Still on holiday here, and doing some clearing jobs around the house/garden that have been building up for a while. Which means I’ve had to go to the dump today – one of the finest, most joyous experiences in the urban environment.
You go heavy loaded, driving slowly, suspension almost topping out… and leave it all behind. The priests who preside over this sacrament at our local place are fantastic too – helping you with the bigger stuff, directing you as to which skip to dump stuff in, advising whether something ought to be recycled. Everyone drives away feeling lighter, happier, going home to a simpler, less cluttered place. It is distinctly sacred.
This isn’t, of course, to be naive about the problems of urban waste. It is incredible to see the stuff people do chuck, when most of it could very well be posted on a site like Freecycle. At least they sort stuff for recycling now, which they didn’t a couple of years back.
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One response to “Dump”
Funny, in the last day I’ve encountered two memorable bits WRT dumps and waste.
1. NPR (our U.S. public radio system) aired a spoken essay from a Native American on growing up poor – the dump being the “Indian Furniture Store” – her entire family making trips to the dump to GET stuff, rather than DISPOSE of stuff. She ended the essay beautifully with the Native spirit “rising above” any possible stigma, replaced with a respect for all things, including the discarded and unwanted.
2. Saw an ad this morning in my new copy of World Watch Magazine by the ROyal Dutch Shell Group. The headline: “Don’t Throw Anything Away – There Is No Away” – wow – an oil company acknowledging that we live in a closed environmental system. Unfortunately, Shell is blowing a lot of hot air – literally… their inefficient Nigerian plants burn off (called “flaring”) over HALF of the gas they produce, accounting for 150 kilo-tons of CO2 “thrown away” into the atmosphere each year, and Shell has spilled over 10 million tons of crude into the Niger over the last decades.