There’s Always Good Stuff in the Dumpsters

George Kennett

In high school, I joined the Recycling Club. I wasn't very ecology-minded back then. I joined, because I had nothing better to do, and I liked the teacher who ran it. He was a squirrelly guy with thick glasses and slowly-graying hair. I thought we'd be learning about environmentalism or something. Actually, we just went around emptying the recycling bins. You'd think the janitors were paid to do that, but no, we did it for free. You'd be amazed at the stuff people throw away. Pens, markers, working earbuds, perfectly good books. (By the way, if you've ever thrown a not-empty cup of coffee in the trash can, there's a janitor somewhere who wants you dead.) Once, I found a poster that's still hanging in my room today. Another time, we found a pair of scissors, still in the unopened pack. I laughed about the idea of a teacher who bought a pair of scissors but couldn't get the package open, due to a lack ofscissors.

Ever since I've thought about all the perfectly good things people throw out. Because, really, we throw away all kinds of things, without even thinking about it. Tools. Food. Ideas. People. When I pass by a trash can, I always peer in, looking for useful things. I don't think I've paid for a pair of earbuds or a pencil in years. Once in a while, in the nice neighborhoods, you’ll find a big dumpster behind a chain store, with no padlocks or cameras guarding it. I go rooting around in them, just to see what I can see. Lots of cardboard, mostly. At the end of each year, go through your campus or high school, and look at the trash cans. All those books can go rot in a landfill somewhere, or you can take them to Half Price Books and walk out with some cash for lunch. There are people who make a living selling electronics they fish out of dumpsters and fix up. There are activist groups who take the food they find behind grocery stores, and make vegetable soup for the homeless.

Once you spend enough time rooting around in the garbage, you find all the people who get thrown away. The punks who don't notice how much grime they have on them until you offer them some hand sanitizer. The homeless folks who starve outside stores full of shelves bulging with food. The patients wasting away in hospitals and nursing homes, waiting around to rot alongside the apple cores and used napkins. The waitresses and busboys working at places they could never afford to eat at, who watch while pounds of food get tossed in the dumpster each night. No, sir, you can't take any of it home, that's stealing. And God help you if you steal. They build big, shiny dumpsters with bars on them for people who steal. We talk a lot about how much trash there is nowadays. All the landfills, and oil spills, and plastic in the ocean. And we ought to talk about that because it's a big problem. But maybe we should be talking about all the people we throw away. Maybe we should talk about who it is that's filling our pretty little world with so much trash. And maybe we should be fishing people out of the garbage when we find them. After all, they look perfectly good to me.