Lifestyle

Will We Ever Be Able to Recycle Our Clothes Like an Aluminum Can?

Published

1 year ago

November 30, 2022

Will We Ever Be Able to Recycle Our Clothes Like an Aluminum Can?

This text is a part of a sequence analyzing Accountable Trend, and revolutionary efforts to deal with points going through the style trade.

A brand new textile recycling plant opened by the corporate Renewcell within the small coastal metropolis of Sundsvall, Sweden, is so massive that workers use bikes to get from one finish of the manufacturing line to the opposite.

Massive bales of cotton waste are dumped on conveyor belts, shredded, after which damaged down right into a moist slurry, with the assistance of chemical compounds. That slurry, referred to as dissolving pulp, is then bleached, dried, stamped into sheets of what appears to be like like recycled craft paper, given the model identify Circulose, and shipped off to producers to be made into textiles like viscose for garments.

Up till now, most garments marketed as constituted of recycled supplies solely contained a small share of recycled cotton or had been constituted of water bottles, fishing nets and previous carpets. (Expertise exists to recycle polyester into polyester however is prohibitively costly and infrequently used.)

Renewcell’s manufacturing facility is without doubt one of the first steps towards a system that turns previous garments into new high-quality garments made solely with recycled material. It additionally helps to deal with the mountains of textile waste accumulating worldwide and will assist scale back the variety of timber which are harvested from ecologically delicate forests to supply materials for style. (Greater than 200 million timber are minimize down yearly to supply dissolving pulp for man-made cellulosic materials, together with rayon, viscose, modal, and lyocell, in response to Cover, a Canadian nonprofit that works with the paper and style industries to scale back deforestation.)

A few half-dozen start-ups around the globe are geared toward business textile recycling, and Renewcell is the primary to open.

Many customers appear to be more and more uneasy about what occurs to their previous garments, and style firms are trying to find methods to proceed increasing whereas concurrently fulfilling guarantees to scale back their destructive environmental influence and obtain a round system during which garments are looped again via as an alternative of being despatched to a landfill. The European Union has mandated expanded textile assortment for all member states by 2025, which is predicted to considerably improve the circulate of style waste in want of a vacation spot.

“It’s thrilling,” Ashley Holding, a sustainable textile marketing consultant and founding father of Circuvate, mentioned of the manufacturing facility’s opening. “It’s nice to see them get to such a stage.”

The Rise of Undesirable Items

Trend circularity wasn’t all the time this sophisticated. Earlier than industrialization, most individuals made their very own clothes from all-natural supplies. The rich repurposed and handed their garments all the way down to servants, after which on to individuals in rural communities, who patched them till the clothes had been now not wearable after which bartered them to rag collectors, in response to a 2018 research from the College of Brighton. In Europe, these rags had been collected in warehouses after which lastly despatched to be made into paper or wool shoddy for reasonably priced blankets and coats.

With the industrialization of style on the finish of the nineteenth century, individuals who beforehand sewed their garments at house started to purchase a few of their clothes, Adam Minter, the writer of “Secondhand: Travels within the New International Storage Sale,” wrote in an electronic mail.

“As clothes fell in worth, and girls entered the commercial work power, customers had fewer incentives and fewer time to fix and restore,” in response to Mr. Minter.

There was an expanded circulate of undesirable items, and the Salvation Military, which opened in New York within the late nineteenth century, began elevating cash for charitable tasks by taking in, repairing and reselling clothes and housewares, in response to Mr. Minter. Goodwill was based across the identical time as a Boston church’s charitable program.

“By the 1910s, the quantity of undesirable clothes and different shopper items was so nice that charities transitioned away from mending,” Mr. Minter mentioned.

As we speak, most of our clothes leads to the trash, mentioned Maxine Bédat, the writer of the 2021 e book “Unraveled: The Life and Dying of a Garment.” It’s onerous to get a dependable determine of how a lot is discarded, particularly in the US. However, she mentioned, “We’re nonetheless primarily throwing it out.”

Extra knowledge is accessible for Europe. On common, 62 p.c of clothes that involves market annually in six Western European international locations leads to landfills or incinerators, in response to a latest research by Trend for Good.

