Boy are we ever becoming a consumer society.
I went out the other day, not wanting to travel into the big city, so I chose the closer smaller city. Just to buy used fencing, hinges, lumber scraps. For my garden.
I didn't want to spend lots for it. But I needed enough supplies to keep cats out of my garden.
Not so easy to find. In fact, impossible.
I drove into the dump. Not a dump anymore. No, now it's called a recycling centre, transfer centre. Can't salvage anything there. Not from the mound of skids, sitting whole just waiting for someone with a small SUV, strong back and inclination to pick up a load. Nope. Not allowed.
I even saw a set of kitchen chairs needed sanding and another coat of varnish. A whole pallet of glass bricks, almost new. One of those wire gazebo frames, standing up, looking fine. Half hoop structure perfect for plasticizing for a greenhouse. Plastic barrels galore. Doors without frames. Old windows in frames. Can't pick them up. Can't have them either. This is a transfer site. Only. All the stuff in here gets hauled away to another site to be crushed (and sold as chips), burned or piled in another garbage site far away.
I asked at the recycling centre - where we take out milk jugs, cardboard, cans and the like. Nope. They only handle the small stuff. Once its there, can't take it away either.
I know there are Re-stores in the big city. But have you ever seen their prices? The cost of a dented, well used appliance, with no guarantee it'll work, is sometimes over the price of a new. Furniture I wouldn't put in my basement has a dollar value of over the new store prices. I know that's for a good cause. But really?
So, needless to say, I ended up with new fencing, only a couple of posts as I scrounged enough days before from ditches around our place to make up the difference. For a garden.
I remember as a kid one of the Saturday treats was going out with my father to the salvage yards. Not for car parts, though we did that too. No, these were small acreages loaded with rows and rows of slightly dented appliances, dirty toilets - not used, just dirty or chipped - leftover countertops, sinks, bricks, windows, fencing, wood pallets. Pretty well everything you could imagine, and then some. We kids had a lovely time trying to figure out just what some things had been used for. I know the parents bought a lot of the cottage necessities from these fields. For pennies on the dollar.
I do frequent second hand stores. I love them. Drapes and curtains, sometimes needing just a new seam here or there and I get good value for my buck. I love to find vintage clothing, half-finished skeins of wool, boxes of scrap material, old patterns, books. You name it, I can find those things. Even small appliances like lamps and bread makers are for sale.
But not fencing materials. Not locally, anyway. For that I am forced to buy new. I know in the long run it is worth it. But it still bothers me.
What happened to going to your local dump, rooting around for a slightly broken antique dresser, bringing it home for pennies and fixing it up? Why can't I pick up those wooden pallets, pay my dimes and take them home to pull apart and use? Since when did we transfer all that lovely, slightly used stuff away from the neighbourhood, just to crush it and fill another landfill in some other county? Why can't we recycle the old way anymore?
I know that answer. Unfortunately. The government has this strange idea that the only way to keep the ecomony chugging along is to consume. So we are forced to buy new whether we'd prefer to reuse or not.
We're raising a generation who has never learned how to recycle, repair and reuse the old way.
And we wonder why this poor earth is struggling.
