On the front lines of ‘Junkville’
But junk men — they see it all. They’re on the front lines in the war against our clutter, in all its strangeness, wastefulness, and sometimes remarkable beauty.By Greg Mercer, Record staff
August 26, 2011
WATERLOO REGION — Kind of like our underwear drawer, our junk is often one of those things other people don’t see and we rarely talk about.
They’re called in to clean out basements, garages, even entire homes when people die, divorce or just plain skip town. Some people’s garbage shows a life of flighty consumption. Others’ secret possessions are only revealed when they’re hauled out from the shadows.
People in Waterloo Region’s junk removal business, like David Moss or George De Rosa, say they’re no longer surprised by what they find in our trash.
Things like a preserved alligator head. Or family heirloom war medals. Or a brass Roman-style helmet. Or a prosthetic limb.
Even a bomb.
“We were carrying out a cabinet once and this bomb just kind of fell out from one of the drawers. Our eyes bugged out of our head,” said Moss, who owns Waterloo’s Just Junk. “Every day, you have no idea what you’re going to find.”
Plenty of things people call trash is actually worth something, said Moss, whose company removes about 500 tons of junk a year from local homes and businesses.
He’s found mint-condition antiques like a toy train set, vintage sports jerseys, and first-season programs from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He’s found baseballs signed by the likes of Blue Jay great Dave Stieb, a beautiful lamp made from a fire hose nozzle, and a 100-year-old iron and wood desk from Waterloo’s long defunct Globe Furniture Company.
If an item is clearly something that would be important to a family, junk removers will usually double check before taking it away.
Most companies try to give reusable items like furniture or kitchenware to charity. Leftover materials from home renovations often wind up at places like Habitat for Humanity. They’ll also try to recycle things like paper, wood, metal and drywall as much as possible.
“I’m trying to keep it out of the landfill. Most of the stuff people consider garage isn’t really garbage . . . if you saw what people throw out, you’d be embarrassed,” said Junk Genie owner De Rosa, who describes himself as “on the guerilla front” of “Junkville.”
There are also hoarders — something both Moss and De Rosa say they see on a regular basis. They’re not surprised anymore to walk into a home to find it floor to ceiling with old newspapers, or odd collections like bags of human hair or jars of nail clippings.
“Sometimes, it’s an avalanche of garbage inside the house. There’s just a little trail leading from one room to the other,” De Rosa said. “People will collect anything.”
And then there are the things that end up in the landfill by accident.
At least a few times a month, someone calls the Region of Waterloo’s 300-acre waste facility on Erb Street and begs to be allowed in to sort through the mountain of trash to find something they lost.
Sometimes, there are bicycles or lawn mowers unintentionally left at the curb on garbage day. The bad news is they’re usually crushed within moments of being picked up.
“The trucks are just instructed to pick up whatever’s there, and they’re not there to decide what is and isn’t garbage,” said Sue White, manager of waste collection and diversion for the Region of Waterloo. “We often see things at the curb and we wonder why it would be there.”
Smaller items may survive the crushing and in “dire” cases, the region will let people into the landfill to search through the trash. Some, incredibly, even find what they’re after.
“People have lost jewelry, money, passports, watches, even dentures. Sometimes, if we can identify the truck, there’s a chance they could trace it. But there can be up to six tons of garbage per truck, so it can be pretty overwhelming for a person to sort through that,” White said.
The landfill has even had a search request from a woman who left her dryer out for curbside pickup, but forgot to remove her daughter’s designer jeans from inside it, she said.
But things we throw out intentionally can be surprising, too, like perfectly good kids bikes or ride-on tractors that appear barely driven. Junk haulers will usually try to give those to charity so they can find a second life.
“It’s kind of sad when you see someone throwing out a bicycle that barely has a mark on it,” Moss said.
The junk removal business gives these men a unique view on our modern, consumption-crazed society, they say. We live in a “throw away culture” De Rosa said, one that’s good for business but a sad comment on the way we live now.
“We used to have TV repairmen, we used to have repair shops. Now if it’s broken, we just get rid of it and buy new,” Moss said. “We just want the latest and the greatest.”
gmercer@therecord.com
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