A Waste of Good Rubbish

When I tell people that the stuff they leave out on the pavement for collection on Council Clean-Up Day simply gets picked up by a regular garbage truck, crushed and sent straight to landfill, I am always met with disbelief and incredulity. I do my best to gather up anything useful and have so far acquired a rug, a stereo, a candle holder, a handbag, lots of garden pots and plants, a chest of drawers, a shelving unit, two chairs, a worm farm, countless books and a job lot of delightful wooden ornaments for my garden in the process. Here in Balmain at least, the quality of some of the items that people deem no longer worthy of keeping is beyond belief. However, perhaps the problem is one of misinformation.

The tradition of leaving things out on Council Clean Up Day seems to be getting bigger and bigger and people do seem to put things out which they must believe could be useful to someone else. It has become a little like misguidedly dumping all of your unwanted stuff on the doorstep of the local charity shop, without giving a thought for how much time, effort and resources have to be employed to sort and redeploy it all. I believe that people's intentions are in the right place, they just don't imagine that the council is doing anything other with their unloved wares than 'recycling' it.

It's become socially acceptable to dump stuff on the street instead of taking responsiblity for over-consumption in the first place. Not being in a position to give much thought to old toasters when they die because of the endless cycle of cheap goods that don't last and unwillingness of the part of manufacturers to set up collection schemes for obsolete or dead goods, we think we can solve the problem by just sending them elsewhere. That includes 'dumping' recycling on the Third World and making it someone else's problem. Out of sight, out of mind, I think you call that.

If the council were up front and honest about what happens to those items that get picked up in this way twice a year, perhaps many more people would make more of an effort to pass them on to somebody who could actually use them. When I want to find a new home for something I no longer use, be that magazines, old sheets, a TV or a mobile phone, I post it on Freecycle (www.freecycle.org) which lets me get in touch with people in my local community who might want something I no longer do. In Marrickville, the excellent community co-operative Reverse Garbage (www.reversegarbage.org) makes its mission the creative reallocation of donated reusable materials.

We all have a responsibility to re-think our consumer lifestyles in favour of a more sustainable future. If we could all refuse once in a while and reduce the amount of stuff we send to landfill by making much more of an effort to re-use our 'rubbish', the world would surely be a better place. Leichhardt Council can help us do this by not continuing to make its residents believe in the rubbish fairy who will simply make it all disappear, because it's just ending up in someone else's backyard.