24 Surprising Billion-Dollar Industries | Big Business Marathon | Insider Business

foreign tuna can cost over a million dollars at this auction in Japan and a 12 ounce bottle of aloe vera gel can cost up to twenty dollars these are just two examples of products behind billion dollar Industries [Music] we traveled the globe to learn about these massive and often hidden businesses [Music] our first stop is Japan's toyosu Market where you'll find the priciest cuts of tuna in a 40 billion dollar industry [Music] takayuki has been a Naka aroshi for 30 years for him work starts at 4 30 a.m at toyosu Market there's no such thing as a normal business day octopus and squid arrive a day earlier fresh fish like horse mackerel and sardines come in before midnight and truckloads of tuna are dropped off every hour that's almost 13 million dollars and tuna is the Market's most popular product each day the fish make their way from the both decks to the auction floor but it's more than just the type of tuna you find in a can there's big eye tuna ideal for sushi and sashimi yellowfin tuna perfect for grilling at restaurants due to its high fat content but most bitters are here for the bluefin between 3 and 5 AM wholesale employees lay out tuna one by one bitters like takayuki have about 15 minutes to evaluate dozens of fresh tuna before the auction begins sushi restaurants supermarkets and department stores all depend on nakaroshi like him takayuki looks at the Quality and cost um foreign [Music] any sort of Nick or flesh wound can lower the price by thousands of dollars when tuna is reeled in it can wriggle and ride causing a chemical reaction in the muscles the movement speeds up decomposition and makes tuna sour soggy and less tasty is when the bell rings the bidding begins [Music] a range of hand signals known as tayari are used to place bids an index finger for one and two fingers for two but whether that's 1100 Yen a pound or 12 000 depends on the type of fish being auctioned in just 10 minutes the auction's over and winning bidders claim their prizes the tuna then makes its way from the auction floor to the intermediate wholesale building for filleting toyosu keeps the temperature between 50.9 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit to slow decomposition wholesalers also rely on a fleet of small trucks known as tare they zip through winding corridors to minimize how long the fish are exposed to air foreign works as a unit to move the heavy tuna onto the cutting table to prepare the tuna for cutting first they wash it then remove the ice foreign foreign customers care about two things when it comes to Raw bluefin tuna color and taste um [Music] foreign customers show up early to get the first pick [Music] ready thank you foreign not a single part of the tuna is wasted even its eyes customers have relied on the Market's high quality fish products for decades before the market moved to its new location and was renamed toyosu it was known as the tsukiji markets tsukiji was the epicenter of seafood its success for demand for all types of fish ing for bluefin tuna in the western Atlantic Rose by over 2 000 in 1970 but it was difficult for the market to keep up um meanwhile Japanese tuna consumption was growing significantly um animals Japan has since placed a quota on the number of bluefin tuna caught but it's a double-edged sword for wholesalers like takayuki yes [Music] um Cinema [Music] these men are climbing slippery Limestone Cliffs risking Falls of up to 100 feet they're looking for a rare nest made of bird saliva that's found inside caves across Southeast Asia in the Philippines the Harvesters are known as bouchadors Island centuries family have put their lives on the line to gather swiffliness just two pounds is worth 2 900 and it's used to make a soup that locals believe is good for your health demand is so high that swifflet forms are popping up all over Southeast Asia but busadors continue to gather nests in the wild even with the danger involved we followed Alvin on his hunt to find out why this ancient method of harvesting is still happening and what makes this such a risky business Alvin and his crew gather at bengalan Point on mighty good Island consists of relatives cousins Brothers uncles and nephews they packed the boat with essential tools flashlight and they're heading to nabat Island it's one of the seven thousand islands that make up the Philippines and it can only be reached by boat they get off the boat and walk Barefoot across the slippery and sharp rocks they make the latter as they're climbing up they tighten the bamboo with rope then they attach a piece of wood called kalitang to the ladder suppose foreign but Advanced bushidoors like him sometimes use little to no support only their hands and feet this is the most dangerous way to climb in the regional language it's known as or like a crab Alvin has had some close calls and he dislocated his shoulder ones island is completely remote if there's an emergency there's no way to quickly get help um only Harvest during the day when the birds are out finding food sometimes the caves are lower and easier to reach but the waves crashing against the cliffs present a threat the entrances are small but the caves are usually spacious they use flashlights to light the path after spotting the nests Alvin uses a spray bottle filled with water to loosen them they are then gently peeled away from the cave walls foreign [Music] the birds like the caves because Alvin and his group are also careful not to pick any nests with eggs he knows that if the bird survives so will his livelihood sometimes the nests are hard to reach ES the bird makes a new nest in 15 days when the old one's gone but sometimes all that hard work the bushidoors put in is for nothing if the hall is no good Alvin and his relatives are the only people who Harvest on nabat island that's because his ancestors discovered the caves hundreds of years ago foreign himself was only nine years old when he went to the caves for the first time with his father who was also a Bushido they spent the night on the island but even then they're on high alert swifflet nests are only harvested from December to April and Alvin can find as many as 2500 in those five months after harvesting the bouchadors cleaned them to remove any feathers or branches then they divide them by their hardness and color Class A nests are the most profitable they're typically white dry and made of pure saliva Class B nests are not as white and may have some debris mixed in and Class C nests are soft and yellow just two pounds of the best kind are worth about twenty nine hundred dollars okay the local city hall buys the nest from the bushidoors at a regulated price and sells them to private customers around the world the bushidor split the profits Alvin makes about 600 once the season is complete it isn't a lot of money but he says it's enough [Music] the nests are made from the hardened saliva of the swifflet bird foreign they are the main ingredient in bird's nest soup a delicacy in China and around the world a bowl can cost as much as a hundred dollars but today Alvin gave in and tried some in recent years demand for the nests and bird's nest soup has gone up the industry is worth 5 billion dollars and many Southeast Asian countries have turned to swiftlet farming they've set up structures that mimic the bird's natural habitat dark abandoned buildings that feel like caves and they use fake bird calls to attract the swifflets bushidor say they've noticed a difference in the number of swifflet nests left in the wild but they're not sure if it's because of farming or other environmental factors foreign the Farms do pose a challenge to the bushidor's livelihood but Alvin says cave nests are higher quality than farmed ones locals believe they have medicinal properties and there's some signs that backs it up a 2015 study shows the nests are loaded with nutrients that can boost your child's immunity and they're rich in proteins amino acids and vitamins that strengthen organs [Music] Alvin is finally home after two days of hunting for nests the season is almost over [Music] um for the rest of the year he earns a living by fishing his wife marby is relieved for Alvin climbing the same caves his ancestors did is a great honor now he takes pride in carrying on the traditionally foreign identifying a fake Rolex can be tricky you know as a person who has been dealing with these things for years when it doesn't say Swiss you know something's wrong John Buckley is a veteran watch dealer who buys sells and repairs used Rolexes and they're sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars it's just perfectly perfectly done these days use watches can sell for up to three times their retail price the market is estimated to be worth 20 billion dollars and it's growing fast it's like everybody started buying watches because they're a good way to store money between 2011 and 2021 Rolex has outperformed the stock market real estate and gold but even experienced sellers like John have to be careful for one there are counterfeits U.S customs showed us how it seizes up to 150 000 fig watches per year Rolex watches inside in just plain old bubble wrap and Rolex would never put their watches in little Ziploc bags but spotting a fake isn't always as obvious if dealers like John get stuck with a counterfeit the effects can be disastrous not just financially but it can also destroy the reputation new Young Bucks that come into the business they get caught out there real fast and your reputation is burned burned when you can't make good on a sale Factory bezel Factory dial we follow John through Manhattan's famous Diamond District does he always strikes deals in such a competitive market it's 13-3 no it's not so bad of course it's not so bad why do you think I'm offering it to you this section of 47th Street is home to over 2 600 businesses selling gems jewelry and luxury watches John bison sells roughly a dozen watches per week here from stores and other collectors today he's visiting two of his regular spots little lady's got a paddock that I need hopefully I could buy it from and I'm going to show him a couple of pieces that I've got I gotta find it first oh that's good what's good about this watch it comes fully complete look at the condition you got everything yeah John already has a customer lined up for this rare Patek Philippe I really like this watch what's the date on the papers I'm curious not that it matters he's hoping to get it for under forty thousand dollars listen I know it's a nice watch I'm not here to beach out you know I need it 36 000. I thought I was pretty good at 35. 37 000 that's my final price I think it's fair you can think about it I don't have to think muscle no problem thank you this watch will be sold for 40 40 000 in change so I'll make three grand on the watch which is not bad down the street John has his eye on a gold Rolex day date with diamonds on the bezel or the ring surrounding its glass much is this twenty one thousand dollar watch 25 000 yes two three five you like that right let's do it it's Factor diamond dial Factory diamond bezel 23 pounds the deal but I'm gonna do for you I'm gonna obviously say us but really it's beautiful John typically has around 30 watches in his collection and most already have buyers lined up we like cash flow I write a check I want to know that you know I'm gonna have that money back I'll make my profit on it and move on to the next one it's like the Holy Grail over here I didn't even think they were still producing them he doesn't want to risk getting stuck with something he might not sell even if he loves it like this diamond-studded Rolex from Qatar which has an asking price of 175 thousand dollars when you look at these that they make on the street and you compare it to something like this I mean it's a different world I I I don't have a home for it despite the high price tags John says he rarely makes more than a few thousand dollars per watch sometimes it's only a few hundred there are very few home runs in this game I mean I don't know what is considered a home run making 10 grand on a watch it's like that doesn't happen thank you so much in fact he makes even more money selling obscure Parts than the actual watches these are interesting these are called color change or tropical and years ago you know guys would never keep this stuff but now because they're unique they they keep them and they ask for a lot of money for them these are Daytona dials which are actually pretty cool this is just tons of stuff wallets Rolex duffel bags and hats we have it all we do he's hoarded these Rolex Parts in his workshop for 25 years we're here in the lab this is where I get to uh practice my gorilla watchmaking skills you have to have a very specific part for a very specific watch in order for it to command a very high price [Music] John has seen demand for Rolex parts and watches Skyrocket after 2017 that's when a Rolex Daytona worn by the actor Paul Newman broke a record selling for 15.5 million plus fees selling officially at 15 million five hundred thousand thank you for your patience Natalie it is history now 15 million 500 000. what happened after that was this big bull run and I hate to use stock terminology but that's what it was it's like everybody started buying watches [Music] in 2021 Rolex retail sales were estimated to be higher than the next five Brands combined so why are they in such high demand first off their reputation for quality they're made by hand with materials like 18 karat gold platinum and stainless steel and there aren't many new ones entering the market Brands like Patek Philippe and oldie Mark piguet each make fewer than 100 000 watches per year Rolex makes an estimated 1 million annually and that's still not enough to keep up with demand for most people the only way to get one is to result of that cases is a higher demand than available Supply which causes prices to go up Rolexes also last and can resist all kinds of extreme conditions in fact it started off as a sports brand back in the early 20th century they began making highly functional timepieces designed to go underwater top of mountains and on jet planes and these were professional grade timepieces for people that needed accurate measurement these were not collectible watches back in the day okay you look at some of these you know watches that are six and seven figure watches they sold for maybe a hundred bucks at a military PX or something like that Edmund Hillary one of the first to Summit Everest wore a Rolex Oyster Perpetual during his expedition in 1953. in the 60s Rolex began sponsoring tennis matches Auto races and a number of high-end luxury events Rolex has also started showing up a lot more on movie screens actor Sean Connery wore one as James Bond Marlon Brando War One Two by the 1980s Rolexes were sought after collectibles today a Rolex Daytona model is so popular it's almost impossible to get on a waiting list I'm still on a waiting list since 1996 just to give you an idea but buyers are willing to spend a lot to skip the line which is why used Rolexes can sell for two to three times their retail cost and as demand soars Watch dealers like John have to be even weirier of the biggest trap of the trade counterfeits Customs Officer Steve nethersall showed us how they sniff out and seize counterfeit watches at JFK Airport before a package ever lands in the U.S CBP gathers Intelligence on the sender container and aircraft he'll start by looking at the Box well I'm looking because I don't have my glasses on so I'm cheating the first when it comes in is the country of origin Louis Vuitton they're coming from France the watches coming from Switzerland when it's coming from China Bing that's your number one red flag Rolex would never put their watches in little Ziploc bags they don't put these inside it the silica gel Rolex does not Ascend to individuals in the United States they only sent to their retail stores more than 90 percent of all the goods that we receive that are counterfeit are from China you know sometimes by the naked eye you can't tell but sometimes it's that bad you can but you look and you could see the uh scratches and how it's not machined uh properly to a nice finish so when Steve finds a counterfeit good he seizes it then he figures out the items MSRP using the Brand's website and cbp's internal database this one here would be about eleven thousand dollars that's the MSRP what the manufacturer would be losing had this been gender wine these are generally on the internet for about two hundred dollars back in his Workshop John is figuring out whether this Rolex is counterfeit after 25 years in the industry he usually knows what to look for I mean I'm looking at the color of the case this piece is not the same color as this piece this is 18 karat gold we always have to check because I can't take a chance on paying for it number one or selling it to someone else if I'm not sure what are the most reliable ways to test gold Rolex Parts is a scratch test on a black stone made of quartz then he adds a few drops of nitric acid which dissolves any material that isn't gold and there you go wow the acid did not dissolve the gold over here the acid dissolved to the gold it is not authentic but most of the time he can spot a fake with the naked eye we could usually spot these just based on the symmetry of the case they don't have that nice Rolex slope the other I mean obvious thing that you look at if you