.5 million premature deaths and 174 gigatonnes of CO2; and would today cost about 10% of what it does. Lang’s counterfactual assumes that the learning rates of the 1960s would have continued unbroken, which is the most generous assumption available, and I give his numbers as the upper bound of what was forgone rather than as a finding; a quarter of them would still be the largest figure in this essay. We are now told that decarbonising the grid is the great task of our century. We had it begun and we stopped.

Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist, in A Bright Future (2019), give the comparator that should haunt every wind-and-solar-only programme: Sweden decarbonised its grid in about 15 years from 1972 to 1986 by combined hydro and nuclear; France did the same in about 15 years from 1974 to 1989 by nuclear alone. No renewables-only programme anywhere has matched that pace per capita. We had a working example of how to decarbonise a national grid in human-political time. We decided we did not like it.

The change of mind, when it has come, has come too late but it has come, and the names are worth recording because my own camp owes it to itself to honour the people who did change. James Lovelock, of the Gaia hypothesis, wrote in The Independent on 24 May 2004 that “nuclear power is the only green solution,” and asked his “friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, published Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto in 2009, listing his earlier anti-nuclear position as one of the four he had reversed and offering the line that “with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.” George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist who had been a fixture of the anti-nuclear left for decades, wrote on 21 March 2011, ten days after the Fukushima tsunami: “A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.” Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, published Nuclear 2.0 in 2013, writing: “I blame the Green Movement for at least half of cumulative emissions. If the nuclear power programs proposed in the 1960s and ‘70s had continued, then most of the world’s electricity would probably be zero carbon.” Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus had begun this argument from inside the movement with “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004 and have carried it since. On 3 November 2013 James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, and Tom Wigley wrote an open letter “To those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power” in which they put the case in a single sentence: “There is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”

The green movement did not cause climate change. A movement which set out to address it, though, spent 50 years opposed to the one mature technology that could most quickly have displaced fossil fuels, and the opposition was funded in part by the fossil-fuel interests it claimed to be fighting. The mistake the movement made in 1969 was confusing nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, and the mistake we are still making now is letting that confusion stand for sophistication. The decision to forgo nuclear was not a political misjudgement of marginal cost. It was, on Lang’s numbers and on any reasonable fraction of them, the largest single self-inflicted wound in the history of climate policy. The people doing the inflicting were on my side of the line.

V. Think Globally, Act Local

I have lived in Canada long enough to take an interest in how it sets its environmental account, and the account is the two equations at the scale of a country. Canada has one of the cleanest grids in the G7: around four-fifths of its generation comes from non-emitting sources, mostly hydro and nuclear, and the provinces that carry its heavy industry sit far below the grids of China, India and Indonesia, which run five or six times dirtier per kilowatt-hour. In the name of Net Zero it has nonetheless exported the value-added stages of its core extractive industries to exactly those grids. The heavy oil goes south unrefined and comes back as petrol and diesel. The lithium leaves as concentrate and is refined in China. Most of the copper concentrate is smelted in Asia, and the nickel goes to Norway and Asia as matte. Aluminium, refined at home on Quebec and British Columbia hydro power, is the honourable exception and the proof of what the alternative looks like. A tonne of processing moved from a Canadian smelter to a Chinese one is not a tonne of emissions avoided. It is a tonne multiplied by five and moved off the national books, and the estimates of how much of any Canadian reduction is simply re-emitted elsewhere, contested as they are, all start at a large fraction.

This is the deeper sense in which the slogan “Think Globally, Act Local” went wrong. It was meant to localise responsibility for global goods. In practice it localised the moral feeling and globalised the costs. Canada feels better; the planet does not. Vaclav Smil, the energy historian at the University of Manitoba who has spent his career counting joules and tonnes and who is not, by any defensible reading, a denier, put the objection in a 2024 interview as “shutting down domestic production and offshoring too many major industries for which we have advantages and resources at home”, and the country has begun, quietly and without saying so, to agree with him: the consumer carbon levy cancelled in 2025, the emissions cap interred, the pipelines that were never built. The retreat will be more orderly and less expensive in proportion as the camp owns up to where the equations did not close.

