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For a week in the summer of 2006 Jimmy Condon of the Shire (a learning center near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia) spent a week in Oaxaca, Mexico working with a group of innovative young men at CACITA - Autonomous Center for the Inter-cultural Creation of Appropriate Technologies. They were working together around how to build things out of waste materials. Here is a bit of what Jimmy wrote after returning from his time in Mexico:

             So, any old way, the use of upcycling in the construction of the Pirate Ship (a.k.a. CACITA) inspired me in my major building project over the summer. I built a shower system and composting toilets at the Shire out of approximately 80% upcycled materials. I am no welder, but at the Yarmouth dump they allow one to salvage from the wood and brick pile. At the dump I found out that a third of the wood is chipped and sold to an energy company that burns it to create electricity. The remaining two thirds is chipped and composted. The brick rubble, cement rubble and hot top (which is derived from fossil fuels) are buried or used as fill (which is essentially burying) for government building sites like roads or structures. The metal pile is stripped of any valuable metals, like copper and aluminum and I have no idea of what is done with the substantial amount of remaining metal materials. The discarded materials in the metal pile consists of mostly spent hot water tanks; old bikes; old propane gas grills; old appliances: refrigerators washers, dryers; old tables and chairs built of metal like school desks and office equipment.

            My experiences at the dump this summer made me think about how Yarmouth is a small community in comparison with a town like Dover, New Hampshire on the seacoast of New England. In Dover, we are not allowed to salvage due to lawsuits that would inevitably arise, as dumps are very dangerous wth their enourmous piles of metal, brick and whatnot everywhere. How much good salvageable material do we throw out in New England? Definitely a lot!   

So my idea is simple – maybe too simple – but I’ll throw it out there none the less:

Get a small group of people to run the transit stations (dumps) - the same transit stations that are everywhere in every town in North America. But they have it set up slightly different. The difference is in the way it is set up - instead of three guys in big excavators, you have one excavator and a small group of people who separate the usable from the non-usable materials. These workers put the “waste” into rows – a wood row with doors, windows, framing lumber, etc. - they could even spend downtime de-nailing some 2-by stock; a row of usable metal,  salvageable appliance parts etc.  You get my drift. Put a damn sign out in front of the dump and sell the shit for 10 or 20 bucks a truck load. The workers could be paid with the money you make from selling the “garbage” and most likely turn some profit as well. It may be the start of a kindergarten idea – but it seems to make more sense than the cave man idea of digging a big fucking hole and shoveling all the “waste” into it. Especially since half of it isn’t even waste to begin with.