All Hail Cheap Bastards!

[suebee]

Hey Finn! That all sounds fantastic. I wish we had a place where we could drop off usable items. But there is a secondhand shop here that's almost as good as that. It's run as a employment opportunity for intellectually disabled adults, and every time I've ever gone by it when it's closed there are bags and bags of donations in front of it's door. That's where my girl got me the silk robe and her $1 espresso machine.

I used to live in a larger centre where garbage pickup was an informal recycling opportunity. Not just the usual garbage picking (though I'm certainly not above that - have snagged some pretty good finds that way!). But in this city most people carefully wrapped good items they didn't need anymore so they'd be clean for whoever wanted them. Even if I didn't want anything I did as you do: I'd take good items and give them to a charity. It especially annoyed me to see good toys thrown out. I'd ALWAYS rescue them and give them to the Salvation Army, or a shelter, or wherever I thought they'd be of use. So much waste!

[StoneFinn]

Originally Posted by cybersuebee

Hey Finn! That all sounds fantastic. I wish we had a place where we could drop off usable items. But there is a secondhand shop here that's almost as good as that. It's run as a employment opportunity for intellectually disabled adults, and every time I've ever gone by it when it's closed there are bags and bags of donations in front of it's door. That's where my girl got me the silk robe and her $1 espresso machine.

I used to live in a larger centre where garbage pickup was an informal recycling opportunity. Not just the usual garbage picking (though I'm certainly not above that - have snagged some pretty good finds that way!). But in this city most people carefully wrapped good items they didn't need anymore so they'd be clean for whoever wanted them. Even if I didn't want anything I did as you do: I'd take good items and give them to a charity. It especially annoyed me to see good toys thrown out. I'd ALWAYS rescue them and give them to the Salvation Army, or a shelter, or wherever I thought they'd be of use. So much waste!

I know-- the amount of waste that I have seen has been mind-blowing. I Uni, in my public speaking class, I did a presentation on Dumpster Diving. The response to it was well beyond just doing a presentation. By the end of the presentation my entire class went from "EW" to "can I go with you?". I did a slide presentation in the same class at the end of term-- using a laptop of my own that I had "recovered" while dumpster diving. By the end of the class, we had regular "outings" organised of almost every member getting together in local groups and doing what I called "Recovery Missions". Again, anything that couldn't be used by someone in the group (or their friends / family) we would take to various charity donation centres.

I know Australia isn't "perfect", but one of the first things that I noticed here is that there is much less waste. It is more ingrained in the culture for people to re-use as much as possible and throw away as little as possible. We have days called "council pick ups" where you can put out 1 cubic meter's worth of household items for free pick-up by the rubbish people, once a year per area. Most of the time over 1/2 of each pile is picked up by people before council ever gets there. We have gone out on these days-- and it amazed me-- it wasn't just us wandering through the neighbourhoods-- there were MANY people out picking up all sorts of items. We, personally, got a beautiful flacatti rug, a good working compact house stereo system and speakers, ceramic/terra cotta/metal planters, tool boxes, and more.

It is something that I would love to see spread to other places...

Okay-- have to run now... actually going to the thrift store LOL