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It's the biannual municipal hard rubbish collection!
I don’t know what it’s like in wealthy Toorak, but here it’s always a source of great local interest and amazement. This time there seems to be a lot more stuff and, along with the usual crap, some of it looks to be very good quality.
Everything under the sun
All up, the display is a sort of museum of modern living. There are microwaves; lots of mattresses; metal tubing for tables, clothes racks and all sorts of things; chipboard furniture, from the seemingly new to water-damaged crap; lots of indoor and outdoor chairs; lounge suites; crockery, cutlery and other kitchen stuff; garden refuse; and just about everything you can think of — it’s all out on the street waiting for pickup and its journey to who knows where.
Recycling
Of course, seeing all this stuff raises the question of recycling. OK, we’re all in favour of it.
There’s actually a quite a bit of informal recycling. We’re not supposed to grab other people’s hard rubbish — that’s meant to be reserved for the contractors — but naturally everyone checks out the piles and grabs anything that looks useful for them.
You see people peering closely at a heap and occasionally carrying something away. Sometimes cars pull up and people start piling stuff into the boot.
One can’t help but think: Once it’s collected what’s going to happen to all this stuff? Is it going to be picked over and the good stuff re-sold? Is it going to be sorted into categories (crap, metal, electrical, etc)? Is it actually going to be recycled in any way? I think most people would assume that nothing much is going to happen at all — a cynical public assumes most of it will simply end up in landfill, that is, buried in a hole in the ground.
Piled up on the streets of Brunswick at the moment seems to be a good part of the annual output of entire factories. Is there something wrong with the way we are living (or forced to live, to be more precise)?
Built to be used and chucked
In the piles on the footpaths are a lot of electrical goods — household appliances, computer stuff and musical stuff. Occasionally there is a note on an appliance saying “This works” but most have nothing. They often look brand new but probably don’t work — most likely for want of a tiny cheap part which you can’t get for love or money or only after a stupendous amount of effort. Truly, all this is the endpoint of consumerism. Stuff is produced, used — and ends up on the street in the hard rubbish collection.
I don’t blame people for consumerism. Some people get carried away but capitalism promotes consumerism — it needs consumerism to sell the endless river of stuff it produces. Some of it is necessary, some of it is simply crap but in nearly all cases it is produced with no thought of tomorrow. If the whole world were to live like this we are doomed.
Things could be produced to be readily repaired and to be easily recycled at the end of their useful lives. But not under the system of profit-crazed capitalism that we endure. If we want to save our planet and make rational and sustainable use of its resources, we’ll have to fight for a different economic system. This one is plain crazy.
