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Trash pickers and recycling
Apr. 1st, 2007 08:59 pmThis is my third spring in Abilene and the first one that I have participated in the annual spring clean up. It seems that once a year the city sponsors a day for people to clear out their clutter and place it on the curb for the city workers to haul to the dump. Unwanted furniture, appliances, trimmings from shrubs, and a wide array of other goods line the streets of the neighborhood for pick up tomorrow. And all day today pick up trucks have wandered the city streets in search of salvagable goods.
Looks like Abilene has their own one week freecycle program going. I set out a semi-broken electric chipper/shredder that I can't keep from jamming up. It was at the curb for less than five minutes before a pair of wandering teenagers with skate boards paused to examine it. They moved on and about fifteen minutes later a man in a pickup stopped and put it in the overflowing bed of his truck.
My first spring in town the city had proposed stopping the program altogether and just waiving the fees at the dump for a week. There was a wave of protest from all quarters. The city commission didn't understand that this was about more than taking things to the dump. For starters, many people simply don't have the means to haul their own stuff away. Elderly and handicapped people might be physically capable and many of the rest of us don't have the truck to do it.
But the problem was greater than that. Why fill up the dump with things that might be fixable and still have some useful life to them? This is literally a case of one man's trash is another man's treasure. I suspect that some people may even be able to make a small income by fixing stuff (like my chipper shredder) that the picked up for free and then selling it for a small profit. Recycling isn't just hauling newspapers and bottles to the recycling center.
Looks like Abilene has their own one week freecycle program going. I set out a semi-broken electric chipper/shredder that I can't keep from jamming up. It was at the curb for less than five minutes before a pair of wandering teenagers with skate boards paused to examine it. They moved on and about fifteen minutes later a man in a pickup stopped and put it in the overflowing bed of his truck.
My first spring in town the city had proposed stopping the program altogether and just waiving the fees at the dump for a week. There was a wave of protest from all quarters. The city commission didn't understand that this was about more than taking things to the dump. For starters, many people simply don't have the means to haul their own stuff away. Elderly and handicapped people might be physically capable and many of the rest of us don't have the truck to do it.
But the problem was greater than that. Why fill up the dump with things that might be fixable and still have some useful life to them? This is literally a case of one man's trash is another man's treasure. I suspect that some people may even be able to make a small income by fixing stuff (like my chipper shredder) that the picked up for free and then selling it for a small profit. Recycling isn't just hauling newspapers and bottles to the recycling center.
