The Metamorphoses
Grant Buday Celebrates the Recycles of Life
It’s not often that you achieve a childhood dream, even if it is a modest one. Mine was not to be a football player or an astronaut; at the age of five I wanted to be a garbage man. Rooting through people’s trash seemed like a treasure hunt, plus garbage men got to hang on to the back of the truck, which was even better than bumper-skiing. It was a job that involved travel and adventure and generous remuneration. Altogether an attractive package. Every Monday morning in East Burnaby I waited for the garbage truck to come rumbling up the alley. The men in their white coveralls knew me and waved as they hopped off and flipped the lids from the trashcans and swung them up. They were always finding money, silverware, and once they showed me a wooden leg. I recall it vividly, oak and iron and utterly exotic, the sort of thing a pirate might have worn. (Being a pirate was another serious career option.)
While treasure and wooden legs have eluded me, a few other intriguing items have shown up at the Mayne Island recycling depot where I’ve been working for the past year. It’s a grubby job. I go through a pair of gloves every couple of weeks, but I see things: 50-year-old sets of encyclopaedias, antique sewing machines, the July/August 1920 issue of Good Housekeeping (25 cents a copy in the US, 35 in Canada). A young couple recently brought in a brown plastic screw-top container with a label that said Saanich Crematorium. I couldn’t bring myself to open it, but I did give it a shake and was relieved to find that it was empty.
We deal with a wide range of objects at the depot, and an even wider range of people. Ah, this lady’s bringing in old photo albums. She’s come to a crossroads in her life, cutting her past adrift and starting over. This guy’s got five years’ worth of Playboy magazine for us. An ultimatum from the wife? This other guy is bringing in a lifetime accumulation of Field and Stream. And here is a lady with a crate full of hand-painted ceramic hens. Apparently she has finally come to her aesthetic senses. “Do you take ceramic hens?” “Yes, we smash them up for road base.” “But, I want someone to have them, to love them!”
Mayne Island has about 900 people on 30 square miles, located halfway between Vancouver and Victoria. The population doubles in the summer, and so does the recycling volume. During spring clean-up it’s almost endearing to see a guy pack in six jumbo-size bleach bottles, feeling he’s doing his bit for the environment by bringing them to us rather than plopping them in the garbage. Not that the locals are any more environmentally conscious than the aggravating subspecies of humans known as “off-islanders,” or “weekenders.” There are guys who’ve lived on this island for decades who wouldn’t even know the depot’s location if it weren’t for the big wooden vulture at the entrance. To them, recycling is vaguely effete, a threat to organized labour, and certainly anti-chainsaw—only a step up from, say, being a garbage man.
Part of recycling etiquette is not to remark upon what people bring in; at least not to their face. But later, it’s difficult not to discuss the 300-pound man in drooping sweatpants who held up the line by peeling the labels off each of his 86 prescription bottles. And how can one fail to note what, and how much, people drink? One gent is fond of Teachers scotch; one week he was 17 empty 26ers fond. If this had been a season’s supply I wouldn’t have noticed, but the week before he brought in six, and the week after he brought in eight. Occasionally an empty Johnnie Walker Red shows up among his regular brand, which means he’s consumed the island’s supply of Teachers.
Recyclers are notorious liars. Men invariably attribute their empties to their wives. If a person’s plastics are mixed up with paper and metal, or if there is a dead mouse in a vodka bottle, they insist that it’s not their recycling at all but a sick neighbour’s—whom, out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re helping out.
I began my recycling career by volunteering for two hours twice a month. In those carefree days I was a much jollier presence, and looked forward to my shift as a pleasant diversion. Once I got promoted to paid employee, however, my work life took on a new seriousness, and now I am not above chastising people who treat the depot as a dump and leave their old shoes and failed macramé projects right beneath the sign that says “No shoes or failed macramé projects!” In an utterly premeditated fashion these people dart from their cars and secrete their offending items onto our swap shelf and then drive off. Or try to. I’ve nearly been run over stepping in front of their vehicles and holding out my palm like a traffic cop. Old gumboots, Tilley hats, vinyl handbags, torn flip-flops, sweaty golf caps and mouldering shower curtains are not welcome. Some people will apologize and depart, chastened but wiser, determined to be better citizens in the future; others will try to argue that a mouldering shower curtain is sure to be snapped up soon by someone who has recently installed a brand-new mouldering shower. Still others will actually sneak back after hours and deposit their offending objects on the shelves.