What isn’t thrown out principally nonetheless flows to organizations like Goodwill, which move on what can’t be bought to for-profit sorting firms, in response to Ms. Bédat. Wearable garments are bought to resale markets in creating international locations, and unwearable textiles are became rags and lower-quality fibers for issues like insulation. Garments given to farmers’ market collections and quick style manufacturers via take-back applications normally additionally find yourself with these for-profit sorting firms, Ms. Bédat mentioned.

About 40 p.c of what the Western world ships to one of many largest resale markets in Accra, Ghana, is taken into account trash, in response to the Or Basis, which advocates higher clothes waste administration. Mountains of previous clothes have been photographed on seashores, in landfills and in deserts in Africa and Latin America.

“The resale market is being crushed beneath the load of the quantity of trash, principally, they’re receiving,” mentioned Rachel Kibbe, the chief government of the style consultancy Round Providers Group. “Now we have these companies which are changing into de facto waste managers.”

Presently, little or no textile waste turns into new clothes. In Western Europe, in response to Trend for Good, simply 2 p.c of collected textiles — pure wool, pure cotton and acrylic — are mechanically recycled into new textiles, principally mud-colored wool shoddy blankets for catastrophe reduction work, and low-quality cotton that have to be combined in with virgin cotton for brand spanking new textiles. Mixed with the low assortment charges, meaning lower than 1 p.c of clothes bought in Western Europe is recycled into new fibers.

“Now we have to wrap our heads round the truth that your garments, should you ought to half with them, might land in somebody’s desert, in somebody’s waterways, in somebody’s discipline, burning,” Ms. Kibbe mentioned.

The Race to Recycle Textiles

The brand new Renewcell manufacturing facility accepts solely pure cotton textile waste, and plenty of garments are constituted of artificial blends. However will probably be in a position to soak up a number of it — greater than 120,000 metric tons a 12 months. Round 163,000 metric tons of low-value cotton waste, ripe for chemical recycling, flows yearly out of six Western European international locations, in response to a latest research by Trend for Good.

Utilizing material sourced globally from denim factories and secondhand retailers, the manufacturing facility produces sheets of dried dissolving pulp, referred to as Circulose, which it sells as the principle ingredient for man-made cellulosic materials like viscose, rayon and modal.

“We’re creating circularity inside the style trade,” mentioned Patrik Lundström, the chief government officer of Renewcell. “As we speak circularity within the style trade doesn’t actually exist. Now we have been speaking about this environmental influence for the final 20 years. Now we have very, little or no progress to this point.”

Renewcell’s founding researchers, Mikael Lindstrom and Gunnar Henriksson on the Royal Institute of Expertise in Stockholm, first developed the expertise to course of cotton waste in 2012.

The corporate produced sufficient recycled material for a costume in 2014 and constructed an illustration plant in 2017. It attracted the curiosity of manufacturers like Stella McCartney, which funded a life cycle evaluation exhibiting Circulose had the bottom local weather influence of 10 totally different artificial cellulosic fibers. H&M grew to become a minority shareholder within the firm in 2017.

The corporate went public and was listed in Sweden on the Nasdaq First North Premier Development Market in 2020. H&M, Levi Strauss and Bestseller, a global clothes chain primarily based in Denmark, have dedicated to incorporating Circulose into their garments. (In 2021, Levi’s debuted a capsule assortment of denims that had been 16 p.c Circulose.)

“The Circulose that comes out could be very precious as a result of it’s a recycled material, however it behaves like virgin,” mentioned Paul Foulkes-Arellano, the founding father of Circuthon, a round economic system administration consultancy.

A handful of different firms are additionally racing to supply recycled materials on a business scale. Two Finnish start-ups, Spinnova and Infinited Fiber Firm, have patented applied sciences to show plant-based waste into materials that mimic the texture of cotton. Spinnova mentioned its commercial-scale plant will likely be working by 2024. Infinited hopes to open in 2026. The U.S. start-up Evrnu has raised $31 million for its recycling expertise, the corporate mentioned, and expects to be open by 2024.

The expertise to course of polyester-cotton blends is a little bit additional behind, and people blends make up a big chunk of the previous clothes that’s discarded. An Australian start-up, BlockTexx, mentioned it’s constructing the primary commercial-scale recycling plant that may course of poly-cotton blends and hopes to open in 2023.