look at the amount of space between the face and the glass you will see that it is very high it's probably got an extra millimeter and a half John also has his son James help with fraud detection scroll through hundreds of listings and I pick out the 10 that are fake the threat of counterfeits hasn't stopped sellers or buyers though Rolex is also getting in on the second hand Market launching its own program to sell pre-owned Rolexes younger Generations are fueling this new demand Surge and they're finding out about these old watches on Tick Tock I saw this watch it's a 36 millimeter white gold with a factory bottom dial can you pull it out for me John's son and his friend Tyler mccorski have helped him build a huge social media following Buck was with us today let's get it the bread and butter is the negotiations you know people like to see them so we want to give people what they want but our other thing that we really do well is more so education content today we're going to show you how to change the battery on quartz watch John teaches audiences the same lessons on Tick Tock he showed Tyler when he was still a kid the first time I ever sold a watch for Buckley I was eight years old and it was a rubber swap remember those the rubber Swatch watches and he says I need five dollars on each one go sell them wherever School wherever and and keep whatever's left after the five as far as the whole hustle and the whole grind I got that wimbled in for you if you want it I actually enjoy the going out there and trying to make money aspect of this business thank you thank you despite all these new players Don isn't worried about the competition you go by these guys who fancy themselves you know watch Specialists and they've been doing this for a year or two you know everybody's a specialist or an expert okay listen I'm a freaking expert I've been dealing with this stuff hand to hand I've got the junk to prove it mccowski really left a cup of coffee down here did he really do that that's just rude [Music] making aloe products takes quick hands a good knife and lots of plants it takes about 20 hour leaves to make just one gallon of aloe vera juice but some aloe products have been found to contain no aloe at all it's so easy to to put out a fake aloe product so there are all kinds of synthetic gels so how are real aloe vera products made and can we spot the legit stuff we visited the largest aloe Farm in the world to find out Universal aloe's Farm covers 5 000 acres here in the Dominican Republic while there are hundreds of types of aloe plants this Farm chose aloe barbadensis Miller because it has 20 amino acids mineral vitamin carbohydrates hormones and other bioactive substances once the baby plants are in the ground it takes about eight months for them to mature about 750 people harvest these fields they're dispatched in groups harvesting section by section the cut leaves won't grow back but the plants will grow new ones it will take them about a week to harvest just this one area one by one workers pick up all the harvested leaves and toss them into a truck those leaves head to a processing plant two miles up the road okay I got the amended [Music] foreign the leaves go through a bath of chlorinated salt water to kill off any Little Critters from the field that may be hanging around [Music] this jiggly fillet is the gel inside the aloe leaf that's what's used in real aloe vera juice gel or skin care products [Music] to do it they need a really good knife they might make it look easy but filet takes Precision is [Music] and they have to move fast filleting 3 500 leaves a day many aloe companies use machines for filleting is [Music] the leftover Leaf bits go back out into the field as compost and the buckets of fillets those get weighed then poured onto this big table workers here will inspect them for any leftover Leaf bits which they'll then slice off once it's all clear the fillets head to the shredder which grinds them into a pure aloe gel is at this point ascorbic acid is added to extend the shelf life is [Music] the gel flows into the spill proof bags [Music] this bag is then vacuum sealed and put into a bigger metal box the whole process from Leaf to this container takes only about three hours but before the shipment can leave the factory its contents have to be tested for quality assurance foreign ER passes the lab tests can it be released for shipment these ones are bound for Rotterdam in the Netherlands there the gel will be pumped into bottles for Forever Living Products but not every bottle of aloe is made like this in 2015 consumerlab.com tested 10 aloe products for ingredients half of them failed our tests a 2016 Bloomberg investigation found that Walmart CVS and Target's aloe products contain no evidence of aloe at all it's so easy to put out a fake aloe product so there are all kinds of synthetic gels often you'll see the word like carbomer is a synthetic gel and if you see a clear gel you have no idea if it's really aloe or carbamer most aloe products aren't closely regulated by the FDA that's because they're considered supplements or Cosmetics not drugs so a product can say it contains aloe but it could mean a range of things it really does contain aloe filet or it's the whole Leaf ground up and not just that inner fillet or it's a synthetic gel and there's actually no aloe which won't hurt you but doesn't have any of the supposed benefits of aloe there's not a lot of Regulation or oversight of aloe products it's also hard to regulate because aloe grows naturally all over the Americas and its gel has been used for thousands of years to heal Burns and reduce inflammation the channel problem is there isn't scientific proof of aloe's healing powers some Studies have shown it helps soothe Burns and speed up healing While others show no effect on burns so it's not that aloe doesn't help the evidence isn't there right now the outer rind of the leaf has been found to have a laxative compound called alawin one study found that it caused cancer in rats while another found it helped with constipation but the FDA has banned aloe from being sold as an over-the-counter laxative drug there's no patent on aloe and so there is a lot of incentive for companies to be putting lots of money into clinical studies they don't really need to do those studies to get these products on the Shelf still consumers worldwide are flocking to aloe as they Embrace more natural products Universal aloe saw a 30 increase in demand in 2020 as consumers navigate this growing Market how can we identify the products made with real aloe vera while Todd says it's actually really tricky but he did have a few suggestions first you should always check the ingredient list you want to see aloe you want to see its for first you really need to be super careful on the wording because if it just says Leaf it could be any part of the leaf you could be getting the latex which you don't want unless you want the laxative effect look out for tricky wording like 100 gel that could mean there is 100 gel but not all of it is aloe fillet so you really need to know what part of the leaf is being made when they say aloe gel is it a gel that's made from blending up the whole leaf or is it truly just pure aloe gel despite these uncertainties experts don't expect the demand for Aloe to dip anytime soon 2022 the electronic waste created by humans weighed as much as 350 cruise ships and the industry for recycling it is worth an estimated 40 billion dollars we visited one of the largest E-Waste recycling companies in the U.S to see how hard the process really is that's Ingrid president of Sims life cycle Services one of the largest e-recyclers in the U.S Ingrid took us through her biggest facility to see how it's repurposing or recycling up to 6 million pounds of old electronics every month so we're in Laverne Tennessee just outside of Nashville this is a 200 000 square foot facility where we focus on receiving processing Electronics Sims mainly gets electronic waste from Office gear like laptops computers printers or phones we have Fortune 500 companies like HP and Lexmark insurance companies Banks the rest of its clients are secret but Ingrid can tell us what happens to these devices once they get here reuse repurpose re-engineer if we can't reuse it very last resort is recycling what you see here is where we first get the material in it's a fifo type of process first in first out that's how we work it but here she's offloading a truck so she'll go in get her Forks into the pallet and pull it out she's supposed to come from an office refresh it looks like there's some old DVD players some old stereo equipment the first stop the scale then they will get the weight and then put it into our data center and that's what Drew is doing over there with a computer then it gets tagged with a barcode it'll tell us whether we go to the store recycle or we go to reuse the building's broken up into recycling on the right and reuse on the left we'll start here if we can reuse it and reuse the parts then you're not making a new part so this is the heart harvesting area for laptops sometimes when you can't sell a whole laptop we can remove parts from it and either rebuild a laptop to sell or sell the parts to get all these tiny pieces out of a device without hurting them it takes a lot of skill and different screws a lot of different screws so much of it still needs to be done manually and to do it properly and that's very labor intensive memory units processors screens keyboards and motherboards can all be reused workers will clean them check that they're functioning and send them back into inventory to be sold again lots of times when we're allowed to sell units we'll do Revenue share with it so we'll share Revenue with the client so that's kind of a nice way to add life to the electronics and then also get some Revenue back big hard drives pulled from computers or servers are another Money Maker but they come with an added challenge of security you can see the fence up you need a key card to get in I don't know if I have access oh I do so here is where you'll see the higher value material any store data has to be wiped before a drive can be resold we have a lot of banks and insurance companies as our clients so you can well imagine that those folks want their data erased properly this is where you'll see some of the wiping going on of the hard drives at the end here these have already been done so they're ready to go to the next step to get resold so our drives will sell wholesale or on eBay you can see these guys are deemed for eBay so you'll see one terabyte 500 gigabytes all different size drives all these smaller drives there just isn't any value in it anymore so something simply not worth Sims time to refurbish it's said to be recycled on the other side is destroy recycle and over here we have a lot of folks that are depackaging and also removing hazards this part's called demanufacturing so we'll remove hazards batteries and all that type of thing before it goes to be shredded on this side there's a lot of hazardous materials in electronics like Mercury cadmium and lead and if devices end up in landfills that bad stuff could do major damage to groundwater and soil this is what we want to ensure does not go into the shredder because this could be really dangerous for fire if we leave toner in there I mean it goes up like nothing toner is explosive and then the plastic acts as a fuel source that's our biggest challenge everything that's not hazardous gets shredded so this is Lori and Lori is running the shredder all with a mouse right this is the control rooms and it's like 100 horsepower quad Shredder which means you have these teeth that are grinding up all the material here and those are nice printers that are getting eaten up and ground out to this on the outside so this is a little really cool part it's very noisy the first thing that we're trying to do is remove any steel a giant magnet overhead pulls out all the steel this is where the charge is added to the material and based on the plus and minus we'll repel so the aluminum gets thrown the farthest away so that's why aluminum is here and the circuit board is in the middle and the plastic Falls right down because it doesn't accept the charge the leftover mix heads to another machine named Heidi Heidi is German originally we were using it to separate plastic but the technology wasn't keeping up it doesn't work on black plastic and you see today everything's black plastic now Heidi separates everything using infrared technology gingers are metal finder she was named after the engineer who designed her because he had a ginger beard and Ginger is just taking out any further metal that's still within the plastic mix what's left goes into the Dutch sink float machine named Auto so I guess that's the only male machine we have of in Auto plastic floats while everything else sinks we scoop off the top the good stuff and that's what we'll go to Montreal to our plastic compounder and then goes back to HP to get reused into parts and those raw materials can make Sims some pretty good money so we really want to recover that value every electronic has precious metals in it some gold some copper some Platinum some Palladium so all these elements can be separated and sold to be reused piecemeal the seal will go to a steel mill here in Tennessee but with more than 75 percent of E-Waste landfill bound companies are missing out on huge profits to put in perspective in 2019 an estimated 57 billion dollars worth of precious metals and valuables and electronics were thrown away or burned if we recycle it then we're not digging holes and mining for Virgin medals it's a way to get some really precious Commodities without expending all that energy and damage to the environment but it's a catch-22 recycling E-Waste could be a money maker and it's better for the environment but it's both really hard and expensive to do they're not designed to be recycled many different chemical compounds all smashed together when devices got smaller and smaller removing whole components became less and less possible treating and disposing of these hazardous materials is dangerous and pricey recyclers also have to constantly upgrade machines and processes to keep up with this changing technology and that's costly too we normally change the blades once a year and when it gets towards the end the blades get a bit dull well that's when we get a little bit anxious and sometimes they're jams Sims has invested a thousand hours updating just its Sally the shredder machine and while recyclers are facing all of these challenges E-Waste is only expected to increase by 38 over the next decade so is there a way to make e-recycling easier some say it starts with manufacturers what a lot of the manufacturers are focused on rather than making products live a long time they see their way out is to keep selling as many products as they can as rapidly as possible and they try to compensate by saying don't worry it's recyclable and so this churn and burn mentality is very harmful Jim thinks one solution could be for manufacturers to create electronics that are actually meant to be recycled for example making devices that don't have toxins so they're safer and easier to break down but until that happens Sims will keep wiping and shredding those hard to recycle electronics harvesting acai is a dangerous job in Brazil workers climb thin palm trees deep in the Amazon rainforest foreign [Music] these berries have become one of the most popular so-called superfoods in the U.S and they aren't cheap One Bowl can cost up to 15 dollars and while the berry has exploded in popularity in recent decades small farms like this haven't really been able to cash in foreign to this day most acai in Brazil is harvested by families on small-scale farms but big plantations are on the rise putting pressure on families like Lucas nogueras and a way of life that goes back Generations foreign fruit become so trendy and what is the true cost for the people who have been harvesting it for Generations [Music] we met Lucas at the end of the 2021 Harvest but there were still some berries left on a few trees his family's Farm is roughly 70 miles from balang the capital of the state of peral which grows more than 90 percent of the acai produced in Brazil the only tool they use to climb is a single piece of rope called a peconia they used to be made of leaves foreign the trunks are so thin that climbers have to be lightweight at the top they swing from the tree to reach multiple bunches [Music] going down can be dangerous too especially while carrying a large knife and holding an arm full of branches dropping them could damage the fragile fruit s and the risks don't end at the climb so if I mentioned and this is Lucas and his family harvested 53 baskets like these in 2021 earning them an income of about 950 dollars that's as little as 20 cents per pound meanwhile a pound of processed acai sorbet can sell for seven dollars or more in the U.S part of the issue is that Lucas has to sell his acai as soon as possible because the fruit goes bad fast that leaves farmers who don't have processing machines with little leverage to negotiate communities Merchants bring the acai to balang by boat it's a race against the clock to sell the fruit before it spoils so markets run overnight the price of the baskets varies every day depending on the demand most of the acai produced in the state stays in Brazil but exports have skyrocketed growing about 