Last month a well-fed middle-aged man with styled white hair and a peach SUV bearing the license plate of a certain long coastal state from a certain large country south of our border enquired about leaving a wringer-washer. I said fine, but it cost $25—a bargain, considering that we undertake the labour of trucking it via BC Ferries into Victoria to drop it off at Hartlands. He said okay, though he didn’t have it with him at the moment. I naively assumed he meant he didn’t have the winger-washer. In fact he was referring to the money, for later I discovered the appliance in question stashed around the corner, and Mr. Peach SUV gone. He’s never been back. To this guy and others like him I offer the Recyclers Curse: May you be reborn in a landfill.
Some people depart recycling with more junk than they brought in. Certain men come under strict orders from their wives not to carry home any more screwdrivers, bags of nails, axe heads, saw blades, copper piping, rebar, or cowboy novels in German. A few people come each day—sometimes three or four times each day—to scrutinize the shelves, captivated like crows by anything that shines, anything that might have some conceivable use, such as a left-handed golf club (in case you get maimed and have to switch), or an eight-track of the Irish Rovers featuring the unicorn song (in case you suffer a head injury and wake up Irish).
Let’s call this one guy Bob. He arrives punctually an hour before the depot closes and hangs around getting in everyone’s way until we lock up, babbling on about John Lennon and the White Album, the Las Vegas circus act Siegfried and Roy, or Mr. Spock’s views on reincarnation. For most people, a visit to recycling lasts a few minutes, but, like a bad sandwich, Bob stays—and stays—culling and sorting and rearranging everything that has already culled and sorted and arranged. Perhaps he hopes that we will recycle him and he’ll re-emerge as his ideal self, the self to which he aspires: Lieutenant Ohura, say, or Spock. Bob always departs with more than he brought in, and then, when he gets tired of it, he brings it back a week or a month later.
I confess I’m not immune to the lure of collecting. I’ve begun amassing sets of fire irons, for instance, as well as old magazines. The other day I took home a copy of Life dated June 18, 1945. As in the 1920 Good Housekeeping, the ads are a sociological treasure: G. Washington’s Instant Coffee: Now! Even a man can make perfect coffee in just 5 seconds!
Mayne’s recycling program is one of the most successful in BC. In 2004 we shipped a total of 148 tonnes, including 22 tonnes of newspaper, 21 of cardboard, 11 of glass containers, six of plastic containers, two of batteries, and 31 of ferrous metal. We send these materials to processing plants in Victoria each week. To its immense credit, the Capital Regional District underwrites our recycling program, which is fortunate because the prices we get fluctuate, and even at the best of times are criminally low. Cardboard is currently $60 per tonne, newsprint can be as low as $5 per tonne, and both hard and soft plastic are sometimes zero. Here are a few interesting statistics: Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run your TV for three hours. Every glass bottle recycled saves enough energy for a 100-watt light bulb to be lit for four hours. Recycling a four-foot stack of newspapers saves the equivalent of one 40-foot tree.
One reason for our success is the number of enthusiastic volunteers, and perhaps another reason is that the local garbage collector, who does an excellent job—may he live long and prosper—charges seven bucks a bag, which is motivation enough to get even the most regressive old fart down to the depot. There are not a few old men who are proud of never having put out a bag of garbage, preferring instead to burn everything, and I mean everything, from their Depends to plastic bags to the plastic bottles containing their hypertension medication.
