Page 10 RAIN July 1979 A little homework will do wonders for Rain readers before delving into this eye-opening exploration. That is-ifyou haven't done so already-go back and skim through "Mine the Trash Cans-Not the Land" in our November 1978 issue. Written by the members of the Oregon Appropriate Technolo'gy consulting group, including Dan Knapp, it is easily our most reqfl,ested back article. It is also a real revelation on bow high-tech, mechanized resource recovery systems-like the dinosaur that lies idle in Lane County, Oregon-can be outperformed and outclassed by simple, labor-intensive handsorting systems that highgrade valuable metals out of the swelling solid waste stream. Turning Waste Into Wealth, Part I, is Dan's broader indictment of this country's Waste. Establishment-from the tunnelvision language it uses to cre1 ate arbitrary divisions between liquid and solid wastes, forestalling the development of alternatives, to its anal c_ompulsion to create totally new toxic waste problems out of the old ones it can't seem to solve. But just like the whole energy question, waste reality is changing very quickly. Many recycling microeconomies are already on line and ?forking wellwith even less subsidization than the solar alt,ernative has" enjoyed. It's entirely feasible that a larger recycling economy can pay its way. First, however, some barriers must come down.... In the August/September Rain, Part II of Dan's article, How It Could Happen, will scope out some principles, for organizing Effective Recycling Behavior in neighborhoods, successful examples and places to plug into for waste activism. It's been good working with_Dan to pull this article together. I'm convinced that in an ecologically based society garbagepeople would occupy a most honored station.· For further information, you can contact Dan at OAT, P.O. Box 1525, Eugene, Oregon 97440. -Steven Am.es I. Why It Isn't Happening Waste is the opposite of wealth; it is the refidue left over after value has been extracted; it is nullity, a void. ... Consume, waste, walk away, forget. This process is structured into our habits and ou_r lives. It is The Way Things Are Done. Anyone who has stood,·as I have, through the long hours of a high-volume day at the dump, handing out informational leaflets, must conclude that it is a public spectacle, a massive ritual-dare I say it?-a deliberate flaunting on many levels of conspicuous wealth, real or imagined, temporary or perrna-· nent, paid for or not. "Spotting loads" was a function we in Lane County's onetime Office of Appropriate'Technology decided was necessary to maximize Effective Recycling Behavior in the early stages of our Metals Recovery Demonstration Project. One of our "spotters" would shepherd willing members of the public to separate desirable metals out of their mixed loads and drop them off a:t a metals recovery area. It worked! We made $2400 in hard cash-not free grant bucks-for the deficit-ridden county Solid Waste Division in our first (and only) ten weeks of operation, while segregating, sorting and marketing 30,000 pounds of_high-grade elemental copper, brass, aluminum and steel at the Glenwood Solid Waste Center. In the process we doubled the volume of metals recycled through the county's metals operation. 1 -The success of this highgrading project, ironically, is also one of the reasons·w~ were retired into involuntary unemployment by a county committed to the construction of~ hightech, failure-prone' facility for centralized resource recovery. The highgrading project we designed is still going on-albe,it in a crippled, inefficient form-but it now pays the salary of the former director of the Division of Solid Waste, who bailed out I of the county's ill-fated experiment in gar~age grinding before its final collapse, and into the arms of the largest private garbage-hauling contractor in the area. Casting a little light on such paradoxical behavior is one·of the tasks of this article. Waste Knots The spotter function was a real education in value. The thing that still haunts me the most is the occasional boxes I saw • bearing assorted bottles of biocides-th.e kind you used to buy in the supermarket and now banned by the Environmental Protection Agency bei::ause they contained dioxins-all' nearly full. The people who were dumping these boxes of liquid poisons thought they were doing a goo1 thing: they were organic growers who had no use for pesticides and wanted to remove them from the homes they had moved into. And so these undesirables were intentionally consigned to the tender care of the Division of Solid Waste., not unlike the 30-gallon herbicide barrels someone tried tq recycle through the metals recovery station one day, clearly labelled: DESTRO}( BY BURYING IN A SAFE PLACE. What would happen next, I knew too well, was that some of the b9ttles would break after being thrown ten feet into the bottom of the pit, leaking their contents into the paper, food, wood, dirt and general disorder contained down there. The remainder would likely not survive the Terex tractor/ compactor's inexorable push to the end of the pit, or the second drop down into the big White live-bottom transfer trucks that haul the well-mixed refuse to the county's new, .experimental garbage mountain rising on the slopes of Short Mountain, whose collected waters- including small quantities of the leachate that has started squishing out of the rotten pile -drain down into Camas Swale, out into the south fork of the Willamette River, and back through Eugene on their way out to the Pacific Ocean. What do.you.think? Is Short Mountain a safe place for these -biocides and their containers? Salvage? Just Try To ... Here is another telli~g scene I witnessed from the:; catwalk at the end ~f the transfer pit at GlenwoQd: A woman was unloading two good,' but old-fashioned, doors from her car. Next . to her, 1. young mm had just completed throwing his load into t'he pit, was straightening up, and saw those doors about to go
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