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Essay: We need bit of connection as we manage our waste

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By Teddy Robertson

Sunday, January 16, 2011

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When I come to Los Angeles in the summer I lived in an apartment on an alley. Actually, an alley in Torrance, one of the over 88 cities of L.A. County. It's an area of small homes, a few shingled cottages from the 1940s, many tract era houses and on the hillside, multi-storied stuccos on stilts. A few two- and three-story apartment buildings cluster closer to the highway.

Our place is the upper level rental at the back of a small house — the kind built before the era of subdivisions. That's what the decades of real estate expansion did here. Bungalows sprouted a second story, rear lots added rentals, garages became storage, driveways became patios and cars went to the street where between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. there is no parking at all.

When I walk the alley here and there a garage door will be partially raised. Boxes and plastic bags jumbled inside from concrete floor to ceiling. No car. It's strange for me, a California transplant to the Midwest where housing space abounds and population declines.

Los Angeles is not a very conversational place. Neighbors don't acknowledge one another much. But in summertime the alley is lively. The cat lady calls to her felines by name in the morning, the classic car enthusiast guns his burgundy vintage Mustang as he heads out to Saturday breakfast, the Mexican swap meet guy hunches over the tail gate of his truck tinkering with something and Steve, the iron worker, forges metal trellises with his blowtorch in the backyard.

But the prince of the alley is Larry. He has a real set up. And he's friendly.

In shorts and polo shirt, comfortable shoes and thick white socks, Larry pushes a laundry cart he's customized for action. With brooms erect and bags dangling off the sides of the cart, he is outfitted for battle.

Trundling methodically along the alley, Larry halts at the round, black 300-gallon trash containers set out every two or three residences. With gloved hands and a variety of home-devised spears, he probes the barrels for recyclables.

It's delicate work. About 4 feet high and nearly 4 feet across, the black containers are — as the city web site proclaims — the frontline of the waste management system for alley residents.

Unofficially, people with small pickup trucks scour the alley on weekends for large metal — water heaters, room air conditioners and miscellaneous pipes residents leave to the side of the barrels.

We are on Larry's Monday morning route. His schedule is set by the recyclers and the city. On Mondays, Larry can park his cart at the barrels and poke in peace. On Tuesday mornings, an enormous city truck wedges and beeps its way through where two cars cannot pass — automated claws extend to grasp the containers, lift and tilt and dump them, now lighter from Larry's work. And unimpeded, thanks to the recyclers. A lone driver operates a vehicle that would have been useful at the siege of Stalingrad.

Larry is retired and he first began recycling to get some exercise and lose a little weight. It enables him to get out in the fresh air and move around. And the alleys are an El Dorado. His son sometimes helps out. It's worth it to net a grand or two a year.

On summer mornings, when the windows are open, I hear Larry's soft, patient prodding of the barrels around 10 a.m. These are a retiree's hours. I call out and he responds with a wave and a smile.

Today we term this work recycling or repurposing. It connotes extra effort associated with higher values. Monochromatically "green," earth-friendly, with a whiff of the virtuous. But such current discourse is pallid compared to the vocabulary of the past.

Colorful, motley English terms — rag and bone, grubber, tosher and mudlark — refer to people. Like the tinkers, itinerant menders of kitchen pots and sharpeners of knives who extended the life of valuable metal. Smelly at best, disreputable if not illegal at worst. Nevertheless, in the 19th century recycling had a human heart.

Lest I wax too nostalgic, it's worth remembering the crass practicality of the more distant past. Armies melted down bronze statuary for weapons, roads were laid with the stones from the monuments of the defeated, new towns were built on the convenient rubble of their predecessors.

Today in some European cities you have to walk down steps into churches. The street level has risen several feet over time.

The online Solid Waste Management Glossary (from aerobic composting to worm culture and yard waste) is encouraging for the global environment, but not much fun in my daily life.

A 2007 article in The Economist details impressive improvements in recycling in Europe, Japan and Britain. National rates for waste recycling have risen to over 50 percent in some European countries. New developments like sustainable packaging and spectroscopic sorting have streamlined the recycling process. Markets for recycled materials have emerged. It's scientifically and technologically inspiring as I haul my bottles and cans to Meijer in Flint.

I miss Larry, though.

At least my Flint paper goes to my neighborhood association's collection where there's always some chitchat with the volunteers on Saturday mornings — a bit of human connection as we manage our waste.

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Teddy Robertson grew up in California but has lived in Flint since 1984 and in Mott Park since 1995. She teaches history at UM-Flint, specializing in Polish history.  Her research is about the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz and she has published translations from Polish to English.

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