The British start-up Worn Once more Applied sciences mentioned in October that it had obtained greater than $30 million in funding and is developing a plant in Switzerland to separate and recycle blended textiles. The U.S. start-up Circ introduced in July that it had obtained greater than $30 million, via a funding spherical led by Invoice Gates’s Breakthrough Vitality Ventures, and which included funding from Inditex, the father or mother firm of Zara.

“Abruptly, there’s been a sweep,” mentioned Ms. Rademan, of Trend for Good. “However I believe we’re nonetheless originally. They’re nonetheless combating for cash at this stage.”

The consulting agency McKinsey estimated in a 2022 report that six to seven billion euros would should be invested by 2030 to deal with at the least 18 p.c of the textile waste generated in Europe.

Critics level out that probably the most sustainable factor to do can be to rewear, restore and upcycle materials into new clothes, like individuals did within the nineteenth century.

Even Renewcell, which runs on hydropower, is just not fairly closing the loop, as a result of it isn’t turning cotton into cotton. (Although some manufacturers like Levi’s have used Circulose to partially change cotton in some merchandise, and lab exams present it may be run via this course of as much as seven instances, just like paper recycling.)

“Recycling stuff is energy-intensive,” Mr. Foulkes-Arellano mentioned. “If we had been wise, we’d simply minimize all of the denim up, all of the T-shirts up, and simply upcycle them into new clothes. I imply, there’s a number of actually good upcycled denim firms on the market. However massive enterprise needs new material.”

Ms. Rademan estimates will probably be at the least one other decade earlier than anybody will be capable of recycle a worn-out sweatshirt the best way they will recycle a soda can. She mentioned there’s a want for extra capital funding in constructing recycling crops, extra dedication from manufacturers to purchase recycled fibers, and a dedication from clothes producers to combine recycled merchandise into the provision chain.

Ms. Rademan mentioned within the subsequent 10 years she “would really feel snug that once I put this sweater in that recycling bin, it isn’t going to some unhealthy place.” However in the US, she mentioned, progress will depend on the political panorama: “It’s pushed by whoever’s in cost.”

Mr. Holding predicts will probably be 2050 earlier than we now have a worldwide textile-to-textile recycling infrastructure.

Though Renewcell is a crucial growth, “it’s nonetheless a drop within the bucket,” he mentioned, “in comparison with the quantity of textile feedstock that exists and the quantity of supplies that are produced yearly.”

Lifestyle

A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'

Published

4 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Press Room

A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'

As a young literature student in the 1990s, the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbled across a copy of Love and Silence, a forgotten 1967 novel by a writer named Enayat al-Zayyat who died by suicide in her 20s — a few years before her book was released.

Mersal was taken with the book’s “fresh and refreshing” language and emotional intensity; it exerted such power over her that the moment she finished reading it, she “turned back and began again… [copying] out passages, small stand-alone texts like lights to illuminate my emotional state.” At the time, Mersal was establishing herself as a reader and writer, and felt the need to “personally celebrate the books which ‘touched’ her, as though she needed to define herself by appending her discoveries to the canon.”

Decades later, she remains engaged in that project, at least where Enayat is concerned. Now an established poet living in Canada, Mersal set out to learn as much as she could about Enayat’s life and death — enough, ideally, to write the other woman’s life story. Although she did not uncover nearly enough to achieve that goal, she still presents the resulting book, Traces of Enayat, as a biography of sorts. It isn’t. Traces of Enayat is a memoir of Mersal’s search, a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo and through Mersal’s mind.

Mersal is a cool, restrained writer. Her prose, in Robin Moger’s translation, slips by easily, so that her moments of flaring emotion stand out. In contrast, the excerpts of Love and Silence she includes are hot with description and feeling. In one, Enayat describes feeling “at once imprisoned by this life and pulled toward new horizons. I wanted to pull this self clear, gummy with the sap of its surroundings; to tear free into a wider world.” It seems evident that Mersal chose this passage for its echo of Enayat’s story. Certainly it evokes one of Traces of Enayat‘s central questions: “Was it [Enayat’s] decision to end her life that drew me to her,” Mersal writes, “or the thought of her unrealized potential” — the wider literary world Enayat never reached? More vexing still is the question not of what draws Mersal to Enayat, but why Enayat’s hold over her is so powerful. At the end of the memoir, it’s still not clear.