14 000 between 2011 and 2020. [Music] some acai gets transported to processing facilities like North acai every day 22 tons of fruit are turned into frozen pulp the acai that most people outside of para are familiar with this is the stage where we see the biggest jump in price about 177 percentage [Music] foreign today more than 70 percent of Brazil's acai exports end up in the states the global market for acai is expected to reach nearly 2.1 billion dollars by the end of 2025. acai's popularity took off in other Brazilian states in the 1980s when it became part of workout culture in Rio and Sao Paulo the Bulls made Regular appearances in this popular 90s soap opera that took place at a gym it's high calorie content made it a perfect pre or post exercise food and its antioxidants made it easy to Brand a superfood that came with claims that it can solve all sorts of health issues like obesity type 2 diabetes coronary heart disease Strokes hypertension high risk for covid-19 cognitive difficulties sexual difficulties but nutritionists say this narrative has been blown out of proportion wait a minute one food can't do that can it nonetheless Americans were hooked and made all kinds of acai bowls mixing in Fruit granola honey and more but it's a far cry from the culture of the people who have eaten it for much longer indigenous people living in the Amazon have harvested and consumed acai for centuries maybe even Millennia and it's still a staple food in the daily diet of people in Para who eat it fresh with Savory meals Lucas was 12 when he started climbing acai trees and he still does 36 years later [Music] years acai has also made headlines in American and Brazilian media for reports of children working in the industry but Farmers like Lucas say it's always been this way and that it's normal for everyone in the family to help out and learn the trade nowadays Lucas owns this land along with 55 other families these kinds of settlements are called kilombos or a kilombola community and many go back centuries they were established by enslaved Africans and afro-descendants who ran away into the jungle and started communities like this to survive many learn from indigenous people how to harvest and process Native Foods including acai the Brazilian government estimates there are nearly 6 000 kilombola communities in the country in a 2013 study found roughly 75 percent still lived in extreme poverty is Lucas's acai trees grow alongside different native trees and plants but larger monoculture plantations that produce more fruit are on the rise the amount of land used for these plantations has more than tripled since 2006. these plantations are often located far away from flood Plains where acai trees naturally Thrive that means big producers have to irrigate their acai trees while Farmers like Lucas rely on natural seasonal flooding from the nearby River foreign some small producers have also been favoring acai trees over others which could become an issue in the long run and experts worry that as acai's popularity continues to grow the cultural traditions of para and the Amazon could be lost internet [Music] acai is something Lucas and many people here take pride in it's a clear processed [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] companies spend almost 14 billion dollars a year on mouth-watering ads like these but it takes more than a big budget to make food look this good oh nothing here is simple as far as the work we do is incredibly complex very technical Steve Gerald has filmed commercials for big Brands like Hershey's Heinz and Pepsi through his production company the garage and there's a lot of money on the line filming one 30 second ad can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're working against the clock because they use real food which doesn't stay pretty for long that's the misnomer about everything baking makes things harder we visited Steve's studio in Brooklyn New York to see how his team films the perfect burger today Steve and his team are working on a test shoot for Burger King they'll use it to try and land the client yeah good Brett Kurzweil is a veteran food stylist it's his job to make the burger look like a Whopper he usually has a budget of a couple thousand dollars and he always buys a lot more than he'll use so he can pick out the perfect looking bun Patty and veggies then he gets to work but he doesn't cook the meat all the way through because I didn't want it to shrink too much I wanted to get as much volume out of this piece of meat as I could get even perfect patties need final touches so he uses a colorant made of gravy darkener and soap to add a charred look he only has to paint half the burger because the camera films from just one side a mixture of Vaseline and pulverized meat helps fill in any holes and those grill marks another trick of the trade Brett heats up metal skewers and then I just pushed into the burger with the hot hot metal and it seared next he melts the cheese using a clothes steamer how did you change it I just Cho I just said you're for food but I also I'm trying to um control how much comes out so I've covered up some of the holes the onions and tomatoes on a slant so they lie flatter well yeah my mother would have been happier tricks denture cream to hold up ingredients for condensation on cans we'll use glycerin while Brett finishes up Steve's team is making sure everything is ready on set the trickiest part is combining what the client wants in the commercial with what's technologically possible they have no idea about engineering yeah they're just like robots are cool we want a robot but since today he's working those people that where's the detection then he turns to master rigor Matthew Huber he says half the time he has to build the rigs completely from scratch they provide the structure for the specialized equipment that makes food dance across the screen his work goes hand in hand with the robots the robot obviously is a hugely complicated and expensive thing that's used for a lot of what we do but if you only just need a straight line movement pulling back it's easier to set up a simple machine that just does a single type of movement like these air Pistons he uses to launch food or these catapults to save on buying new parts he uses a lot of the same base pieces it's like Legos you know you just put stuff together take it apart do something different with it the next time so we've used like a lot of these pieces probably like hundreds of times meanwhile Paola Andreas Ramirez is finalizing the set from the tables to the ketchup bottles off to the side I want it to feel real so if it's blank it won't feel like it's it's a real commercial kitchen every inch visible to the camera matters so Paula's team built this tile wall just for this shoot but they said it still felt empty so we just added this through these two floating shelves up there we plan for something and then we just have to be ready for the unexpected her typical props budget is forty thousand dollars a shoot but she can pull a lot from her Personal Collection this has been 20 years of collecting and this is like Salvation Army garage sales years and years of hoarding I always like to have extra so if you're shooting example a glass of soda I need to have at least six of the same glasses for quick changes if they're scratched uh because it's video so it's a little bit one breaks exactly so when that burger arrives it's game time I gotta go on set yeah now it's a race against the clock give the tomatoes to Fresh angle feels right now you want to get a little heat in there go ahead and roll camera [Music] and push in a little bit closer all right good today they have custom built water cooled lights that don't torch the food you used to have like these really hot lights that would like cook the food and it would die really quickly so like the ice cream would be like impossible to shoot in slow motion because it would just melt the second you turn the lights on but that but that lettuce will start to wilt in a matter of minutes hot lights are not so quick moving robots and tons of planning are essential to keep a shoot on schedule because any delay could mean running over budget the first action uses a dolly Zoom to create something known as the Hitchcock effect but the whole background is like warping around it cue the robots they're actually the same kind that build cars this robot cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it can pretty much do any move you can think of sometimes you could program the robot pretty quickly some moves take a whole day here's the second shot Steve envisioned the camera moving through a field of burgers as each gets pulled out of frame we're probably only like an inch and a half away from that burger when we land so to try to do that with people will be almost impossible it's a really complex move that the robots do really easily and they do it the same exact way every time but speed is not the only challenge every shot has to be identical if a burger is even a centimeter off or if something on set gets bumped between takes they might have to start over the surprise don't want to behave this laser helps them keep track of the Burger's position or sometimes you might do it a job [Music] they also have to be really flexible on set there's always curve balls that happen because there's a lot of problem solving which I love for the last shot Steve ties all the ingredients on a fishing wire and a robot slices the string and the camera catches the perfect drop this exact move was actually Steve's claim to fame in 2016. did this famous burger Drop video that went viral all over the Internet he slowly raked in millions of views across platforms and Global Publications started covering his work all that social media Buzz earned him a lot of viewers and new clients and he was able to launch the garage in 2019. the burger drop was kind of like the spark that started the path towards where we are today and now Tick Tock is like crazier than Instagram ever was for me Steve is a former food photographer but he wanted to combine his love of engineering food and video and amazingly there's a job that lets me do that it's a lot there's a lot of different jobs that my guidance counselor did not tell me about including my own today his team films 40 advertisements a year billing over 5 million dollars annually kind of feels like CGI but it's actually done in camera and I think to accomplish that like Larger than Life feeling takes just a lot of technology and skill Steve says they know they've done a good job when viewers can't tell a whole production is hidden behind a shot they have no idea what we do at the end of the day it is fun for me to people for people to understand how complex this stuff is but all that complexity is worth it because there's a lot of money on the line fast food companies poured five billion dollars in advertising in 2019 and for good reason they know just how valuable the power of food suggestion can be a Yale University study found that visual cues like food ads can have an effect on food cravings another study showed visual cues can influence overeating and even weight gain and that can convert into traffic and impressions for a brand you're responsible for a lot of people working their diet be included these Brands led the pack in ad spending in 2019 and budgets just keep ballooning in September Burger King announced it'll invest 400 million dollars in restaurant Renovations and advertising a 30 increase from 2021 which is why Steve and his team filmed this Whopper pitch hoping to hook a new client with their dancing robots and Juicy Burgers a pack of instant noodles is one of the cheapest non-perishable foods you can buy so how did the humble instant noodle become a billion dollar industry [Music] Momofuku Ando was an entrepreneur with a wild resume everything from selling textiles to charcoal and he even started a school at one point now on those story has admittedly gotten a bit mythical over time there's even this adorable children's book written about him and an incredible animated short film about his Origins it's called Samurai noodles and it's probably the coolest our story page a company can have and I think you can see the resemblance but anyway to really understand how that giant box of ramen ended up in your grocery store we have to go back to 1940s Japan [Music] after World War II Japan faced widespread famine and had its worst harvest season in decades a Nissan spokesperson would later state that at the time people were starving and queuing for noodles at Street stalls because of strict rationing laws and a ban on selling street food thousands of unsanctioned open-air Markets started to pop up it's estimated that factory workers got more than half of their vegetables on the black market at the time Japan relied heavily on the wheat provided by the U.S during its occupation Ramen and Joseph both made from Surplus wheat flour were considered stamina food because they were high in calories and kept you full but at the time there was a big push to use the US provided wheat to make bread Ando as inquisitive as ever wanted to know why the government wasn't using more of that wheat flour to make noodles which were much more common in Japan he said if you change your diet you are in effect throwing away your traditions and cultural heritage ano thought that Ramen that was more accessible and easier to prepare could be a solution to Japan's hunger problem but in response he was basically told if you think it's a good idea then do it yourself so he did but this was no easy task Hondo had basically no noodle making experience and remember that checklist he had to figure out how to bring great flavor and texture to instant food after a year of experimenting he finally had his breakthrough according to my favorite anime Samurai noodles the development process looked a little bit like this which is pretty epic basically after watching his wife make tempura he realized that frying the noodles was key frying extracted their moisture so they could be stored for long periods of time and they rehydrated with hot water that's how we got this iconic break of noodles what you'll love is that you can serve your family in three minutes and for just pennies what I find so interesting about ondo's invention was that it wasn't an accidental breakthrough he thought instant noodles would be a success and he worked for a year to find the solution looking back he said the experience of hardship and suffering strengthened me to succeed in a critical time in 1958 Honda released chicken ramen and changed his company's name to Nissen which you proudly recognize underplayed a direct role in trying to sell instant Ramen reportedly setting up a sales booth in Tokyo to give customers a chance to try the new product at first it actually cost more than five times the price of fresh noodles but the taste and convenience made it a huge hit foreign [Music] [Applause] magic Ramen because it was ready to eat in just a few minutes it was now over a decade since the end of World War II Japan's economy has started to improve it was a surplus of wheat flour and people were going back to working long hours these were the perfect circumstances for instant Ramen to succeed chicken ramen sold 13 million packages in its first year and sales in Japan skyrocketed growing by billions in just a decade as his popularity grew dozens of companies started manufacturing instant noodles in 1968 instant Ramen was estimated to hit three and a half billion servings but ongo wasn't done inventing at age 61 it was time to make instant noodles even more instant Nissan introduced cup noodles in 1971 and like chicken ramen it was a huge hit in fact it was so popular that Nissan couldn't meet demand even though they were making 650 000 cups a day you can see how noodles in a cup completely overtakes packaged noodle sales by 1989. today cup noodle sales are more than double packational sales in Japan [Music] still involved with the company in 1998 the Japan times wrote that even as he celebrates his 88th birthday this year Ando is still Keen to invent new variations on his instant noodles today hundreds of instant noodle flavors are introduced in Japan every year but it wasn't just a hit in Japan China is currently the largest market eating over 40 billion servings a year but South Korea leads in per capita consumption with a staggering 75 servings per year that's a lot of instant Ramen here in the U.S the original Nissan Top Ramen was introduced in 1972. most people are like Corey they love eating all those noodles and Top Ramen this year's leader The Washington Post wrote now the noodles are threatening to replace TV sets as Japan's hottest export to this country Ando was even awarded the key of the city in LA and in 1989 the New York Times wrote the growing U.S appetite for Asian style Ramen can no longer be ignored it became a fixture in U.S supermarkets despite being a new type of food for a lot of Americans today instant Ramen consumption in the U.S is over four and a half billion servings per year and over 100 billion serving globally and in case you were wondering Ando finally retired at age 95. Nissan the company Hondo founded reported over 450 billion yen in Revenue in 2019 or about 4.3 billion dollars it's not led by ondo's son koki but despite its Commercial Success under didn't forget his original goal to help and hunger in 1997 Ando helped start what's now called the world instant noodles