Trash Palace - Night 58

Rather than our usual natural conservation

activities, today’s job occurred on the other end of the human material consumption spectrum: recycling wastes. The Trash Palace is an electronic waste refurbishment and recycling center owned and operated by a non-profit entity. Working in conjunction with the Wellington Council Mental Health Division, the Trash Palace also employs a number of mentally-handicapped individuals. The site manager, Rob, was everything you would expect from a man in his position; cheerful, energetic, and genuinely just a nice guy.

Destroying a Computer

The Trash Palace’s goal of reducing, and eventually eliminating, most forms of e-waste from Wellington’s landfills is progressing much better than expected, as evidenced by their backlog of wastes and ever growing facility. Here is where the GVN volunteers come in. Computer towers, monitors, and printers are some of Trash Palace’s most common items. These outdated ubiquitous technological centerpieces have been piling up at the Palace; it is our job to take a chunk out of said pile. Stuart, the electronic materials recovery boss, gave us a quick rundown of what jobs were available and we split up according to preference. Nikos and Toby grabbed old monitors off of a heap and smashed them to the ground, opened them up and removed graphite and copper pieces. Patricia and I, farther down the line, took old CPU motherboards and monitor innards, stripped them of all the copper motor coils, wire, and aluminum. In another room Jake was busy removing magnets from microwaves. Stuart noted that 90% of school science teachers in the southern part of the North Island buy magnets from the Trash Palace. The girls gathered in the main garage to gossip and strip copper wire.

In the evening, the television sat dormant (for once) and we all sat around and played cards. I emerged victorious from a nearly violent game of spoons. As I’ve mentioned before, the GVN volunteer house here in Wellington is many times nicer than the accommodations in Brisbane, however, the functioning TV and DVD player seem to be a curse in disguise. I guess having weaned myself from the idiot box many years ago I am a bit shocked at how much TV people can watch in a day. From the moment we get home until 11 or 12 at night, the evening revolves around the television. The weekends are even worse. This should come as no surprise to me, but it does. While I suppose it doesn’t help that we are a bit stranded in suburbia, I truly thought that the type of people who signed up for conservation volunteering would be of a bit different persuasion.

What I Learned Today: Ever since my graduate school research into Industrial Ecology I’ve been interested in closing material loops. A tenet of sustainability, recreating nature’s cyclical processes must be the end goal of civilization’s production and consumption cycle. For most of us, the minute it leaves our house, garbage is no longer an issue. Spending a day at a material’s recovery site can greatly change your outlook, so much so, that I think rather than taking school children to amusement parks and theatres, we should be bringing them to garbage dumps and wastewater treatment plants. Give them a quick peek into the belly of modern civilization. All ideological musings aside, I learned from Stuart that for every kilogram of copper we salvaged from the computers saved numerous tons of excavation. Not to put a damper on the weeding and planting that we do, but in all actuality we probably saved more habitat and reduced more carbon output today by salvaging copper than in the previous four days of performing more conventional conservation work.

written by

exumenius on December 7, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand

from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos

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