Of course, Traces of Enayat is not designed to satisfy. It’s there in the title: we’re only going to get glimpses and fragments of its subject — or, really, its subjects. Mersal hides herself behind her search for Enayat; Enayat herself hides in the past. Her best friend, the actress Nadia Lutfi, remembers her vividly, but was too busy working to be fully present for some of Enayat’s bitterest disappointments; Enayat’s surviving relatives, meanwhile, recall her painful divorce and the rejection of her book by the publisher she’d hoped would release it, but they never had the emotional access to her that Nadia did.

Even Enayat’s tomb is hidden. She turns out to be buried in a side wing of a family member’s mausoleum and, after much investigating, Mersal manages to visit. This is the book’s emotional high point. Mersal weeps, not out of grief but because “standing there in front of her headstone was the high point of our relationship… the tomb was the only place where she actually was. For her life, I had to return to the archive, to the memories of the living, and my own imagination, but I felt now that at last she trusted me, that she had allowed me to reach her.” For the first time here, Mersal allows her interest in Enayat to transform on the page into a nearly mystical connection before moving swiftly away from the tomb and the scene. For the reader, this is an answer of sorts: Mersal’s link to Enayat goes in some way beyond the explicable. We can’t experience it for ourselves.

What we can experience is Mersal’s investigation of Egypt after the Nasserist revolution of 1952, the context for Enayat’s book and its disappearance. Enayat’s work and life do not fit neatly into the prevailing narrative that “Arab women writers [of the period] were primarily concerned with nationalism, that there could be no liberation for women without the liberation of the nation.” Love and Silence is about grief and romance; its author, meanwhile, had to battle sexist Nasserist divorce laws to free herself from her husband and couldn’t get the court to give her full custody of her son.

Mersal pieces this story together slowly, speculating about the role of Enayat’s divorce and one subsequent romantic relationship in the end of her life. She does archival work and visits the places still left from Enayat’s Cairo, superimposing the post-revolutionary city Enayat lived in — full of new hopes and colonial legacies — on the contemporary one she describes. These moments are, like the book’s other strands, fragments and flickers. Mersal passes over geography the way her prose tends to pass over emotion, never lingering in one place long enough to describe it in depth.

Mersal is a poet and this is, fundamentally, a poet’s strategy. A poem is, more often than not, a peek through a cracked window, a fleeting experience rather than a drawn-out one. But Traces of Enayat is a full book, and the degree to which it feels swift and partial is at once a literary achievement and a frustration. In its last passage, Mersal writes that Enayat “wants to remain free and weightless.” Maybe so. But by letting Enayat have what she wants, Mersal denies the reader a deeper experience of her own obsession.

Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her first novel, Short War, was published in April 2024.

Lifestyle

Emotional support alligator, once in the running for America’s Favorite Pet, is missing: ‘Bring my baby back’

Published

4 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Press Room

Emotional support alligator, once in the running for America’s Favorite Pet, is missing: ‘Bring my baby back’

Emotional support gator’s owner pleads for its return

An emotional support alligator named Wally, who has made headlines over the years, and was once in the running for America’s Favorite Pet, has gone missing and his owner is making an emotional plea for his return.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. – A Pennsylvania man is pleading for the safe return of his beloved emotional support alligator named WallyGator.

In a Facebook post, Joie Henney stated that the alligator was taken from his enclosure on April 21, while the two were visiting Henney’s friends in Brunswick, Georgia.

In a separate post, Henney wrote that his pet gator was nabbed by somebody “who likes to drop alligators off into someone’s yard to terrorize them,” and added that WallyGator was then taken by a trapper called by the Department of Natural Resources.

However, Storyful has not independently confirmed this claim and has reached out to both the Department of Natural Resources and Brunswick police.

In an emotional video posted on TikTok, Henney said, “We need all the help we can get to bring my baby back.”

WallyGator was reportedly the visual model for the alligator in Disney+’s “Loki,” and has gone viral after several public appearances over the past few years.

