Footpath fossickers are inspired by both ethics and aesthetics.
EARLIER this year, Tania Lewis and her colleagues visited householders in Moreland, in Melbourne’s inner north, to ask about how they reuse hard rubbish.
Dr Lewis, an associate professor of media and communication at RMIT, happened upon a gem of her own – she observed a kind of “green materialism” at play.
She explains, by way of example: one of her interviewees, Mark, had picked up an old shoe-cleaning box, the sort you’d keep a brush and polish inside and put your boot on while you buff and shine. He repaired it and uses it, and also, daydreams about its history.
“He imagined the old Italian man who might have made it originally and used it through his life,” Dr Lewis says. “He loved the fact that it had been used before. He was very invested in that romantic ethic, the sense of having a connection with the material objects in our lives.”
She says people rummage through their neighbours’ refuse for many reasons, including frugality, sustainability and an opposition to throwaway consumer culture. But many of us also do it for the thrill and the pleasure.
“People often valued hard rubbish precisely because these objects had histories and lives before them; unlike new objects, which they felt were somehow sterile and alienating,” she says.
Dr Lewis is the co-editor of Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, published in 2010. She says her research revealed another perspective on life in the suburbs.
“They’re often depicted as places of hyper-consumption. I wanted to focus on people who are doing quite the opposite. I wouldn’t call them alternative; they’re just ordinary families who’ve opted to live differently and who are very critical of mainstream approaches to consumption.”
There’s good cause to highlight our everyday thriftiness: it’s more common than you might think. A survey of households in Frankston, conducted by Dr Ruth Lane in 2007, found that two in every five had gleaned something from hard rubbish in the previous two years.
In another recent study, Dr Lane, from Monash University, recruited householders to track the things they put out on their nature strip. They reported that more than a third of the items were nabbed before the scheduled pick-up (the most popular were white goods, sports equipment, furniture, electrical appliances and kids’ toys).
She found that much more stuff is reclaimed informally than through the official collections. According to the Department of Environment and Sustainability, almost all the hard rubbish gathered by councils goes to landfill. Only 13 per cent, by weight, gets another life.
Despite this, lots of councils discourage scavengers, both professionals and amateurs. Many have switched away from scheduled pick-ups. Instead, you must book your own, once or twice a year, when you need it.
“Unfortunately, many councils have moved to make hard rubbish scavenging illegal and I think that’s incredibly short sighted,” Dr Lewis says.
“We need to encourage these forms of reuse and encourage people to reflect on what they consume, where it comes from and where it’s going at the end of its life.”
If you’re looking for the low-down on footpath fossicking, visit the Hard Rubbish Melbourne Facebook group. It has over 5000 members, many of whom post details of their finds and ask for tips on repairs and missing parts. They’ve also collated information about the timing and conditions of collections all across the city.
Read this article at The Age online
Anyone got a good story of finding gold? I picked a laser printer/photocopier five years ago, and after a simple, no-cost fix, it’s still going strong.
Hi Michael,
Great article, and especially good to see people writing about waste. It is that under-served aspect of the environment which could be so much better.
I’d like to explore some of the points about scheduled pick-ups being better than at-call services. I do this because I am arguing hard FOR at-call services here in Perth, and am doing so precisely because I think it would achieve a better recycling outcome (see http://www.wmrc.wa.gov.au). Perth Councils have either scheduled pick ups or Council provided skip bins.
In particular, I’m very interested in the study by Dr Lane, but am unfortunately unable to open the link – it is a Swinburne library restricted resource. Nevertheless, I think anecdotally we know that a lot of bulk waste is picked up before the contractors come around. The question is who does the collection. The post suggests this is neighbours. I suspect that is true for a very small proportion, and that the majority goes to professional scavengers.
That is all for the good, you might think. Perhaps. What I’ve seen is that these scavengers are pretty brutal. They’ll pull open microwaves for the copper coil inside, cut off electrical cables to make them useless, and take away white goods for the steel. I doubt fridges are properly degassed. Still, all of this is anecdotal.
I’m also interested in the statement that more waste is recovered informally than through official collections. Information we received from Melbourne council is that it is more like 75% recycled by the contractor from at-call hard waste collections. This is quite inconsistent with the Metropolitan Waste Strategy that refers to 13% recycling, and so I’m interested to know what the cause of the discrepancy is. My experience is that centralised data collection is often unreliable because of misunderstandings of the questions asked (ie people don’t report waste recycled because they think they are being asked how much goes to landfill). Still, this is a very large difference.
The at-call service also effectively reduces the total amount of waste going to landfill. To refer back to the council we spoke with – 300 tonnes went to landfill in a year (of about 1,200 collected) from a population of over 80,000 people (at-call service). We are working with a Perth council that took 400 tonnes of waste to landfill in a year from a population of 7,000 people (scheduled service). Nothing was recycled. That is a big number, but not unique.
I guess you can see why I’m pushing for an at-call service. I’m doing it in the context of large volumes of waste going to landfill under the current scheme, notwithstanding some (large or small) neighbourly scavenging. From this data, it seems that the opposite point to Dr Lane’s can be made. Council at-call services are very successful at taking waste out of the waste stream. A casualty (and a truly unfortunate casualty) is the ability for people to connect with a reuse culture. That is not insignificant.
Ultimately, it depends on how the collection is done and what its focus is. For mine, an at-call service enables contractors to maximise recycling because the waste is not damaged be weather or destructive scavengers. The contractor can then connect with charities to sell what is resaleable, and recover that which is only viable for recovery in large quantities. This is the service I am trying to introduce.
For all of this, it is unlikely that the proposed at-call service will get up. People think that the current system is great.
Apologies for the LOOONG response – I am very interested in this stuff. To put in a cheeky plug, I also blog about this sort of thing at http://www.garbologie.com.
Regards,
Adam
Hi Adam
Thanks for your response (longest ever!). I’m sorry about those links – I’ve fixed them up so they at least show the abstracts. (Unfortunately academic journals don’t let the public read them for free.) I’m baffled that there’d be such a difference between your numbers on re-use though official channels and the Victorian stats, so it’s hard to respond. “Professional” scavengers certainly have a bad reputation, but I’m not so sure. If they’re reclaiming things, that seems like a good outcome. The antipathy towards them seems to be largely because they’re cutting the council contractors’ profits.
Personally, I tend to favour distributed solutions, instead of centralised ones, so I have a bias towards people sorting things out amongst themselves and not always having stuff magically go “away”. The research I read suggested that there is an important role for this, and one that could be encouraged further. Perhaps we need some more research to determine what really happens to the stuff…
Keep me posted!
Hi Michael,
I’m with you preferring distributed solutions. I think we would be better off if we took care of things ourselves, and one of the tragedies of my job is that I implement systems for improved environmental outcomes (looking at the public as a whole) which then discourage personal ownership of problems. That then leads to more centralised systems being required… Probably the best way forward is some sort of system that encourages a compromise between a good base service that reduces waste, and people sorting stuff out for themselves. I keep looking for how to strike this balance.
Re professional scavengers, it’s not so much them taking the stuff. That doesn’t really bother me for the reasons you mention. It’s them destroying stuff that could be reused or repaired, and being cavalier in how they recycle (ie “degassing” fridges by simply cutting the pipes). But you’re right, the objection is usually because they impact on contractor profits, and that’s because the structure of the contract is often a combined collect and dispose price. Contractors budget for some recycling (generally steel and copper) to offset collection costs. It’s tricky to solve. Remove the incentive to recycle, and contractors won’t which is also a bad outcome.
Adam