I had an all-day meeting at the Law School today, a scant mile from my house. After a day of sitting, the walk home felt good. Along the way I noticed a couple of college-aged girls unloading stuff directly from the bed of a Ford F-150 into a dumpster. I've walked past that dumpster a million times, and insofar as I've thought about it at all, I assumed it was part of a major construction project. It's huge - eight feet tall and fifteen feet long, one of three dumpsters that together take up almost an entire block.
I looked twice because I thought the girls were doing illegal dumping. And they were dumping some really good stuff. Like sturdy metal shelves - seemingly brand new - such as the ones we have in our basement for cleaning supplies and tools. Or a chrome floor lamp, light bulb and all. Or a 50-gallon garbage bag bulging with textiles. Or an 8x10 oriental rug, hardly worn.
Then I realized that there were workers right there next to the dumpsters. One was writing on a clipboard, another driving a small loader. And I noticed another car parked in front of the F-150, with a young man taking stuff out of the vehicle and tossing it up and over the edge of the middle dumpster. I thought about our neighbors, the football players moving out this weekend and the big dumpster of stuff they left behind in their driveway. And I realized that it's summer move-out, when the kids who've graduated but stayed on through the end of their leases finally clean everything out and head off for the next phase of their lives. And these dumpsters must be there for the college students to throw away all their old stuff, so it can be carted off directly to the landfill.
The rest of the way home, I noticed garbage bins and dumpsters filled with perfectly good stuff. Sturdy wastepaper baskets. A pair of worn but servicable blue easy chairs. A plastic lawn chair. A half-dead potted plant. Picture frames, plastic cups, bed pillows, lampshades. Glassware.
I was feeling an impulse to pull this stuff out of the garbage and take it home with me, not because I need or want it but because I can't stand the thought of it all going to waste. I was thinking of all the brand new stuff we bought for Emma for her new dorm room. I was so pleased to think of her starting her new life with fresh new things. But now, here are all these perfectly servicable not very old things that must be gotten rid of. Like this backpack, which she'd been carrying for two or three years in high school. I realized a day or so ago that it isn't the slightest bit worn, and yet we bought a new one, from the North Face. Starting fresh.
And here are all these 40,000 University of Michigan students, a large portion of whose parents had the same impulse when they headed off to college, the impulse to send the kids off with a fresh start. And at the other end, all these dumpsters full of four-year old fresh starts.
When I first graduated from college, I lived for 18 months in an apartment in Jamaica Plain with a couple of kibbutzniks. Tlalit would cook our entire weeks' worth of meals every Sunday, delicious, complicated food like spinach pies with filo dough. Tzvika would dumpster-dive with the 1979 Datsun B210 that he'd picked up somewhere for a song and restored to working order. He'd go around to college neighborhoods and come home with broken t.v.s, stereos and lamps, repair them, and sell them through classified ads or garage sales. The two of them couldn't get over the waste in the United States, and the wealth, and the poverty. It was their lark year after college, before they went back home to Israel and got on with their real lives, and they funded it on the flotsam and detritus of the Boston elite.
I have a feeling there aren't enough enterprising and competent kibbutzniks in Ann Arbor to empty all those dumpsters. But wouldn't it be nice if at least a little bit of that stuff could find its way to those poorer neighborhoods - or even those poorer schools - right down the road in Detroit and Flint?
It seems like there ought to be a way to make it happen.
Karen, I remembered that the university has a way for students in the residence halls to donate their stuff instead of putting it in dumpsters for the landfill. See this website I found on the subject:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.plantops.umich.edu/grounds/recycle/student_move-out.php
It would be great if the campus area could partner with the local charities to drive a truck around in the campus neighborhoods and pick up gently used stuff like you describe. Students could put stuff at the curb at designated times over a few weeks in April and in August and stick a sign on it for pick up --like the Easter Seals or Purple Heart do already. It seems like a little communication and coordination could go a long way in reducing the stuff that gets tossed as "trash."
Paula, I keep thinking about all this stuff that gets thrown away or donated in Ann Arbor, and all the poverty nearby, and how there doesn't seem to be a way to connect what people need with all this extra. Seems like there must be a way. Did you know that a bunch of Ann Arbor thrift shops aren't even accepting donations now because they are too full? That's just wrong when we are so close to some of the poorest cities in the country.
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