VI. The Innovation That Saves the Planet Is Old

If I had to put my disillusion in a sentence, it would be this. Green politics has tried to do with friction what only innovation can do. Carbon taxes and carbon caps and recycling mandates and household virtue have produced an enormous administrative apparatus that creates overhead, raises costs, and, at best, modestly changes consumption patterns at the margin. They have not, on any honest reading of the last 30 years, produced the structural transformations that decarbonise grids and industries. The structural transformations that have arrived have arrived through capital markets and engineering. The cost of solar fell because of supply-chain learning curves Henry Ford would have recognised. The cost of LEDs fell the same way. The cost of utility-scale battery storage is falling the same way now. The cost of small modular nuclear reactors, finally, has begun to do so, in Ontario and Wyoming and Tennessee, on the back of the same kind of supply-chain compounding that bent the cost curve for everything from steam turbines to silicon.

The strongest reply to that sentence comes from the recent record of nuclear construction in the West, and it deserves its full weight. Hinkley Point C in Somerset, Vogtle in Georgia and Flamanville in Normandy all ran years late and billions over budget, and in none of the three was the green movement the obstacle; the delays were in first-of-a-kind engineering, supply chains that had forgotten how to build reactors, and regulators doing their job. If nuclear cannot be built on time and on budget in three rich countries that wanted it, the objection runs, the pivot of 1969 cannot be blamed for what the industry did to itself. I accept the record and read it the other way. Supply chains forget because they are not used, and the three projects are what a technology looks like after 40 years without a learning curve; Sweden and France built their fleets on schedule because they built them continuously. The pivot did not only stop plants. It stopped the learning, and the overruns are the bill for the pause. The second reply is that friction is not the opposite of innovation but its precondition: solar and batteries came down their cost curves because feed-in tariffs, mandates and carbon prices created the demand that drove the volume. That is fair, and it narrows my claim rather than reversing it. A price on carbon that pays for volume is an investment. A mandate that pays for a gesture is friction, and the rinsing I began with is the second kind.

That is the strange ending of this story. The technology that could most quickly close both my equations on a national grid is the technology the camp talked itself out of in 1969 and is now, slowly, talking itself back into. It is not new. It is old, refurbished, miniaturised, made safer, made buildable in factories rather than on green-field sites the way Ontario built Pickering. It is the kind of thing capital markets reward and political programmes find hard to ship. When the next decarbonisation chapter is written, a great deal of it will be about how slowly the camp moved from the position it took in 1969 to the position it now needs to hold, and how much of the world burned in the interval.

I am not done being in the camp. I am done being asked to wash out a tin in the name of a system whose books do not balance, when the books on a different ledger do not balance either, and the second ledger is the one that matters. The fool is not the person who recycles their aluminium. The fool is the person who confuses the rinsing of a tin with serious work, the person who throws soup at a Van Gogh and calls it a strategy, the person who voted out David Brower and took Robert Anderson’s cheque without asking why an oilman was so keen to fund his anti-nuclear group. I was as much a fool as anyone. I believed that paying for plastic bags and washing plastic containers for the blue bin was helping to save the planet. It was helping me, and people like me, to feel that I was, while years and then decades passed and the planet got hotter almost without a mention from anyone who was taken seriously. I was one of the ignored masses, a happy consumer feeling good about my own efforts to save the planet by doing the right things, even if they made no difference, one of the many who thought that recycling, windmills and a few solar panels would do it, when what would do it was the hard, cold work of economics, making energy sustainable at a price the market would pay, which, had it started 50 years ago, would be finished by now. The voice in this essay is the voice of someone trying to stop.

While I was rinsing the tin, the world caught fire. The least I can do is to put the tap down, look at the equations, and tell the truth about which of them close.