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One less in a landfill, or how our stuff tells our story
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Ari's waste. Courtesy Save Your Trash
“I lived next to a junkyard. White guys would want something from it, but they didn’t want to go in there, so they’d ask me to get it for them. I’d do it. I’d go get it and sell it back to them.” This is the beginning of a lengthy, tangential story from G, an American Indian Vietnam vet and ex-Hell’s Angel who, by his own account, holds the somewhat questionable title of spending two nights in every major brothel and three nights in every major jail in the world and who, by my account, has the biggest collection of stuff I’ve ever seen. The high walls of his living space are lined with VHS tapes he’s watched a half-dozen times each, books he doesn’t know he has, boxes of clothes organized by dirty and clean, his adult children’s well-worn stuffed animals—a library of objects most people cast off every few years the way a snake sheds its skin. The place is not unlike WALL-E's truck/home, the tools, hardware, art supplies and curio forming an extra layer of insulation against inclement conditions.
Last week I talked about people ridding themselves of excess belongings. The inquiry ended with the magical, cathartic disappearance of a bunch of burdensome stuff. But that fairytale is incomplete; all those things have to go someplace. As Ari Derfel, the San Franciscan who saved all his trash for year, plainly puts it, there is no such thing as away. Derfel started his experiment to get a really concrete picture of just how much garbage a single person generates each year. The assemblage of trash—washed, sorted and stored in boxes and cans around his apartment—provided more insight into his consumption habits than sheer quantity alone; it became a map of how much, when and, upon reflection, why he was buying certain things. In an excellent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Derfel tells reporter Kelly Zito that when he realized he was eating soy ice cream every day after work, it dawned on him that he was probably stressed out and would benefit more from a daily run than a daily snack.
What we throw away says a lot about us, maybe as much as the things we keep. Spend a few evenings roving through the alleys of our city and you can not only score some pretty cool and useful stuff, but you also start making projections about which buildings contain families with children, which have young people getting ready for the annual apartment shuffle and which house the kin of the recently deceased. These clues usually come in the form of sturdier objects made of wood and metal, like furniture. Intentionally disposable items tend to be more anonymous: plastic water bottles, pizza boxes, PC towers from 1996. These things are harder to save because they’re designed not to be.
VHS tapes aside, there’s a noticeable lack of plastic in G’s home. There’s plenty of wood—wood holds up the multiple televisions hanging from three of the walls, the immense work table filling the center of the space is made of wood—but there's not much stuff that will deteriorate or stop working in a year or two. Funny how the plastic things that go out of date or break most quickly are often the things we pay the most money for. Cell phones, mp3 players and laptops tend to wear out faster than a really well-made pair of shoes and are slightly less useful. I’m not saying we all have to go back to Swinglines and land lines (I have the former, which pre-dates myself and I am absolutely certain will outlive my new Macbook), but I am saying the cost of things does not necessarily reflect their true value.
There are the minimalists, the ascetics who simplify their relationship with the world by reducing their ownership of it. And then there are the archivists, the craftspeople, the scavengers who rescue and preserve objects that have been abandoned as useless or out-of-date. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, buying and discarding without much thought beyond our budget. However, this might be starting to change. Yesterday's New York Times ran a story on waste disposal giant Waste Management's bid to buy Republic Services. One sentence caught my eye: "Profit growth has been relatively slow in the waste disposal industry, which also operates the nation’s landfills." It can't just be Ari making that dent...
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