Association its purpose is to improve the instant noodle industry and provide emergency food Aid since his founding the organization has helped donate hundreds of thousands of instant noodle servings under one said it is never too late to do anything in life you can have a new beginning even at the age of 50 or 60. and he really lived his life with that mindset whether or not you believe every detail of the Samurai Noodle story instant Ramen completely changed the way that people ate a centuries-old food most of our smartphone one thing in common we went to South America to learn how mines power and Industry were tens of billions of dollars [Music] the lithium here in Chile is locked away in underground salt water or brine billions of gallons are pumped to the surface every year where it is left to evaporate and concentrate mining companies also use millions of gallons of fresh water and in one of the driest places on Earth locals are scared of what that will do to their already scarce Water Supplies and they worry they won't get their fair share of the white gold rush unfolding in their own backyard in okay mining the lithium triangle looks inevitable in the rush towards an all-electric future but what is the true cost [Music] Jose Morales has lived near Bolivia's Salt Flats his entire life he makes a living growing quinoa and selling wool from his llamas there is very little rainfall and a nearby river that used to provide water is all but dried up so Jose now pumps groundwater from Wells [Music] in early 2023 the Bolivian government granted a mining license here that would massively scale up lithium extraction people like Jose are afraid that's just going to make the drought worse we'll come back to Bolivia but for now neighboring Chile might hold some answers these are the Atacama Salt Flats a natural wonder one of the driest places on Earth and a vast source of lithium the bright squares are pools of brine where the water is left to evaporate and leave behind a mix of salts and minerals the more yellow the pond the higher the concentration is it can take more than a thousand gallons of brine to produce enough lithium for just one electric car battery two companies control the right to operate here American Albemarle and Chilean sqm in 2021 Chile exported almost 1 billion dollars worth of lithium carbonate and satellite imagery shows just how that has transformed the landscape it can take around 18 months for the brine to move through the series of ponds the concentrated lithium brine is then processed into lithium carbonate which is then taken to another Factory near the coast where it is purified into battery grade lithium the two companies suck out enough brine to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 20 minutes they also draw 32 gallons per second of fresh water from underground aquifers for use in the processing factories that would fill an Olympic-sized pool in roughly five hours it's no surprise that water usage is such a sensitive issue in one of the driest regions on Earth Central Chile has experienced a mega drought since 2010 the Region's longest on record Brian is far denser than fresh water and the two rarely mix but Regulators worry that pumping so much brine too fast will increase the risk of fresh water contamination and lithium isn't the only thirsty industry here since the 1980s copper mines have been responsible for around half of the Region's freshwater use the Chilean government blamed the copper and lithium Industries for a 25 centimeter drop in the height of the water table the copper mines planned to switch to desalinated Water by 2030 Jorge Munoz coca is concerned about the damage this use of fresh water could be doing to the environment information boy he is part of the atticomeno indigenous community and lives in San Pedro with his three children in 2015 he founded an activist Collective to educate people about lithium mining moment Jorge says locals lost faith in the mining industry a long time ago in the 1990s the Chilean government agreed to hand ancestral lands back to indigenous communities including the Atacama lithium mines some land was transferred but crucially not the mines neither of the two lithium companies in Chile consulted with locals before starting their operations at the time they didn't need to but in 2008 Chile's government agreed to involve indigenous people in any decision that could affect them directly still it would take another eight years for one of the company's Albemarle to begin giving over three and a half percent of its profits that same year sqm was sued for extracting more brine than allowed sqm recently committed to reduce Brine and freshwater use and monitor their environmental impacts portugu feels there has never been real transparency is um and his community's concerns almost always come back to water is thank you but demand for lithium shows no signs of slowing down it is the ideal metal for Batteries because it is extremely light and stores energy very efficiently compared to traditional batteries it would take around four lead acid car batteries to get the same amount of energy as one lithium battery of the same size this makes them perfect for maximizing power without adding much weight or taking up too much space a booming electric vehicle industry has roughly tripled lithium prices in the last three years while companies scramble to ramp up production so now all eyes are on Bolivia and its wealth of white gold at more than four thousand square miles the uyuni Salt Flat is over double the size of the Grand Canyon and clearly visible from space more than 90 000 visitors come from all over the world each year to photograph the shimmering sea of salt Antonio Cabrera moved here back in 2009 that was when Bolivia announced it would invest 900 million dollars in the lithium industry yo Antonia had high hopes that would bring jobs and prosperity a state-controlled company built a small pilot plant which opened in 2013 but Bolivia lacked the technical know-how to scale up almost a decade later the pilot plant was only producing a few hundred tons of lithium carbonate per year a tiny fraction of Chile's exports for Antonia the industry's failure to take off meant the promises of work came to nothing and five of her six children left to find jobs in other cities today she lives with her daughter and Grandson she says even the local school only has one teacher left to make things worse the pandemic hit the tourism industry hard foreign after years of high hopes for Bolivia's lithium industry he's an active leader for his community and lives 60 miles from the pilot plant with his daughter he worked for the Lithium company as Community liaison back in 2019 he was supposed to help recruit workers locally but in the end he says most workers were brought in from Bolivia's large cities instead now with the Chinese and Russian companies moving in he's worried about his precious water supply foreign he says water levels have dropped more than two meters over the last two years because of droughts is friends foreign is not against lithium mining he just wants any company that comes in to extract the metal to be open and honest is if you look at Bolivia's history you can understand why local communities might be suspicious of international interest in their natural resources zoom out and you can see how for more than 500 years silver mining has left its scars on the landscape it was the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century who laid claim to what's now known to be the largest global silver deposit an estimated 8 million enslaved miners lost their lives in the mines Mercury which was used to refine the silver polluted streams and poisoned local ecosystems these ancient Minds have created Untold wealth yet the region of Potosi Remains the poorest in Bolivia the government is nonetheless optimistic for the next chapter of its lithium story almost three billion dollars of investment from Chinese and Russian companies will build an array of new lithium plants capable of processing an estimated 100 000 metric tons of lithium carbonate each year the Oblivion government says that it will bring infrastructure and employment but with the touted rewards come risks they're gambling on a relatively new technology it's called dle or direct lithium extraction instead of pumping Brian to the surface and waiting for the water to evaporate this method separates out the lithium using a range of filtration techniques it can take only a few hours but it's unclear how water or energy intensive the process will be there are small operations testing this method in the US and Argentina but it hasn't yet been proven to work at scale for many bolivians this uncertainty breeds concern we don't know what this agreement says disagreement with the Consortium the Chinese Consortium says and this is incredible because the the natural resources are from this are from us are from all bolivians but we have not accessed with this disagreement the agreement is closed [Music] just on the outskirts of uyuni Lies a stark reminder of what can happen if Grand mining projects go wrong the carcasses of over a hundred trains lie in the sun rusting away some dating back to the early 20th century the town was once a transport Hub linking the Pacific coast with tin and Silver Mines of the high plains of the Andes the industry and the local economy collapsed after the second world war and the trains were left to rot the lithium industry here will need to promise a better future than that for local communities and the environment if it is to overcome doubts that it is anything more than a mirage there are almost double as many cell phones in the world as there are people it's no surprise the phone repair business itself is a multi-billion dollar industry hello I'm Julius and I'm the owner of phone fix craft so today I'm going to show you how to clean and repair really damaged iPhone my job is to actually phone repairs including micro soldering and that's a recovery stuff like that and the cleaning is just it's not that it's a huge part of our business it's just fixed phones that we see that they need they need some cleaning so the first step you have to remove those two bottom screws which every iPhone has we open up the screen the phone had a broken screen and the and the owner of this phone used used it for a good while with that broken screen so the all the internals of the phone were exposed to whatever was in customers pocket so it's actually a fire hazard so so we try to remove every loose bit from from the inside of the phones thank you but once it's loose I would use compressed air like a like a gun the dirtiest Parts would be the charging port on on all kind of phones not only iPhones but actually it doesn't look dirty if you just look at it with naked dye and the microscope I have here it's it's my most loved tool it's gonna come come with me when I die I would just clean every phone every earpiece and every charging port under this this microscope this tool we use for charging port cleaning is something similar to a metal toothpick it's just a little bit thinner and then then sharper so now I'm going to clean years worth of pocket lint and dust from the charging port the clearancing charging dishes foreign ports would be usually filled with the like pocket length from from your jeans and then whatever is in your pocket really if you cut the cookie there then you would have some crumbs or something like that you can see you know what what color uh threads or trousers or pants I'm not sure in the United States the trousers or pants so what you see here it's actually the contents of of a charging port of what we usually would find there so it's a it's just a pocket lens really pocket lint and then Dust I would use the same tool that I use for cleaning charging ports to clean the uh really heavy clogged speakers as well we do get phones that are really dirty and messed up but it's for us it's just normal you know Medics are not not surprised by injuries or something like that it's their job so so for us it's uh yeah so on this phone the battery has already started to smell and and customer agreed to get it replaced we remove the battery uh we attached the new pull tabs to to a new battery we just need to apply a new display adhesive before putting everything back together so once the screen is pressed back into the frame uh we just need to put the last two screws in and it's it's ready to be cleaned before giving it back to the customer thank you you just have to solve solve a puzzle you know to get the thing working and this is especially rewarding if some few other shops deemed it unfixable and then it comes to you and and do you accept the challenge and you actually get that fixed it's uh it's nice it's uh that's what I really love some pool repairs can cause homeowners as much as twenty thousand dollars [Music] we followed a professional pool cleaner to get a messy look inside the billion dollar industry I am miles okay the pool guy and I'm going to show you how I professionally clean the bottom of a pool Grandma's pool definitely was the most challenging um the sludge on the bottom it was like six inches of sludge lap across the whole pool it looked very abandoned because obviously it had been left for 15 years so that was like when I first got into the pool obviously there was a little the water had been drained down quite a lot there but as I stepped in it was really soft branches may have fell off of like the the bushes that are around the pool um and then just sort of like they could have started growing like bigger as well while they were in the pool as well so so we had to shovel it into sort of buckets and then when someone would put it in a wheelbarrow and take it down to the Heap at the end of the garden and it just created like a massive pile of just sludge I'd say there was probably like a ton or maybe two tons of sludge um so yeah get like draining that down and uh like scooping all the fudge out of that one and just the time it took um yeah that was definitely the hardest one but uh we've got it there in the end [Music] oh my God so recently I've been to a job um and the pool has been left for like eight years but the water weirdly was like clear but the algae in there was really like blanket-like and there was loads of it and you could sit like move it around you can see it looked like really weird like an underwater sort of like Forest of like algae it was like really bad um and that ball definitely had to be um drained down okay so when I first go to a pool and I see that it's green what I'll do first is get um a pool brush out and then I'll brush the whole pool all the surfaces disturbing all the algae off the surface normally algae will just like break up was it and you brushed the the pool um and it will just break up into like really small particles and then you can just like Hoover it but like this type of algae was just like really like stringy and just like solid together um yeah it was a weird one and then again there's like sludge on the floor with sort of just like brushing the sludge to like a pile and then like scooping it out [Music] that pool had been left and just sort of like gone a couple of days without chlorine and because it was sort of like indoor had like sort of like in a greenhouse type so it got like really hot in there when the sun comes out and just the algae just attached itself to the tiles like so badly it looked like it had been left for like years people thought they were actually green tiles on the steps and it was really tough on the tiles it needed something quite aggressive to sort of get it off and then what I got was just like some Hydrochloric acids and it's a little water and uh sprayed it over the tiles and it just started reacting with the um the algae um and then I started brushing it in to disturb it all off the surface foreign [Music] and then rinsed it down and that literally took like 15 minutes the woman who earned the pool she didn't she only called us to come and open the pool when in like August had like the whole summer just sitting there doing nothing so like we took the cover off and there was like mosquito larvae in the pool and there was mosquitoes like flying everywhere literally so bad I had to like run away from the pool and she actually didn't want this pool emptied she just wanted to try and get it around with like chemicals get some chemicals out shot and chlorine granules we've done this one so like when I shock a ball that basically kills off all the algae and all the contaminants in the bowl basically what it does is combine all the small particles and what it relies on is like no movement in the water so it's combining all the particles and then they become like heavy and then they just sink to the bottom yeah after a few days come back and it was like the water was crystal clear just all the debris and I think it was just on the bottom and I came in and like just hoovered it up and it was just Crystal Clear ready to go sort of thing foreign [Music] so if you've got an outdoor pool you're going to want to maintain it like once a week at least no so I get a lot of people do say to me why don't you train the ball before winter but what it is is you've got to take into consideration like the structure of the pool so if you have no water in there if there's water in the ground surrounding the pool it can pressurize the walls and then cause damage that you have to keep water in the pool um what you do