Da Dump, Da Dump

The schoolgirl has always been Mr B’s partner in crime on trips to the dump. She mentioned once that she enjoyed it, so now every time he’s going, she gets herself on the guest list. From an early age, she enjoyed being part of Mr B’s gardening clean ups. He would gather up piles of leaves and she would jump in them. He would gather them up again into the wheelbarrow and she would get spins around the garden sitting on top. When he was finally allowed bag them up and haul them into the boot of the car, she wasn’t going to let the fun end there.

A while ago, Mr B cut back our lavender. It’s long wands like sticks of incense gave us a constant waft of perfume since July and fed an army of butterflies and bees throughout the summer. Since September the vibrant purple flowers had turned grey and the perfume was fading, their season coming to an end. Mr B cut them right back and now they look like a line of freshly cut heads on a barber’s bench.

The schoolgirl was busy on the day that Mr B decided to bring them to the dump, so I got the call up instead.  I have memories of going to the same dump with my dad when it was just an open pit, people chucking pieces of furniture and broken appliances over the edge, into the canyon below. I suppose it was a step up from burning them or dumping them on the side of the road. Though it’s hard to believe now, that we literally filled the land with valuable waste. It is there in the background of the new recycling centre, a grassed over mound with pipes for all the noxious gases to escape. What treasures are buried there? Resources that could have been repurposed, lost forever.

Ballyogan Recycling Park is like a department store in reverse. You can visit each section to deposit your waste, sort of like a giant shape sorter game, finding the right place for each item. It’s very satisfying to see your item re-join its tribe and begin its journey back into the manufacturing chain.

In the Indian slum of Dharavi, they have always known the value of waste. They extract everything of use, then they clean it and sell it back, creating a circular economy. As the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

In Ballyogan, we backed up the car at the gigantic garden waste skip and began to unload a dozen large compost bags of cut lavender, fallen leaves and pruned shrubs. Emptying and shaking the contents into the skip was like creating a giant bowl of pot pouri. The dump used to be a smelly place, but what I saw recently would rival the perfume hall of Brown Thomas.

If you haven’t been to your local dump for a while, you may think they are just larger versions of a bring centre for bottles and clothes. Well, think again, these centres are making zero waste a very real possibility. There’s a section that’s free of charge with individual containers for: paper (inc. phone books), cardboard, polystyrene, clean plastic packaging, plastic bottles, aluminium cans, steel cans (inc. biscuit tins), glass bottles, textiles, tetra pak, aerosols, print cartridges, kitchen appliances, light bulbs, batteries, gas cylinders, fire extinguishers, waste oils, electronics, metals (inc. bicycles and petrol lawn mowers), and sheet glass.

Then there’s chargeable items such as: wood, bulky items (inc. furniture & carpets), general waste, soil & rubble, plasterboard, green garden waste, household hazardous waste (inc paint and medication).

I was so impressed with all of this that I went around taking photos and having a good snoop into each section. A member of staff came over, maybe he was worried that I was there to take things out of the bins instead of the other way around. In fairness, there were 2 nice wooden chairs in one skip that did catch my eye, I really hope they get a lick of paint and another incarnation in a new home.

Instead of cautioning me, he gave me a tour of the facility. The cage of broken TVs and monitors gets crushed down and goes through a process using magnets to extract all the metal, the plastic is also taken off for separate recycling, meaning that there is hardly any bulk waste remaining.

It’s a case of a place for everything and everything in its place. You leave with a renewed desire to recycle more, to get your black bin down to nothing. It does mean setting up a spot at home with some sorting system for used batteries, bulbs, scrap metal, small appliances, print cartridges and textiles. The payoff is the good feeling you get bringing them to a place where their value is respected and they can be reborn.

School tours have become leisure excursions in recent years, I’d like to see a return to more educational settings. No amount of drawing posters to promote recycling would match a day spent in a sorting plant where young people could witness and understand why domestic recycling is so important. As all good marketing campaigners know, getting the kids onboard to pester their parents is where the real power lies.