If you’ll excuse the mystical overtones, everything that comes through the depot has a new and exciting future, for recycling is a way station en route to the next incarnation. How reassuring to know that life does not end here, but goes on. Old notebooks, plastic jugs, chainsaw bars and soup tins have many more lives to be lived. They may become jewellery or clothing or carpeting or furniture, or perhaps even a prosthetic part of your body. This is preferable to burning your plastics with the leaves during the spring cleanup and having them come back as a tumour in your body.
My job also includes answering questions: “Do I put newspaper in the paper box?” “Yes.” “How about credit card bills?” “They’re paper.” “But is it secure? Do people sneak in at night and look through them?” “I don’t know. Last month someone came in and pooed on the floor.” “Do you put your credit card bills here or in the garbage?” “My credit cards got taken away long ago.”
When the blue boxes are full we lug them to the appropriate compactor, and, when it’s full, we push the lever causing the metal plate to descend, loudly, inexorably, gothically, Edgar Allen Poe-ishly, so that it compresses the cardboard or plastic, the steel or aluminum. When the compactor has compacted the material as compactly as mechanically possible, we bind it in wire and out thuds a bale. How satisfying. No doubt it is an acquired taste, but a bale of cardboard or of tin cans is a thing of beauty.
At the end of the day Ron forklifts the bales onto the truck. Ron is central to the depot, not only because he is the manager and actually built it 20 years ago, but because he knows everything there is to know about anything worth knowing. Ask him about Styrofoam, turpentine, the mercury in computer screens, Freon in old fridges, the history of the screwdriver, how to windsurf in Active Pass, or the best way to barbecue lamb, and he’s your man. Oh yes, he also grows his own Pinot Noir grapes and bottles his own wine. He’s even a good hockey player. You could easily hate this guy. I have no doubt that the day after the bomb drops, while survivors crawl stunned in the mud and the icy wind of eternity blows, Ron will be busy smelting metal.
The recycling depot would be an excellent setting for a sitcom. I could be the crabby guy, Ron the venerable senior male (a sort of Barney Miller). There could be a couple of teenage volunteers to snag the younger audience, a left-handed lesbian of colour, and naturally there will be the ongoing parade of endearing fools and eccentrics and pains-in-the-neck who arrive and depart trying to recycle their husbands, their pets, their problems, and, who knows, someday a vintage wooden leg. There will be recycling mysteries, perhaps a ghost who haunts the depot, or a quirky item that keeps showing up: a black velvet painting of a sad clown for instance, or a vintage Wayne and Shuster album that, like Bob, simply refuses to go away. Here is the opening scene of each episode, the refrain if you will: Two men and a woman wrestle a guy into a baler. It’s a gritty struggle full of grunting and straining. He puts up a fight but it’s no use, in he goes and down comes the iron plate, compacting him even as he screams. The perpetrators wipe the sweat from their brows, then shake hands with each other at a job well done. Then the woman lectures the man in the baler: “Now, are you gonna separate your plastics!” This is the cue for the theme music, something jaunty and jolly. I like it. I like it a lot. But don’t look for this sitcom on US TV. Fact: Our American neighbours throw away enough aluminum every six months to rebuild their entire commercial airline fleet. That’s a lot of Coors Light.
The wisdom of recycling grows ever more apparent, with the result that the depot is getting busier and busier. Over the summer we were open not two but three days per week. Beyond the practicality of recycling, I suspect that people are drawn to the depot because here, if nowhere else, their arcane household items are appreciated, indeed welcome. And this is in great part due to Ron, who recognizes the value of a vintage Piedmont sewing machine, obscure generator, or hydraulic assembly. Recently he found a pair of shoes I’d pitched into the garbage. He picked them out, studied them and then embarked on an incisive analysis of the tread wear, concluding that whoever had worn them had very likely walked with a limp. Where else can your cast-offs get such attention?
The recycling depot is the land of hope and opportunity. Our motto: “Bring us your used, your outdated, your broken, as long as it is plastic or metal or paper we have a place for it.” For while the garbage dump is a place of rejection and rot, the recycling depot is one of metamorphosis and renewal. At the depot, the future is bright.
Copyright © Grant Buday, 2006