have to do is check your pool at least like once a month and add the correct chemicals and then when you come to open it and somewhere it's going to be nice and close there what people call styrofoam is often expanded polystyrene fault and we make billions of dollars worth of it every year [Music] cycled but it can it's likely because less than one percent of it gets recycled even though we make enough to fill more than 700 empire state buildings every year [Music] and now one company has found a way to turn all this trash into treasure or rather photo frames but why are more companies doing this we went to Mexico City to find out [Music] new materials countless in their numbers and variety have been created styrofoam is actually a brand developed by the Dow Chemical Company and now owned by DuPont it only refers to a kind of plastic used in construction and insulation there's actually no such thing as a styrofoam cup instead it's expanded polystyrene foam that is a kind of plastic scientist first created in the 1940s today it's estimated that this kind of foam takes up about 30 percent of the world's landfills a company called renueva has found a way to make money recycling this cheap product corporations pay Runway though to handle their polystyrene waste and regular people can drop off their own at the company's facility it also hosts collection efforts like this one at a local University all told Hector and his team handle 16 metric tons of plastic per week foreign workers first grind the material to make it easier to manage then they apply heat and pressure in a process called densification which squeezes out excess air leaving reusable plastic behind in terms of size the ratio of pre-densified foam to post-densified foam is about 90 to 1. a machine heats the material and molds it into these spaghetti looking strips the company uses a chemical that's a bit like antifreeze to cool the strips and finally a machine dices them into rice-sized pellets renueva sells these pellets to companies like Marcos and Marcos which turns them into frames process is actually pretty similar to renuevas you heat the pellets mold them and then assemble and decorate the frames accordingly this Factory can process six tons of raw material per day and is actually recycled some of its own old frames different companies use renwavers pellets to make heels for shoes and to make more foam renueva is working on making plates and Cutlery but first it needs to make sure the recycled plastic is safe for food that's because polystyrene foam could pose some health risks scientists have found that foam containers are generally safe to eat off of but some chemicals can transfer into your food or drink and they could be harmful over a long period of time and breathing in foam particulates is dangerous the international Agency for research on cancer says one of the main components of polystyrene is a probable carcinogen though the EPA hasn't classified it as such Hector and his team are realistic they know this kind of plastic isn't going anywhere soon so their solution to waste relies on a circular economy reduce trash by reusing it is most recycling facilities don't handle polystyrene foam and as a result many people simply throw the product away renueva has Outreach programs to let people know the product can be recycled capacitation is the company says that it now recycles five percent of the polystyrene foam used in Mexico City but we were unable to independently verify that fact is renueva has recycled 1200 metric tons of foam since its founding in 2014 a small fraction of the amount produced worldwide every year that helps explain why everyone isn't copying the renueva model most polystyrene products are cheap in part because more than 90 percent of them is just air it makes them very light but also means you need a lot to make recycling profitable they're also often covered in food waste and can break apart really easily which makes them tough to process there are a few similar facilities that run on the runway the model like this one in China or the Canadian company styrogo which uses mobile trucks to densify polystyrene foam on site but many people around the world are pushing to Simply end the use of foam rather than figure out how to recycle it the European Union China Costa Rica and U.S states like New York and Colorado have all announced or implemented bands on single-use Plastics like polystyrene foam Mexico City band single use plastic starting in 2021 but that doesn't include polystyrene foam so the product is everywhere and it fuels the central de abasto one of Mexico City's largest wholesale food markets Universal food vendors like Irene depend on that product's low price expressions [Music] that's why plastic bands don't always have the intended effects [Music] the supports runway's main idea that single-use plastic should be recycled according to Hector the solution to all the plastic sitting in our landfills is to use the plastic sitting in our landfills many environmental action that doesn't make economic sense isn't realistic is [Music] Himalayan salt doesn't actually come from the Himalayas it's mined 186 miles away in Pakistan thanks to its pink Hue and supposed health benefits the salt has exploded in popularity since the late 2000s today it's turned into lamps statues and of course table salt but extracting the coveted salt means descending into dark caves then blasting and carrying heavy rock my problems we went inside the mine turning this mountain into 400 000 tons of pink salt each year the Kyoto salt mine here in the Punjab region of Pakistan is the second largest salt mine in the world the pink salt comes from remnants of ancient seabeds that crystallize 600 million years ago Legend has it it was actually Alexander the Great's horse that first discovered these salt rocks when it stopped to take a lick then under British rule salt mining ramped up in the 1870s today it's a popular tourist destination and a working mine producing the majority of the world's pink salt all the mining starts here at the train station this train takes miners deep into the mountain here tunnels stretch for 25 miles and it's always 64 degrees Fahrenheit foreign ERS work these dark Chambers they've used many of the same mining tools for over a century pickaxes hand drills and gunpowder is foreign the rest is used for structural support so the chambers don't collapse tractors haul the mine salt out of the mountain each day miners excavate over a thousand tons of salt or about the weight of 157 elephants outside they search for blocks with the best shape and coloring to send to manufacturers once picked the blocks are loaded up on trucks either by hand or Crane and sent across Pakistan historically Pakistan couldn't process this raw pink salt so much of it was exported to India cheaply India would treat the salt label it as Made in India and sell it at a premium Pakistan saw little of the profits NPR reported that a ton of salt sold to India for forty dollars could fetch 300 in Europe in 2019 a social media campaign calling for the end of salt exports to India went viral that same year the Pakistani government banned all salt exports to India the goal returning the profits to Pakistan 23 percent uh Joe Rock salty manufacturing production but some Pakistani salt exporters suffered they didn't speak English and couldn't meet Europe's tough import standards only about a dozen exporters saw an opportunity to sell products under Pakistani labels directly to Europe Muhammad was one of them every month he purchases 300 tons of salt from the mine for his company Himalayan Decor International [Music] his artist turned these blocks into more than 200 different products eating cooking plates most of the work is done by hand but drills and saws have sped out the process in recent years over in Karachi RM salt Pakistan grinds up blocks into table salt basically yes basically blocks are fed into the grinder and broken down into smaller grains workers bag and weigh a thousand of these pouches of pink salt every hour like Muhammad's Factory RM salt also makes lamps and other Specialty Products after the raw model we get we converted with a different shape as per our order like you can see in the cutting machine he is cutting different sizes on this saw water prevents dust from flying up but on the Grinders it's not possible which is why Muhammad's staff wore masks even before the pandemic over at RM salt as you can see the specialty we have installed a vacuum through which we can absorb the dust this is the order of USA one of our client we are making these goods for them the moon shape and the heart shape as well the lamps are then coated with the gel to prevent humidity from interacting with the salt and then they're shrink wrapped RM salt ships 30 containers of products every month Muhammad exports about 80 of his products primarily to Western countries like the US UK and Spain where demand has spiked in the last decade because of the alleged health benefits however ever it's such a very small percentage of the salt it makes up these minerals you are highly unlikely to get any real benefit or any trace of them in your regular serving of salt itself but nutritionally it's pretty much similar to regular salt it's also pretty similar tasting to sea salt but others claim Himalayan salt has healing powers whether inhaled used in spa treatments or in lamp form there's a lot of different homeopathic remedies that can seem very very appealing but actually they're not grounded in evidence and it's these false Health claims that have driven the price up Himalayan salt can cost up to 20 times the price of normal table salt normally your price is manufacturers but that money doesn't always make it back to the miners they take home less than 1500 rupees a day not much more than the cost of this bag of Himalayan sea salt at Walmart and those salaries have stayed the same even though Pakistan has severed its salty relationship with India and the pink salt is seeing growing demand abroad paints luckily the mountain won't run out of salt anytime soon it's estimated only about 220 million tons of salt have been excavated here nothing compared to the nearly 6.7 billion tons left [Music] every year more than a billion flowers come into the US for Valentine's Day most come from massive farms in Colombia but these roses have as little as 48 hours to get cut and flown to Miami before they Wilt they have a short Lifetime and thus require the most rapid form of transportation and that is by air it takes a vast network of farmers Air Cargo coolers and Customs officers working 24 7. leading up to Valentine's Day the amount of flowers come into the airport double and triple treating these flowers right is even a matter of protecting the U.S the danger of an exotic pass to establish in the United States our food supply is affected from Greenhouse to gift we follow the Journey of your Valentine's Day bouquet thank you seventy percent of cut flowers imported to the U.S come from Colombia from farms like this one with over 2 800 acres Elite Flower is the largest privately owned Farm in the country the temperate climate high altitude and 12 hours of sunlight create the perfect growing conditions for these blooms that would fill up 414 Boeing 767s and even within roses there are a hundred varieties out in the greenhouse socially distance workers inspect each flower from petal to stem for rot or bugs using shira's workers cut each flower off one by one metabolism to slow that decay the flowers are sent to a cold room for a minimum of 12 hours this begins what's known as the cold chains Fahrenheit extra leaves and Thorns are stripped off the stem using this tool workers wear thick gloves to guard themselves from thorns the leaf flower is buzzing year round but it gets especially busy in February in the weeks leading up to Valentine's Day the company adds an extra 4 000 employees and generates 90 of its profits Elite partners with UPS to fly these flowers to the U.S each plane can hold up to a million flowers but Airlines like Avianca or latam are also big flower movers 89 of all flowers entering the United States by air came through Miami International Airport that's business that's money after a four-hour Journey this temperature controlled the Tom Airlines flight landed in Miami this airplane arrived with more than 50 tons of flour from Colombia and then we'll start to move the one of the 23 parties that we have here to this machine to downloading the flowers the flowers end up in this cold Warehouse held at the same temperature as that airplane the most important thing for us is to maintain the Cool Change there are almost 400 000 square feet of cooling facilities at Miami airport that were built because of the flower industry flowers represent our largest commodity coming in next Customs and Border Protection checks flowers from every flight over 84 000 units for inspection here agricultural Specialists like Stanley pull just two percent of the flowers from each flight to inspect we have a sampling protocol we know for sure that that two percent is representing the 100 of the flowers that are coming in inspections are done quickly so the flowers don't Wilt or get handled too much we make sure that our Inspection area is in our cooler the temperature is good for the flowers and for our Personnel one by one officers open up boxes and remove the bundles wearing PPE to protect against diseases and pesticides they take a bouquet of flowers and they remove the plastic and then they shake it gently they have to get a white background and if anything Falls they'll have to absorb if there is any insects but at the same time they are doing the visual observation to see whether the leaves have any kind of signs of diseases like a bacterial or fungal disease if there's a frango inspection you see some rusty patches she has seen a sign of maybe a disease now she has to use a loop to magnify even more important to look out for bugs Leaf miners caterpillars fruit flies and beetles Critters that may seem harmless but if they got through they could wreak havoc on the U.S agricultural system every year United States spend billions of dollars in eradication programs in order to eradicate those pests from 2007 to 2014 Florida's orange and grapefruit Growers lost 2.9 billion dollars trying to eradicate the Asian citrus psyllid so if an officer finds something we kind of collected in a vial with alcohol for preservation that specimen goes to USDA Department of Agriculture for identification and for the flowers the Importer has basically three choices one is to return to origin two is to fumigate or third is to destroy destruction is the last resource treatment is most often fumigation in an average day we find around 50 to 60 different paths sunflowers like the eucalyptus are high risk for carrying hitchhikers while roses are less risky after the fumigation take place then the rest of the semi can go to the public see BP inspects flowers every day but on Valentine's last season we inspected over 700 million stems of flowers if CBP officers don't find anything they bring the flowers back to that cold chain warehouse and when the customer arrived here we take the flowers and go to the delivery area to load the flower directly to the truck the majority of these flowers are trucked to the northeast or west coast of the U.S for folks like you and me can treat our loved ones to a colorful bouquet for Valentine's Day [Applause] shea butter Market is booming while industrially made Beauty Butters have played an essential role in the industry's growth women making it the traditional way fear their craft is dying out that's why we are doing this International customers often buy larger quantities from companies that can produce it faster making it harder for traditional farmers but the biggest threat is right in their backyard for the past four decades men have been cutting down the very tree that provides livelihood to many families we traveled to Ghana to find out how despite the challenges this group of women Artisans is still standing the day starts with a two-hour Trek to the forest for many women in the town of yandudi the journey can be dangerous they have to travel in groups to avoid armed robbers lurking in the forest and they risk getting bitten by snakes when walking through the grass if you're only one or two women that goes into the push to pick it's likely that you will come back the shea tree grows along a dry Savannah belt that stretches from east to west Africa Only The Ripe Shea nuts that have fallen from the tree are ready the return home can also be physically taxing the women carry more than 25 kilograms of seeds on their heads they first wash the seeds and let them dry for a week then it's time for cracking foreign the nuts are ready when the kernel starts to Rattle against the shell only the good ones are made into butter the bad nuts are used to make a special food called kanwoo and as a fertilizer on their Farms this attention to detail since traditional shea butter apart from commercially made ones with the Machinery you pour everything in the machine so if there's bad one you will not be able to identify it Porsche assumeda has led an organization called titiaca boresa for the last three years the group provides cooking pots and training for Shea farmers in the telensi district it also teaches them how to pick the best quality nuts for their product the nuts into smaller pieces with a brick then roast them