Prime time to witness culture of waste
TO STUDENTS, teachers and parents, during late May and early June everything shifts: Students’ school year ends; teachers limp across the finish line feeling lucky if they don’t teach in a year-round school, and parents arrange summer vacations, day camps, over-night camps, or other forms of keeping the kids occupied and safe.
But for sidewalk collectors, June is prime time, especially if you live in a city where there is an Ivy League college. I live just a mile from Brown University. Over the years I have collected all sorts of valuable objects left for the trash collectors: Two mini-refrigerators; an ice-cream maker; at least two televisions; a brand-new recliner; books; chairs; software; handmade crochet afghan blankets; tables; desks; bookcases; you name it, I’ve found it. And I wasn’t looking very hard: I was just driving by and they caught my eye.
It is a feature of our consumerist culture that today’s college students equip their dorm rooms with more furniture than our parents owned when they married: two sets of refrigerators, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, computers with all their peripherals are squeezed into a space that was designed to hold two beds and two desks. All that stuff has to be moved in and arranged more precisely than a Rubik’s Cube. Then it has to be moved out at the end of the school year, lining the pockets of the owners of public storage facilities.
When a student graduates, what happens to all that stuff? Some of it is kept by the students; some is passed on to other students or to younger siblings. But some it, worth too little to cart home or to save, ends up at a thrift shop, on the curb or ultimately, in the landfills. In such poor countries as Brazil and Guatemala, people have fashioned makeshift shacks and actually live at the trash dumps, carefully combing through all of their wealthier neighbors’ garbage, culling recyclables to be sold and salvaging things they can keep or sell, and eating the food that looks like it is still edible.
It is not only people in poor countries who eat out of garbage dumpsters. Some years ago, when I worked as a coordinator of homeless services in West Hollywood, I had the revolting duty of asking the owners of the local market to refrain from pouring chlorine bleach on the food they threw in the dumpsters: The supermarket managers were concerned about being sued if someone got sick from eating from the dumpster. The homeless were hungry: Cheese that had just passed the “sell by” date was still good to eat as far as they were concerned.
Driving around the East Side, seeing all the discarded, usable objects, I reckon that I am helping reduce my carbon footprint by rescuing an object and putting it to good use. How will our lives change when the petroleum-based plastic that so many of our things are made of becomes prohibitively expensive? Will we turn back to wood-based objects even as our rain forests disappear to accommodate growing populations who want the land to farm? Will we finally learn to live simply? Will the dorm room of 2020 be as spare as that of a student in the 1950s? Will the academic gowns that once kept students warm and now have only ceremonial use once again become the fashion rage as heating classrooms becomes too costly? We will see.
Rosa Maria Pegueros ( pegueros@uri.edu) is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
published in
THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
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