The emotional support reptile was even in the running to be named America’s Favorite Pet and has visited senior living facilities in the past.

In an interview in 2019, Henney said, “He’s just like a dog. He wants to be loved and petted.”

According to the York Daily Record, Wally was rescued from Florida where a congregation of gators were set to be destroyed to make room for a development.

READ: Philadelphia man denied entry into Phillies game for bringing emotional support alligator

When Henney took Wally home to Pennsylvania, the young gator was just 14 months old and about 1½ feet long.

WallyGator visits a nursing home in 2019. Courtesy: SpiritTrust Lutheran

At first, he said Wally was afraid of everything. But soon, the alligator started to become relatively domesticated.

“He was like a little puppy dog,” Henney said. “He would follow us around the house.”

READ: Rambo the alligator allowed to stay with owner in Lakeland home

Henney, a former television host who had his own hunting and fishing show, started bringing Wally to schools and senior centers to educate people about alligators. That’s when he noticed the gator appeared to have a calming presence, so he decided to have Wally registered as an emotional support animal. Henney built a 300-gallon pond in his living room for Wally and his other gator, a 2-year-old named Scrappy. He said Wally enjoys watching TV, and said his favorite movie is “The Lion King.”

Though Wally has never tried to bite anyone, Henney warned that he’s still a wild animal.

“They aren’t for everyone,” Henney told the York Daily Record in 2019. “But what can I say, I’m not normal.”

In a social media post, Henney said there is a reward for the safe return of Wally with no questions asked.

SIGN UP: Click here to sign up for the FOX 13 daily newsletter

Lifestyle

Before living in a pineapple under the sea, SpongeBob was born as an educational tool

Published

11 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Press Room

Before living in a pineapple under the sea, SpongeBob was born as an educational tool

Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants made its TV debut 25 years ago on May 1, 1999 before the official series launch in July 1999.

Nickelodeon

hide caption

toggle caption

Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants made its TV debut 25 years ago on May 1, 1999 before the official series launch in July 1999.

Nickelodeon

Finish this tune: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

If you answered correctly with “SpongeBob SquarePants!” you’ve likely heard of the square, sponge cartoon who made his TV debut 25 years ago on May 1, 1999 (before the official series launch in July 1999).

But before the “absorbent” and “porous” SpongeBob took over television and movie theater screens, he was actually Bob the Sponge in an educational comic book.

Here’s a look at the story behind SpongeBob.

From Bob the Sponge to SpongeBob

SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg attended Humboldt University majoring in marine science with a minor in art. After graduating in 1984, Hillenburg eventually began working at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, Calif. While working as a marine science educator there, Hillenburg illustrated the flora and fauna of tidal pools in the form of an educational comic book called The Intertidal Zone. And the narrator of the comic book may look familiar: a sea sponge with sunglasses and a round face named “Bob the Sponge.”

In 1989, Hillenburg enrolled in the California Institute of Art’s Experimental Animation program. After completing the program, he gained more animation experience. Eventually, he was hired as a director on the Nickelodeon cartoon Rocko’s Modern Life, which aired from 1993 to 1996. While working on the show, he was encouraged to turn The Intertidal Zone into an animated format, something he could pitch to Nickelodeon.

Speaking to NPR’s Morning Edition in 2001, Hillenburg said he worked to develop his characters’ design and personalities, including Bob the Sponge.

He described the moment of inspiration: “It wasn’t until I drew a square sponge, like a sink sponge, that it really seemed to fit that character that I was looking for, that innocent, squeaky-clean I guess you could say, the square peg in the round hole.”

After approving Hillenburg’s pitch, Nickelodeon set up SpongeBob SquarePants to be the network’s first Saturday morning cartoon.

Fun for all ages leads to a multibillion-dollar franchise

SpongeBob SquarePants first aired as a preview after Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards on May 1, 1999. The first segment of this preview, titled “Help Wanted,” is only eight minutes long, yet it introduces a robust coterie of residents in the fictional, underwater town of Bikini Bottom.