over an open fire until they become fragrant this helps release the oils that give shea butter its nutty taste and smell it it's one of the skills Acuna alejere is teaching her daughter she's been making shea butter for more than half her life she grinds the Shea nut Pieces by hand some Shea Farmers have invested in grinding Mills to make this step easier but Acuna takes pride in sticking to the techniques that date back to the 14th century foreign the perfect working space the women only produce small batches at a time to ensure the quality will be consistent it's all hands on deck when it comes to mixing the Shea paste the work can be grueling and takes a lot of strength foreign they do this for one hour to get the right consistency the water activates the buck slowly it separates and floats to the top Acuna melts the butter in another fire using wood that was harvested in the forest she waits until it turns a deep chocolate color is the Shea oil will cool and be sold as unrefined butter the first accounts of shea butter use date back to 14th century Burkina Faso it's been used in West African households as a cooking fat and as a moisturizing salad for skin Legend has it that even the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra appreciated the butter for its hydrating power in recent decades Global demand for shea butter has increased dramatically its healing properties and high levels of vitamins have made it the ultimate ingredient for skin care products across the world in the last 20 years alone annual exports have increased 600 percent but with new demand have come new challenges deforestation competition from bigger companies and a global pandemic have threatened the livelihoods of small-scale Shea farmers we used to get supplies from other countries like Canada US UK well welcome at 19 came we never had orders again faster machine run Shea processing plants in Ghana have also begun taking over the market making it difficult for this group of women to keep up it takes them an entire month to produce what a big Factory can do in three days deforestation is also an ongoing battle since the 1990s men have been cutting down Sheena trees to make charcoal for commercial use around 8 million trees are cut each year the quantity we use to get now we don't get it that way again it has reduced drastically shea butter making has sustained generations of women in Ghana today many depend on it as their only source of income mostly with this group most of them are widows they used to say widows they can't do anything for their own but now that they have their own handwork they are able to do something and end money and take home organizations like Porsches teach traditional Shea Farmers how to produce better quality butter and understand its value in the local market with this knowledge they can take home a higher profit from their sales is the organization is also working to combat deforestation over the last two years it's planted 7 000 Shea trees in hopes of repopulating the Parklands although there are many challenges Porsche sees a bright future ahead [Music] our business that is what we do even though it is hard to proce to produce it but that is where we get our money from that is where we get our income young women are still interested in learning The Craft and she hopes that expanding her business will give more opportunities to people looking to learn the skill in its traditional form we like to have our own plantations we like to have our own warehouses where we can keep our share notes there for women here shea butter is a symbol of prosperity and Independence and they're determined to pass it on to the younger generation Americans spend billions of dollars each year making their teeth a little wider in Beverly Hills California one whitening treatment can set you back 750 dollars thank you I am obsessed with having my teeth be pearly white and about eight years ago I tried those drugstore whitening strips and I think they did a really good job whitening my teeth the only cons were that it took about two weeks they stung my gums a bit and they left my teeth feeling very sensitive a few weeks after I've never tried any professional whitening service but I know a lot of dentists use this service called Zoom teeth whitening and it's supposed to be an hour-long service that gives you instant white teeth So today we're in Beverly Hills visiting dentist Kevin Sands and he's worked on countless Hollywood smiles and today he's working on mine so let's see if Zoom is worth it right when you walk in you see the office decorated with magazine covers of the many celebrities Sans has worked on first like any medical office I had to sign important paperwork then I met with Sans to hear all about the treatment so what we're going to do is we're going to apply a layer of the bleach to your teeth the zoom is a UVA UVB light that activates the product and whitens the enamel of your teeth how is this different from like regular whitening strips well first of all regular whitening strips you know they they do work but they don't have as much of the active ingredient to why you know to really whiten your teeth the way people want them that active ingredient is hydrogen peroxide which is about 25 of zoom's whitening product after some research online I found that common drugstore whitening strips for example Crest White Strips have hydrogen peroxide levels ranging from about 6 to 14 percent how many shades wider can you get someone's teeth with zoom well depending on each individual you can get one shade lighter up to you know five to ten Shades lighter it just depends how much enamel you have your lifestyle people that drink a lot of coffee and and red wine aren't going to get as good of a result and also patients that don't have a lot of enamel don't get the best results either at sansa's office he offers a service for 750 however he mentioned it doesn't work on veneers crowns or decaying teeth the results usually last about six months but that all depends on your lifestyle and cleaning regimen once I knew what I was getting myself into Sans bought in his assistant Megan to perform the treatment First We examined my teeth to find the best shade no definitely not there and you're not there you have really nice shade going on now so you're already in the bleaching category I would put you about a bl3 or a bl4 so you're already in the category of being really light so hopefully we can get you to somewhere around here yeah okay yes yes we wear these glasses these protect your eyes from the UV light that we're going to use we're gonna play some vitamin E oil to your lips all the zoom kits come with this it's just a nice way so that your lips don't get dehydrated during the treatment the next thing I'm going to do is put this retractor it's going to expand it looks a little intense but it's not really so I'm gonna have you open as wide as you can so it's also important we keep everything really dry so I'm going to insert some cotton here and then we're going to apply this towel it just protects your skin this is a protective ingredient that we're going to put on your gums to protect them so none of the bleaching gel will touch your gums [Music] and now we're going to apply the actual bleaching solution so it's 25 hydrogen peroxide okay so it's really strong so you want to make sure you don't put your fingers up near your teeth while this is going on [Music] it can't it feels really relaxing and you just can't handle it are don't feel the LED light and I think taste the gel or anything because this the solution is removed after about 15 minutes for my teeth we did a second round of whitening some teeth require three or four rounds for best results it is a little tingly on the lower front teeth yeah that's the most common area to start to get sensitive and it's just because the teeth are dehydrated once those 15 minutes were up my teeth had to be cleaned before I could see the results [Music] foreign [Music] like the rims of the teeth like the gum we've got a beautiful result yay I love it wow so where were my teeth like before so before we started you're in this shade range bl4 it's a nice shade but we definitely increased your shade dramatically to a bl1 which is the lightest shade possible and you just want to you know avoid dark colored foods and liquids for 24 hours and after that back to normal [Applause] I've had my pearly white teeth for a few weeks now and I've been enjoying them but here's the thing in real life I can see the difference and I've had a lot of people compliment on my teeth but when I look at the before and after pictures it's a little hard for me to tell I think it's because I started with pretty white teeth already but the major change I see is whitening around the edges of my teeth that's the areas I should be flossing more overall if you have stained teeth probably a little bit more yellowish than what I had and you have zero time to wait and you want instant white teeth in under an hour then I think it's worth trying zoom and seeing how the results last for me I've realized that it's probably smarter to stick with a more affordable drugstore options even if it takes some time and I might feel some sensitivity a few weeks after but I think I'll see similar results while saving myself some cash this machine is extracting the Slime from snails in the name of beauty it will end up in skin care products around the world to repair and moisturize the skin historically the way to get snail mucin was by killing them but new machines like this one stimulate the snails instead [Music] companies around the world have adopted the technology here in Italy snail farming has reportedly increased by more than 300 percent over the past two decades just in time for an almost four billion dollar snail Beauty Market to take off [Music] Advocates often claim their products can improve wrinkles and texture but can snail slime really do all that and how has it become such a big business Simone sampo always knew he wanted to be a snail experts is led the International Institute of hilissa culture in the northern Italian town of Carrasco since 2016. through the Institute Simone helped develop methods that create ideal conditions to grow and harvest snails and they haven't exactly been moving at a snail's pace Simone says they've seen a huge increase in demand people are trying to opt for what is known as clean Beauty kind of more organic plant-derived animal-derived products [Music] it all starts in rooms like this one foreign [Music] catch after about two weeks [Music] too weak and then go to an incubation room The Institute sells the baby snails to Farmers who raise them Outdoors using methods developed by The Institute [Music] Simona Basile is one of them she started out in 2019 with about 33 000 snails [Music] the snails mostly eat vegetables like cabbage and spinach they are also fed a supplement containing corn soy and other flowers to strengthen their shells [Music] once the snails reach adulthood after about one year farmers can sell them back to the Institute or to private buyers Simona will take these 11 pound boxes to The Institute is as for the Slime it's what helps snails move and protect themselves against small predators but it also contains antioxidant properties that are said to repair skin damage so how do heliculturists get snail slime for beauty products it's a centuries-old practice but back in the day the snails had to be killed for the Slime to be extracted [Music] the tale goes that Greek physician Hippocrates applied crushed snails to treat skin inflammations later on snails were dunked in pots of salt water and vinegar that forced them to release the slime that is until it was discovered snails would also release slime if they were stimulated so Simone spent years developing this machine to get them to release the mucus without killing them he describes it as a little spa for snails the steel structure has two domes that can fit about 44 pounds of snails the snails are first cleaned with water and ozone then they're sprayed with an acidic solution that makes them release the Slime as a defense mechanism The Institute says this process doesn't cause harm to the animals the machine extracts about 118 ounces of slime during the one hour process is [Music] it will then be distributed through the institute's lumada brand to seven countries it sells for about sixty dollars but that's not the end of it the snails go through this process about three or four times before they are euthanized with a highly concentrated solution of ozonated water utility questions the intestines are used for gourmet dishes the shells for cosmetic products and the eggs to make snail caviar the products are distributed through the lumacheria Italiana company which Simone also leads is part of it may have to do with the rising Global influence of k-beauty South Korea is one of the top 10 Beauty markets in the world it's established itself as a snail cream superpower and North America is projected to be the fastest growing region for snail beauty products in the U.S brands that use snail Museum have expanded their presence through retailers like Target and CBS there's also growing demand worldwide for products that protect against aging and pollution and consumers seem to be gravitating toward natural skin care ingredients Studies have shown it can treat radiation induced irritations wounds and burns I've seen the wound healing benefits and the skin regenerative benefits of using snail mucin after laser procedure but the clinical research is limited and the slime's long-term Effectiveness is yet to be seen the hope will be that it will move from just this anecdotal kind of idea to something that's more clinically investigated Simone has faith in its future his company says its Studies have shown that the Slime has compounds like Alan toyin and elastin that repair and moisturize the skin also in the name of Health and Beauty people spend over 20 billion dollars a year on bar soap here's how Dr Bronner's became an industry behemoth Dr Bronner's magic soaps was founded in 1948 and is most famous for its pure Castile soap the brand produces over 14.3 million bottles a year and one of the unique things about this soap is that there are supposedly 18 different ways you can use it including washing your face body hair dogs laundry floors Windows toilets and even brushing your teeth but how is all that even possible with one product who is Dr Bronner and what's up with all that tiny text on the bottles story of Dr Bronner and how his famous soaps are made [Music] third generation soap maker Emmanuel Bronner started the company over 70 years ago the company is still run by the broners who work hard to keep their families soap making tradition alive let's start with how they make their soap all of Dr Bronner's soaps are pure Castile soaps meaning they're made out of vegetable oils like organic olive hemp and coconut oils instead of animal fats in 2003 Dr Bronner's became certified USDA organic and it went fair trade in 2007 for its major raw ingredients that means the company works with producers in developing countries to sustainably sourced ingredients while paying Fair wages and ensuring that employees are treated ethically once all the ingredients are sourced they arrive to the factory in Vista California to get a bit sciency here saponification is the chemical reaction of making soap the vegetable oil has three fatty acids that are connected to glycerin a moisturizing property in soap it's mixed with an Alkali which is sodium hydroxide for bar soaps and potassium hydroxide for liquids in this case let's do liquid soaps with heat and pressure in the soap reactor The Alkali separates the fatty acids from the glycerin and converts them to soap so in the end you're left with glycerin soap and water left behind after The Alkali has reacted essential oils like peppermint lavender and tea tree are added to the mix for aromatherapy and also to treat certain skin conditions its most popular scent is peppermint which can cool the skin and clear sinuses once everything is mixed together the soap is cooled before it can be bottled soap is filled into various size bottles in its facilities [Music] although the company mainly uses automated Machinery some mini and gallon size bottles are still filled by hand and now on to making the bar soaps organic palm oil is first sustainably sourced from Ghana that's what helps Harden the soap bar the palm oil is mixed with coconut oil and turned into a soap bar base the bar base looks like tiny pellets kind of like Feta cheese those pellets are mixed with an essential oil in this case it's tea tree oil tea tree oil can help reduce acne and dandruff the soap base is triple milled meaning the pellets are ground three times foreign during the last grind it goes under a vacuum where the bar soap is extruded in one long line the bars are cut molded and finally wrapped in a Dr Bronner's label and boxed now you're probably wondering what's up with the label if you've ever come across a Dr Bronner's Soap bottle or bar you've probably found yourself reading that long sometimes confusing tiny text in the shower well the story goes all the way back to World War II and has shaped the mission of the company founder Emmanuel Bronner immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1929 and in the 1930s when Hitler came into Power he tried to get his parents to leave Germany but they decided to stay my grandfather received a letter