I found it in the dumpsters behind the colorful houses. It’s a small glass jar. I liked its shape. I’m going to use it to hold bobby pins. 

I felt like a bird hunting. I think that might sound crazy, but that’s what I felt like. And it was fun. But I also didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want anyone to catch me rummaging through the dumpsters. So I moved quickly. And I didn’t want to leave but I was scared someone would walk by at any moment so I left before I could look through everything. 

A line from Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America by Alex V. Barnard reads, “These corporations promote disposable goods over reusable ones, design rapidly obsolete products, and ensure that repair is more expensive than replacement.” I think this glass container was treated as waste because it was produced to be waste. Waste is necessary for capitalism to function, as Barnard explains, “waste is thus not an ‘externality’ or ‘failure’ of the market but a source of value and driver of production in a capitalist system”. Capitalists profit off of disposable products. Although this glass jar is reusable, it is more profitable when thought of and treated as disposable. So we as consumers have been trained to view it as such.

I retrieved a red ribbon from a chocolate box in the recycling. I was going to throw something away in my common room with my mom and when I looked in I saw a red ribbon. I was initially just going to throw the red ribbon away because I often have a hard time keeping something from the trash, but this was from a recycling bin, and seemed really clean. I put it in my pocket and continued on with my day, until later that evening I gave it to my cat. My cat, Perron, loves ribbons and plays with toys all the time. When he saw it, it was instant excitement. I don’t have a picture because I don’t know where he has put it. I think back on it now and I’m glad I rescued the ribbon. It is going to bring lots of joy to Perron, and that in turn brings me joy. I know this object was thrown away because it was packaging, and no one keeps packaging anymore. I do know if it was mine from the get go, the ribbon would have been a no brainer. I don’t know if people should have treated it differently just because I would, doesn’t mean everyone should.

last summer I found a really cool painting out by the side of the rode it VT. I’d just finished a backpacking trip and was hiking along a forest service rode to get back to a town where I could be picked up, and someone had dumped this landscape painting of what I assume were the Green Mountains off on the side of the road. I was miles from civilization and the only vehicles on that road at all were forest service trucks, so I have no idea how the painting ended up there. It was really well done, and still in pretty good shape even though it was raining at the time and it had definitely gotten wet. I picked it up and walked with it the rest of the way, and put it up in my room at home when I got back.  It’s still there, although I don’t have any photos of it on hand. I don’t know why the painting would have been seen as waste- I guess someone was trying to get rid of it, but it seems like there are a lot of other, more obvious ways to dispose of something like that than to throw it in the middle of the woods. I definitely would not consider it to be waste, it’s beautiful and someone obviously put a lot of effort into making it, so I’m glad I found it and was able to salvage it.

Ewww, me a dumpster diver. One of the most disgusting things I’ve done. Even through my doubled gloves I still felt the filthiness creeping up my finger tips. At my friends apartment, one of her neighbors threw away a desk. It was neither the fanciest nor the cheapest one I’ve ever seen but it was decent. We didn’t necessarily take it out the dumpster but with a whole 2 cans of Lysol and good wash, it could be back in use. To me there was nothing wrong with it. Maybe someone didn’t need it anymore but it was still able to be use. Instead of stoving it into a dumpster with trash, it could’ve been donated or given to the good will. For an item the wasn’t completely worn down or broken, doesn’t belong in the dumpster.

One thing that seems useful to me is the cardboard from a cereal box. Upon writing this post, I just took out my trash yesterday, so having to dig through it was not terribly dreadful, as the only other thing in the trash was small scraps of paper. While it was not particularly dirty, I still handled it as if it were, using just my fingertips and placing it on a different surface right away. It has been a couple of days since I last wrote the first part of this post, and I have been able to find a use for the cardboard. The way that one of my friend’s dorms is located makes it where the Dining Commons outdoor night lights shine into his room. Therefore, they were going around asking people if they had any cardboard that he could use to make blackout curtains in their window. When it came to assembling the cardboard, I noticed that despite it being easy to tear, I instead reached for scissors. With the leftover smaller pieces that were not going to be used, I threw them into the trash can, and it wasn’t until now that I realized that they probably could still have been used just in a different way. I would say that because of the strongly individualized responsibility for handling waste, this has made it so that if I don’t plan on reusing something considered wasteful myself, I oftentimes forget that others could find a way to use it. Both the leftover cardboard and even paper scraps that surrounded it in my trash could possibly be used by the Queer Community Alliance Center’s Art Lab. I think getting rid of things always comes seasonally, even in college say for example, at the end of a year dorm cleanouts. However, the past few readings have motivated me to partake in the sharing of goods on a more consistent level. In the same way that taking out the literal trash is a weekly practice, finding places to give away things to friends or places on campus that could use such materials on a regular basis is something that I think would benefit me and others.