From SpongeBob’s best friend, a starfish named Patrick (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke); to Mr. Krabs, a greedy, red crab voiced by veteran character actor Clancy Brown; to a grumpy octopus named Squidward (voiced by Roger Bumpass); to two characters voiced by Tom Kenny: Gary, a meowing pet sea snail, and of course, the optimistic and overzealous kitchen sponge and titular character, SpongeBob SquarePants.

“Help Wanted” shows SpongeBob preparing for his dream job as a fry cook at the local greasy eatery owned by Mr. Krabs: “The Krusty Krab.”

In promotional art from Nickelodeon, SpongeBob (center) serves “Krabby Patties” to patrons: from left, Sandy Cheeks, Squidward, Mr. Krabs and Patrick.

Nickelodeon

hide caption

toggle caption

Nickelodeon

In promotional art from Nickelodeon, SpongeBob (center) serves “Krabby Patties” to patrons: from left, Sandy Cheeks, Squidward, Mr. Krabs and Patrick.

Nickelodeon

Tom Kenny, who worked with Hillenburg on Rocko’s Modern Life, took a unique approach to developing the voice for SpongeBob. Speaking with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 2004 about the process, Kenny said:

“When it came time to come up with a voice, it was just a matter of finding a voice that was childlike and maybe childish, but not a child, non-age specific, enthusiastic and just kind of weird. And we finally settled on this elfish helium voice that SpongeBob wound up being.”

Tom Kenny, Voice of SpongeBob SquarePants

The first episode preview contained two more segments: “Reef Blowers” and “Tea At The Treedome”; the latter of which introduced a scientific squirrel who lives in a biodome named Sandy Cheeks, voiced by Carolyn Lawrence.

The series officially debuted on July 17, 1999. That same year, SpongeBob SquarePants beat out the popular Saturday morning cartoon Pokémon in average viewership ratings.

The Cast of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical poses onstage during opening night on Dec. 4, 2017, at the Palace Theatre in New York City.

Jenny Anderson/Getty Images for Nickelodeon

hide caption

toggle caption

Jenny Anderson/Getty Images for Nickelodeon

The Cast of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical poses onstage during opening night on Dec. 4, 2017, at the Palace Theatre in New York City.

Jenny Anderson/Getty Images for Nickelodeon

SpongeBob SquarePants only grew in popularity. By 2002, the show had almost 56 million total viewers, with almost a third aged 18 to 49, the St. Petersburg Times reported that year. In 2004, its first theatrical release, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, grossed $141 million worldwide.

Hillenburg left as showrunner after the movie was released but remained credited as an executive producer on the series and co-wrote the story for 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.

The Emmy award-winning series is in the midst of its 14th season. And the franchise has expanded to include another theatrical release in 2020, two spinoff television series, more than two dozen video games and even theme park rides.

SpongeBob's Bikini Bottom On Broadway — And In Danger

A musical based on the underwater sponge and his friends took to Broadway in 2017 and had over 300 performances before closing in 2018. The New York Times reported the franchise had generated $13 billion in retail merchandise sales by 2017.

The staying power of SpongeBob

In 2017, Hillenburg announced that he had been diagnosed with ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. He died a year later. As a tribute to Hillenburg, more than one million fans signed a petition for the show’s characters to perform at the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show.

Colleagues close to him credit much of the cartoon’s success to Hillenburg. Speaking with Fresh Air in 2004, Kenny said Hillenburg balanced attention to detail with the flexibility of the characters.

From left, actor Bill Fagerbakke, SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and actor Tom Kenny attend the premiere of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie on Nov. 17, 2004, in New York City.

Peter Kramer/Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

Peter Kramer/Getty Images

From left, actor Bill Fagerbakke, SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and actor Tom Kenny attend the premiere of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie on Nov. 17, 2004, in New York City.

Peter Kramer/Getty Images

“Steve Hillenburg definitely is the big kahuna and, a lot of times, just has every vocal nuance and eye blink and twitch mapped out to the nanosecond in his mind,” he said. “And then other times, he’ll just take you off the leash and go, ‘You know, I don’t know where this is going. Just take it where it feels funny.’ So you never know whether you’re going to be doing math or jazz. It’s kind of cool.”

Twenty-five years after its TV debut, the show continues. SpongeBob SquarePants was renewed for its 15th season last fall and another movie (this one featuring Sandy Cheeks) is planned.