Nat Locke: Verge collection time reminds us that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure

It’s been verge collection time in my neighbourhood this week and is it just me, or are there more scavengers than usual?

I’ve been noticing A LOT of vans driving ever so slowly up and down our suburban streets, casting their eyes over the annual offerings.

On the one hand, I find this annoying as their vulture-like behaviour holds up traffic and causes my commute to the dog park to blow out from three minutes to 4.5 minutes. Obviously, this is untenable for one whole week a year. Pray for me.

Also, they fossick through the piles in a generally messy fashion. Sure, they might have noticed something useful at the bottom of a pile, but leaving everything else strewn over the footpath and driveway instead of placing it back neatly on the verge is unacceptable. I don’t care if you’re disappointed that the KitchenAid box turned out to just be full of old seedling pots, don’t block the footpath with it. Also, did you really think there would be a KitchenAid still in its box in the verge collection? My suburb’s not THAT fancy.

Still, I did witness somebody carrying a very large TV across a reasonably major road the other day, so someone was being optimistic.

My biggest gripe, however, is that no-one has deemed the trash out the front of my house to be worthy of re-homing. This has left quite the dent in my confidence. There were a couple of good things in there. A slightly battered but still very functional suitcase, for starters. All the zips still worked. The wheels were still operative. It has never had chickens living in it, or whatever might put off a potential suitcase adopter. I only threw it out because I had bought new matching luggage to celebrate the end of travel restrictions and I couldn’t justify keeping the old one.

There were also a few plant stands and a vacuum cleaner that might have stopped being effective because of a large amount of dog hair that, with the right tools, could be restored to full suction. But no, utterly rejected, it went off to landfill.

To be fair, I’m relatively conservative when it comes to my verge collection. I’ve never thrown out any couches, china hutches, or any of the highly coveted stuff like that. There seems to be a house on every single block that is throwing out a six burner barbecue. This makes me wonder if I’m not changing my couch or barbecue often enough. Are all my neighbours refurnishing with amazing regularity, or have they just had this stuff in the garage for several years and it’s finally time to move it on? Are barbecues only meant to be used a few times? I’m genuinely curious.

My Facebook feed is currently filled with slightly breathless community posts about dining tables on the verge in front of number 32 or perfectly good velvet couches at number 17. Of course, by the time anyone actually spots these posts on Facebook, gets in their car, and drives to the appropriate street, the fabulous velvet couch has already been hauled away.

Not that I’m going to complain about the slow-moving van people snaffling the good stuff. What do I care? This is literally junk that is being saved from landfill. I’m a big fan. If someone can do something with a wobbly table, and use it for another ten years before returning it to the verge, then isn’t that a good thing?

Years ago, when I was moving house, I hired a skip bin that sat on the street (I had no verge at that house) for five days. Every day I would throw unwanted junk into that bin. And the following day, the level had dropped significantly, making more room in the skip for me to throw even more stuff out. My neighbour caught an elderly man, holding the feet of his equally elderly wife while she fossicked head first in the bin. He thought maybe he should castigate them, but then realised they were doing me a favour. Half the neighbourhood treated that skip bin like a freebie buffet for nearly week. I was just rapt that they were taking things out sneakily, rather than dropping things in.

How I miss the days when people wanted my stuff.