from his father after he was deported to theresenstadt letter from Teresa all the words were blacked out except for three words you were right and my grandfather never heard from his dad again Bronner reacted with a message of Love instead of hate or revenge and when in pursuit of his peace Plan called the moral ABC he wanted to spread the message of unity over religious and ethnic differences preaching quote we are all one or none he adopted an honorific doctor title and started giving impassioned speeches on the steps of the University of Chicago but authorities eventually arrested him and put him in a mental institution Bronner escaped and hitchhiked to Pershing Square in Los Angeles he started spreading his peace plan there for the people who came to listen to him he made for them a bottle of soap with No Label that he could hand out as a thank you present and word got out that this soap was really darn good so people were coming and taking the soap and not listening to him that's when he got the brilliant idea of taking his philosophy and putting it on the label so that when people would come take the soap and leave they take that soap in the shower and they'd be stuck for this generation we're really trying to take those ideals that my grandfather wrote on the label and really apply it to everything we do that doesn't apply just to their organic soap soap areas of the brand as well but he donates to causes supporting regenerative organic agriculture animal advocacy drug policy and Criminal Justice Reform and fair pay that is all tied back to Bronner's all-one philosophy that the company still promotes through its soap one of the most expensive beauty products out there are wigs just one can cost more than a thousand dollars the priceiests are made of natural hair but those can have a dark origin noon tivon travels more than 50 miles a day to the streets of Hanoi this client sold two years of growth for just seven dollars but how does hair that costs as little as seven dollars in Vietnam end up selling for thousands in salons around the world we went to the streets of Vietnam to investigate this Global business attracts clients with a recorded broadcast she quit her job as a mosaic worker nearly a decade ago [Music] now no one earns up to three hundred dollars a month that's a bit more than the average income in Vietnam she decides how much to offer based on the seller's age the length texture color of their hair and whether it's been dyed no one regularly stops by hair salons if they have clippings that are at least four inches long she makes an offer ing she bought this hair for about two dollars and sold it for about four dollars today Nguyen is buying hair from at her home is it took her two years to grow her hair this long but the bundle was shorter than last time thank you foreign [Music] no one told Insider she sold the hair to a buying agent for 11 and said her markup is between 20 and 50 it's a completely unregulated industry for a start so there's no sort of who who decides what the value of hair is so generally it's the person who's buying the hair who's trying to get it for as cheaper cost as possible Emma tarlow is a professor of anthropology who has studied the global hair Trade Air is such an incredibly intimate fiberian it's actually a body part but it's also a body product at the same time and I was fascinated how something that is so intimate could actually be commodified and travel around the world and end up on the head of somebody else Vietnam exported 7.6 million dollars worth of hair products like Rigs and weaves in 2019. that's almost nothing compared to China where exports added up to more than one billion dollars China is also one of the most controversial markets in 2020 U.S Customs and Border Protection seized shipments of hair extensions from the country in response to allegations of forest labor by the U.S government foreign this company markets its products as ethical because it pays good wages and doesn't use forced labor director fonte Tui says they pay up to 550 a month which is above average the factory only uses human hair while others mix it with synthetic or animal hair this is one of the more expensive products in the factory a 20 inch blonde weft that sells for a hundred and five dollars the factory owner told Insider they charge higher prices for products that reflect their responsible practices the owner said they only buy hair from vendors who have been working with them for more than a decade [Music] Fawn is aware that many people selling their hair live in poverty um people don't part with their hair unless they need money usually unless of course they're parting with it for religious reasons that's the case in India where Hindu devotees donate their hair to Temples that later auction it to factories there's this kind of desire for human hair they wanted to be human but they don't want the human story that goes with the hair because that human story often involves poverty hardship Karen Mitchell has been selling hair for more than 15 years although it's mostly Indian hair but we do sell some imported hair from Malaysia some European hair in small quantities for my clients who want their Jewish wig which are called titles she says she has high profile clients like lizzo and Rihanna the clientele is very diverse I mean I would say it's probably in Manhattan 65 to 70 black women but we have a lot of like Caucasian women Asian women Hispanic women Indian women before the pandemic the value of the global hair trade was growing at around 15 a year it totaled 1.3 billion dollars in 2019. anything made with natural hair is labeled as luxury and some of her extensions cost up to two thousand dollars we saw was considered to be the Rolls-Royce of hair extensions we sell luxury hair extensions Mitchell also sells the hair stylists like Carrie Jolie she knows which country the hair comes from but that's about it for all the techniques that I do I always recommend using the human hair because it lasts longer adorable as far as like in between shampoos the hair won't tangle as long as it's good quality so this will go on the top you're investing in you know your hair so you want it to last longer so that you can reuse it and reuse it Lorraine Pierre spends up to two hundred dollars a month on hair extensions real hair lasts longer and feels more natural than plastic but it comes with a high cost for new one it's just business [Music] Portugal produces about half of the world's Cork Wine Stoppers most come from these trees here in the alintajo region but harvesting a tree takes years of expertise and steady hands of um we went inside the world's largest cork Forest to see how Portugal produces 40 million Quark Stoppers a day these are cork oak trees they're so special they've been protected under Portuguese law since 1209 so Harvesters have strict rules to follow the trees can't be touched for the first 15 years of their lives and they can only be harvested every nine years so the bark has time to grow back in between since the first two harvests of a new tree don't produce the best cork Harvesters have to wait 33 years to get the good stuff every summer Harvesters peel off the bark using Century old techniques since only the outer layer can be harvested yeah um to prevent that workers leave the inner layer untouched we can harvest the bark of the tree without damaging the bark so these cells can grow again without any impact in the life of the tree because the trees regenerate they'll never run out of cork the oldest tree on record is an estimated 200 years old and has been harvested 20 times in its lifetime cork planks are stripped from the trees they're pressed between concrete slabs for six months then they're sent to a processing facility to be boiled for at least an hour that's to sterilize the planks and make them softer this machine punches out the stoppers we see in our wine bottles those corks are shipped out to a hundred different countries but the rest of the cork left behind in this process isn't wasted we don't waste anything even the small residues all that byproduct can be made into things like flooring or granulated Stoppers used to Cork less expensive wines cork harvesting goes back Millennia Egyptians use Stoppers and tombs and the Romans use cork in shoes today Portugal harvests a hundred thousand tons of cork every year and owns a third of the cork oak forests in the world that is a real retainer of CO2 protected for biodiversity this tree that separates the south of Europe and North Africa from the Saro desert so it's a barrier to the certification sustainability was part of what saved the Portuguese wine stopper in the early 2000s winemakers began turning to synthetic closures and screw tops for bottles and the value of cork plummeted but as consumers became more environmentally conscious in the 2010s the movement against single-use Plastics that is happening all over the world it's a real opportunity for cork in 2018 Portugal passed a record billion dollars worth of cork exports Sports we kept that number and very close to 1.1 billion in 2019 and now we are waiting for the final numbers of 2020 but as a global pandemics as a global crisis we are expecting also some impact in our business despite the covid-19 pandemic the 2020 Harvest didn't stop the courtyard was this year wrapped and very smooth we are talking about an activity that it's done at open air itself the industry's success in the last decade has allowed Portugal to take its cork products into other Industries from construction to Autumn automotive industry to aerospatial to sports fashion clothes but even as Quark demand continues to grow Harvesters plan to keep doing things the same way they always have with a good ax just one of these latex mattresses can cost up to twenty six hundred dollars here in Guatemala workers harvesting natural latex fuel a roughly 10 billion dollar industry [Music] he wakes at 3am Institute Guatemala most of the country is a slate but this is when latex tree tappers start their day is there are over a million rubber trees on the guateelinda plantation where doroteo works in the next four hours he'll extract latex sap from around 700 of them is consume is [Music] a careful spiral in the bark of this tray letting the sap drip out his technique is incredibly precise something he's honed over 20 years on the job [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign but judging how long that break should be is a balancing act if he collects the liquid latex too late it may congeal into less valuable crumb rubber a material good for things like car tires but useless for mattresses [Music] during the summer low season an average of 140 liters of natural latex slowly seep into dorotheos buckets every morning double that in winter is a [Music] Para is [Music] everything the Tapas collect then goes straight to a nearby processing facility [Music] Factory workers consolidate the mornings Hall into tanks they let it sit for 12 hours before processing it in a centrifuge to separate the rubber from the water then they wait another 45 days for this concentrated latex to stabilize this will be turned into foam through a method called the Dunlop process it's based on a 19th century process for turning liquid latex into foam and is the most energy efficient method it involves first mixing the liquid latex with a combination of stabilizers this concoction is then whipped up into foam in this machine until it's the preferred density then workers add a gelling agent and heat the foam with radio waves to harden or vulcanize the latex every week about 40 tons of liquid latex foam moves from the processing facility to the mattress core Factory they need about 50 kilos of liquid latex to make one 30 kilo mattress [Music] once the core sets workers wash dry and squish the mattress course for Packaging this Factory produces around 600 mattresses per week these particular cores will be shipped to a facility in Los Angeles where they'll be processed into the final mattresses and sold by the company avocado this core Factory centrifuge facility and Plantation are all part of Grupo Fortaleza a group dedicated to the sustainable production of liquid latex in southern Guatemala Christian closes family has runguate Linda for over 50 years only a decade longer than the average rubber tree can be tabbed workers take care of guadelinda's 2 000 Acres of rubber trees we are certified FSC FSC stands for Forest stewards ship Council basically you have to have no child labor you have to only use organic products you have to abide the loss of your country and different things to certify that you're sustainable the facilities are also goals or Global organic latex standard certified products that carry the label must be made from 95 or more certified organic latex these certifications add value to the final product and consequently zeros to the price tag the rise of the Auto industry in the early 1900s caused the demand for rubber to explode and plantations to pop up in places like southeast Asia and Central and South America but a rapid increase in production quickly led to Falling prices which often came at the expense of indigenous populations forced to work these forests sometimes at the threat of violence since then the World Market for natural rubber has fluctuated greatly usually moving in tandem with the demand for automobiles in 2010 the price was very high so a lot of people started planting rubbers started buying a lot of land and started acquiring a lot of debt in the last 10 years it's been fluctuating and right now it's not at carrier low but I would say there are very low prices right now because of all the war in Russia and Ukraine and all the sanctions being put in China and the lack of production in China as well it has reduced the commodity price of natural rubber it's Times Like These that Plantation workers are most at risk of exploitation which is what certifications like goals attempts to incentivize companies not to do in 2021 the global latex mattress Market was valued at 9.7 billion dollars by 2030 that number could double to around 20 billion dollars but maintaining the high standards that justify the mattress's final price tag isn't easy in our history of planting trees we've been through two or three hurricanes when there is too much rain you can't really Harvest anything you cannot tap because all the sap that that's coming out of the tree it turns to wash off second thing it destroys roads so you can't really transport anything and third well people suffer a lot when the rivers tend to grow and they cannot go to work because everything is flooded the opposite can also be devastating if there is drought if it's too dry the rubber trees cannot produce enough latex for us to tap workers on unregulated plantations can be exposed to harsh working conditions like 12-hour days below minimum wages and toxic chemicals because we're keen on getting premiums we are usually profitable so we can keep the jobs of our workers we can keep tapping and we can keep adding value to our latex [Music] gemstones are an estimated 32 billion dollar industry but extracting them can be dangerous in Afghanistan miners use risky methods to hunt for jewels and 90 of those Jewels leave the country illegally the province of kanar was one of the deadliest places in Afghanistan Decades of fighting forced thousands of families to flee their homes but Habib and his nine cousins grew up around here and know every inch of these mountains for 10 hours to reach a campsite nearly 10 000 feet above sea level foreign they'll live here mining for the next month already Habib first spotted tourmaline in these mountains 25 years ago now with Decades of experience the 55 year old is the leader of his group foreign [Music] and with that short prayer the men are ready to crawl down 300 feet [Music] the veins are actually magma that cooled under high pressure creating emerald and tourmaline they're already 300 feet deep and they can't go any farther without air howdy yeah this narrow tube pumps their oxygen from a ventilator above ground inhaling all this dust can scar workers lungs for life [Music] but nothing stops these men today they're going even deeper into the mine because they've gotten everything they can from these walls foreign foreign to get farther into the Bedrock they drill holes and fill them with dynamite the Bedrock that contains the gems is often brittle and could easily collapse with heavy Drilling in 2019 30 miners were buried alive at a gold mine in another province the dynamite is all set now they have less than a minute to get out of this tunnel each other [Applause] is they usually go back in to retrieve the gems but today they left early because they heard the Taliban was on its way during the 20-year War the Taliban and other Insurgent groups operated most of these mines reports suggest they were earning up to 20 million dollars a year smuggling Jewels out of the country and the gems continue to fund the Taliban today after the group regained control of Afghanistan meanwhile people like Habib struggle to find buyers since most countries don't openly trade with Afghanistan is selling to local Jewelers he divides the money among his workers Habib makes about 140 dollars a month nearly doubled the average salary in this country but he has to feed his wife and 12 children and it's hard to sell his gems for more um has been polishing gems for more than 30 years thank you he learned the craft from his cousin in Pakistan