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| Junk Art Fish made with...junk |
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| Explanatory plaque for Junk Art Fish |
A friend of the family's, DD, has started on a new enterprise, hunting for scrap metal to sell for recycling. So far he has been relatively successful; will have some pictures at some point (but please enjoy this Junk Art Fish from Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum in St. Augustine) but we went on a couple of scrap hunting and scrap selling missions, and it's labor intensive, let me tell you. Remember seeing some fellow driving down your street in a pick-up, the truck bed filled to brimming with seemingly useless bits of broken items like bird cages and chicken wire and such? That was most likely a scrapper, looking at your garbage piles for more bits of broken metal items to add to his collection, before taking the whole mess to the recycling center. From the point of view of someone who was tangentially and vaguely aware that this sort of enterprise takes place every day, it's pretty fascinating. I do know that my sweet, elderly neighbor has been collecting aluminum cans before recycling/trash pick-up days since she moved to our street almost 10 years ago. She is retired and besides whatever she spent to buy her house, she is on Social Security and Medicare so collecting cans might help supplement stuff like...food. And so it is with other forms of metal scrapping. It's time-consuming, labor-intensive work but it helps people make extra money and inadvertently helps the environment by moving perfectly good scrap metal to the recycling plant rather than the landfill.
Like I said, I'll have some pictures at some point, but wanted to take some time to talk a little bit about metal scrapping and scrappers.
Note: As it has been pointed out to me, repurposing junk into art objects is not the same as scrappin', though.
2 comments:
Here in Vancouver, we have an intermittent parade of scrappers pushing their shopping trolleys down the laneways. (Rain City has a GREAT system of alleys between all the residential streets, and I often ride my bicycle along them instead of the paved roads.) British Columbia has a law that requires people who buy sodas, wine, liquor, even bottled water to pay a deposit on their containers. It's minor -- 5 cents on a soda can, 10 cents on a 750-ml bottle, 20 cents for anything of a litre or more. Some people are such slack-asses that they don't bring their containers back to the store; just leave them in the recycling tubs for the weekly trash pickup. So homeless people, or more sadly, elderly Asian women, are forever prowling the alleys looking doing what's essentially picking up nickels and dimes. It's good in a way that it gives them a bit of spending cash, but that life is hard on the legs and a hardship duirng the 10 months of rain and gloom each year.
Personally, I bring all the containers I buy back to the store for refunds. But when I find a can in the street, or when patients/co-workers leave deposit cans on my ward at the hospital, I take them home and leave them in the laneways. A small act of charity. Ditto for when we go into the U.S. and come back with wine. (B.C. has some extreme alcohol taxes, so whenever we pop across the border -- which is not often because of the hour-long wait at the U.S. securitofascist checkpoint. In contrast, we've never waited more than 10 minutes to get back into Canada.) Anyway, even though our U.S. containers don't have a deposit, the homeless can still collect on them at the recycling depots. So that's one of my small efforts at offering charity.
Thanks for commenting Bukko - I love to ride bikes through alleyways, unless they have tons of glass, and the one alleyway near campus seems to be piled high with the stuff. I really wish they brought a nickel deposit to Florida; it would encourage reuse and recycling and my neighbor would make more money (currently you pay by the pound for aluminum cans [not sure how much]). Having to take cans home from work is a pain, but it's a great contribution to keeping your work environment clean and helping your neighbors. How do you say "Good on ya!" in British Columbian?
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