when his family lived there as refugees during the Afghan Civil War but he returned in the early 2000s and set up a workshop with his brothers here in Kabul ations he works mostly with blue lapis lazuli foreign [Music] thank you nord's younger brother Amir Ahmad shirazad runs the store upstairs his son helps out before school [Music] they sell everything from dishes to jewelry and sculptures Amir says he prices items based on the weight of the stones and how long each piece took to me he even sells the type of stone Habib mines and he makes these prayer bead necklaces himself he says business has been tough lately foreign busy mining he's working on his new home just minutes away from the mines [Music] um he will no longer have to walk 10 hours to get to work while he risks his life hunting for gems it has helped him pay for this new home and Habib is thankful for that um [Music] as with gemstones pearl jewelry sales are worth billions of dollars but unlike any other gem pearls grow inside a living creature and getting them out is not an easy task [Music] foreign South Sea refers to the southern portion of the Pacific Ocean in these Waters just off the coast of lombok Indonesia Pearl Farms like after all Pearl a growing cultured pearls these are pearls that require a human to put something inside an oyster instead of harvesting naturally occurring piles and South Sea pearls are the most expensive variety of cultured pearls that's in part because of how long it takes to make a south sea Pearl while some fresh water oysters can churn out dozens of smaller pearls within three months it takes about five years to cultivate a single South Sea Pearl the oyster it comes from the pink powder Maxima can only make one at a time and only a fourth of these oysters survive cultivation that's why the Pearl Farmers have to go to Great Lengths to keep the oysters alive it starts in this highly controlled laboratory where lab technicians must create the perfect conditions for oyster larvae to grow into healthy Pearl producing adults they have to maintain a room temperature of exactly 20 degrees Celsius and feeds the larvae the phytoplankton they need to grow to do this they combine salt water from the south sea and sodium hydroxide and store it for five days until there's enough plankton lab techs feed the Plankton to Nets of baby oysters and monitor their growth for about 45 days that's around the time they reach at least one millimeter in diameter and are old enough to be transferred to Sea the oysters are transferred to save on the costs of rearing figure oysters which can get expensive [Music] in the south sea the oysters get the warm Waters and food they need to mature this is also where most of them will die without producing a single Pearl again [Music] that's why Pearl Farmers have to check on the oysters monthly to ensure they're still growing eating and healthy they pull the Nets of oysters up from the sea and clean the shells this helps prevent Predators from feeding off the oysters and eventually killing them [Music] foreign after up to two years of nursing when the oysters are large enough implantation can begin for cultured pearls implantation is the most important step when a nucleus is implanted the oyster sees it as an irritant and reacts by building protective layers of nature around it this becomes the power [Music] Harry is demonstrating where the nucleus is implanted on an opened oyster foreign [Music] and injects the nucleus in the middle he then adds saipo under the nucleus cybo is a mantle tissue cut from another oyster that surrounds the implanted nucleus it's essential to the Pearl quality and without it the oyster won't produce any Pearls at all Harry is the only person after all trusts with this step that's because the nuclei don't come cheap Mahmoud buys the nuclei from Japan and their cost in addition to import taxes takes 20 percent of his profits and he says getting import permits for these nucleons difficult preventing him from buying enough to expand his business after the nucleus is implanted special attention is paid to how the naked grows around it to avoid a misshapen Pearl they're working towards a large almost perfectly round Pearl workers invert the oysters and put them in their protective Nets to bring back to Sea the south sea piles unique soft satiny luster and thick maker are a result of the warm Waters it grows in and a thick maker means a large Pearl Harry says they must flip them regularly so the naked grows evenly foreign workers remove the oysters from the sea and weekly Harry checks the implanted oysters monthly to see how the Pearl is developing this is done for up to two years before the first pile can be harvested [Music] is yeah hairy implants the same oyster two more times each time the Pearl after all Harvest is bigger by the third harvest the Pearl can reach over 20 millimeters in diameter and over 8 grams in weight but as much as Pearl Farmers like Mahmoud invest in the intense care needed to raise the oysters the outcome is never guaranteed Mahmoud says only 20 of the oysters that survive make the most valuable kind of pearl almost perfectly round lustrous and large Mahmoud grades the poles based on size luster shape and color the larger rounder shinier minimally blemished pearls get the highest grade that can be Triple A or quadruple a depending on the producer Mahmoud then sells them to Jewelers like Rihanna Melia who Fashions the pearls into necklaces earrings and rings Rihanna seeks out the highest grade she can find but it isn't easy material lower grades are more available but they're rougher asymmetrical and lack shine and in the jewelry World those are the least desirable but even the highest grade pearls are not perfectly round that's because even though they're farmed they're still natural pearls so finding a near-perfect pearl let alone enough to make a string necklace is extremely rare it took nine years for Rihanna to find enough AAA grade pearls to make this necklace she is finally able to sell it this year for thirty six thousand dollars to a local buyer that makes sourcing these expensive pearls worth it for Rihanna who relies on Farmers to continue to produce high quality pearls but Mahmoud says Pearl Farmers need more support from the government specifically around making nuclei readily available foreign this company hauls in Sixty thousand pounds of crawfish a day once they're out of the water the clock starts ticking Farmers have just a few hours to get them weighed sold and into coolers and these little guys have to stay alive the whole time as soon as they're dead it starts breaking them down extremely fast it'll get mushy and spoiled these Crustaceans are big business for Louisiana they contribute 300 million dollars to the state's economy and end up across the U.S do you ever sneak a bite but you can't help yourself especially when they have but this industry didn't even take off until recent decades in the 80s some rice Farmers took a massive gamble they experimented with cultivating the Crawfish that lived below their fields and it paid off in just nine years Madison McIntyre has built one of the biggest crawfish companies in the state handling up to 4 million pounds a year ever imagined that it would be to this level nor was it our goal it kind of just happened organically but because the farmed crawfish industry is so young it's like the wild west unregulated and fast moving so how exactly did Louisiana's rice Farmers come to Harvest crawfish and why do they stay in such a tough business crawfish are freshwater Crustaceans related to lobsters and shrimp and they're native to Louisiana's bayous Rivers swamps and rice fields like this one and if you look closely you'll see some holes there's one right here they go by all sorts of names crawdads crayfish Mud Bugs they come out the mud literally from late September to October rice Farmers flood their fields and the Crawfish emerged from their Burrows hungry by November he can start catching them in rows of traps Mauricio Guillen nicknamed Junior heads out on the Crawfish boat which doesn't have a steering wheel and all that's controlled by foot pedals that are at his feet armed with thick gloves he empties each trap he has just seven seconds to dump out a trap load in more bait and drop it back in the water and that's just how much ground it covers between each trap he's got to move quickly so the Crawfish don't die in the Louisiana Heat Junior's pretty fast he's a lot faster than me this table helps them weed out any unwanted Critters and it separates the Crawfish by size the smaller peelers can fall through here you know they'll go from underneath here and then into these sags but crawfish's big break didn't even come until the 1980s rice Farmers profits were dipping so looking for another income stream they took a big risk and cultivated crawfish alongside the grain fourth generation rice farmer Jim Johnson was one of them it just works almost perfect together there's almost no better combination of vegetation to go with crawfish the rice plant provides a wetland for crawfish breeding and shade from the Sun and place hosts to microorganisms like algae larva and worms the Crawfish will feed off of those the crawfish's poop then fertilizes the fields and the two crop Seasons line up perfectly when Farmers harvest the rice the Crawfish have safely broiled themselves deep into the mud once the rice is picked crawfish emerge from their Burrows with babies by winter they're ready to be harvested and eaten soon buyers all over the south from Texas to South Carolina began gobbling up the Mud Bugs what was once just a local eat now makes up more than half of Jim's business and with pecan and margins in the rice industry through the years the Crawfish not only supplemented it but you know agriculture today the crops are an important part of economies like Welsh Louisiana's all the Crawfish in the whole nation are farmed in a 35 Mile Square radius of this area from November to July rice Farmers end up with tons of crawfish hacked into sacks like these Junior and his team will load them onto trucks and book it to the Crawfish dock in the summer months they have to get the Mud Bugs weighed and in the cooler within three hours or else the heat could kill them and dead crawfish breed bacteria once cooked it's technically still edible but the meat falls apart and it doesn't taste as good Madison pays rice Farmers about a dollar 25 a pound for their catch unlike most crawfish mongers he doesn't come from a farming family in 2014 he and his friend Charlie started selling them out of his truck in New Orleans at an abandoned gas station and we would we would do cerebral crawfish through there on the weekend it was so successful he bought more trucks and expanded into a full-fledged Enterprise Parish Seafood wholesale while a lot of crawfish companies focus on just one part of the process Madison does it all along with his dog June he grows his own crawfish and buys from 36 other rice Farmers he also owns a company that hauls the catch a processing plant and restaurants cutting out the middlemen now we have a little over 60 employees we run 14 trucks seven days a week um 24 7. Madison washes some of his catch on this hundred and fifty thousand dollar machine [Music] every day every day but you get used to it like it doesn't really hurt not only do they have to wash their fingers they have to watch out for runaways they're Escape artists so yeah crawfish have to hit the coolers right after washing to keep them alive until they're sold Madison tries to move the high grade larger crawfish within 12 to 24 hours but that's not always easy it's all it's all pretty much done on a handshake there's no contracts you have to be careful because people can buy all of your crawfish in the beginning of the season and then as soon as the catch picks up they can be they can leave you and buy from somebody else stranding crawfish in these fridges it can be a lot of pressure the low-grade smaller crawfish are easier for him to move because Madison just sells it to himself then he sends it to his bro Bridge Factory to process the tail meat workers start unloading the Crawfish off the trucks starting at 4 AM they dump them into tanks and skim off any dead or weak ones from the top then they give the Mud Bugs a wash a conveyor belt drops them into a giant steamer basket using a system of tracks a worker carefully lowers the basket into a vat of boiling water just like lobsters crawfish go in alive to get the best flavor that's why it's so important to keep them kicking until this moment it takes just two minutes to cook them through then Madison and the team break them down this steel table into the peeling room Leona Williams has been peeling here for 50 years [Music] to make sure that the veins are out for sure she can feel about 40 pounds worth a day and you got to be kind of fast at it that's about the only way you could make money they get paid 250 a pound are you the fastest one here uh no I'm not gonna say this I have my sister right here she's a little faster than I am the team in the Next Room vacuum seals the Tails into one pound bags because competition is so stiff Madison wouldn't tell us where he sells these but he said they end up across the U.S he also sends tail meat and whole crawfish to three restaurants he owns in the state cooking up all kinds of Louisiana Delicacies crawfish have been have been important part of Southern Louisiana's culture for centuries according to the native heritage project the homo indigenous people named themselves after the word for crawfish and used it as a war symbol in the 1800s a wave of French Canadians settled in Louisiana after being forced out of Canada by the British they came to be known as the Cajuns and they brought their lobster recipes with them but short on Lobster here they swapped in crawfish by the 1960s crawfish had their own festival and Creole restaurants were adding them to menus in New Orleans it was definitely a Louisiana delicacy it didn't really get much farther than the state crawfish have since gone definitively National but locals still cook them into Staples like etouffee bodan and Boyles Madison's business partner Charlie Johnson uses a Cajun cooking style in his crawfish boils make sure the drains shut this is liquid boil um so I'm adding that to the water he first boils the corn and potatoes drains them and then Cooks the Crawfish last right there when the tail starts to kind of separate from the head there's that little white line you can see the meat that's usually a Telltale sign that they're they're ready while New Orleans creel chefs add dry seasoning to the water crawfish boil in out here Cajuns dump on the dry seasoning after they're cooked shut that ice chest and we let them steam I think the magic happens in the ice chest that's when they start to soak up those seasonings down here folks stop by the restaurant well into the evening the Cajuns also love their dip well back in Nova they don't use any sauce with his Factory weigh station and restaurants Madison has become a considerable player in the Crawfish industry we're building a new facility that's going to be focused on air freight crawfish but his success hasn't come without its challenges as the industry boomed over the last 20 years lots of people tried to get in on the action by 2019 the number of crawfish farms in the state had doubled and then came inflation Madison says cost soared 40 percent last year fuel alone cost him 150 000 more than normal that's a lot of money that would have been profit yeah Labor's pretty high and we have mostly foreign labor 95 of his staff is working in the U.S on a Visa I think we also have to house them and pay for transportation you can't find local or American labor that would work as hard as these guys do side by side with us Madison says he pays them just under fourteen dollars an hour almost double the minimum wage we'll put in 15 and 18 hour days seven days a week so it's very demanding we don't get to see our family as much during the season but they don't get to see their family at all soaring operation costs and low margins have forced dozens of Louisiana Crawfish companies to close and so the people that came in just for the the get quick Rich scheme or not making it right now because of how tough the market is Madison says the size of this company has helped keep him afloat you know we could absorb that those blows but a lot of people unfortunately couldn't one of the changes have you made to make it through this uh we don't get big salaries Madison said Parish Seafood wholesale saw five hundred thousand dollars in profit last year and he paid himself just a twenty thousand dollar salary he also says he invested more than 80 percent of the profit back into the company so if anything ever breaks or if coolers go out we have backup everything you know backup trucks backup ice machines backup freezers backup coolers we have multiple forklifts which are all just luxuries because in an industry where One Bad season could send a company packing Madison has to fight to keep each crawfish alive I think you know in the next five or six years it'll be very lucrative again to be in this industry because it'll only be a handful of people doing it [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 7,376,606

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, Billion Dollar

Id: apRg-105hB0

Length: 212min 0sec (12720 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023