Forget hoarding, let’s try recycling
OK, I admit it. I’m a hoarder. If left to my own devices, my house would be full of little tunnels from room to room surrounded by speakers and amplifiers, assorted cables and punctuated by occasional stacks of old CDs and records I’d forgotten I’d bought.
Concert tour T-shirts and tour books would line the walls and the only way in and out of the house would be through passageways stuffed full of crates of albums.
Black cats of all shapes and sizes would be running through the tunnels, chasing the paper balls I would have made out of my old columns and occasionally a catnip toy would be thrown in to spice up the games for my and their amusement.
Unfinished electrical repair projects would be sitting alongside boxes of parts labelled ‘‘It might be in here’’.
Those TV shows about hoarders would have nothing on me.
So you get the picture. I am, it seems, proudly my father’s son.
Thankfully, I have to live with my wife and it is only her influence that stops me being the hoarder I naturally am.
So having confessed my natural inclination towards buying, storing and enjoying old and new audio, I am now also constantly being offered iPhone and android tablet castoffs from friends.
The pile of castoffs is growing and I’m suffering from electronic junk guilt (EJG). It’s a relatively new affliction felt by those who don’t know what to do with their junk.
It’s a tough condition to live with and there’s no real cure. The guilt hits when you know this latest bit of mobile-technology has a limited life and it has to go … in the ground.
And my EJG is about to get worse as friends gear up for Christmas and begin to offload their old electro-waste in preparation for the arrival of the new gear.
I am their depository for old phone/tablet and iPhone junk that’s past its use-by date. I’ve lost count of the various pieces of modern telephony that is now gathering dust at my place as friends pass on still useable but now outdated pieces of electronica.
We seem to be on an endless loop, acquiring more and more stuff. But I am a reformed hoarder under strict controls and I think the time has come to say my storage facility has closed.
So what to do with the electronic landfill that is now getting larger and larger at my place and probably yours?
Suck it up and fill landfills or find recyclers in the Waikato like recycle it.co.nz.
I had to live the ‘‘what to do with waste’’ question a year ago when I had to say goodbye to our fridge. It was a challenging time to discard a friend that had served us so well. But it was running hot and cold and hot is never good in a fridge.
At the time I was riddled with waste guilt. I had to confront the throwaway society we now live in. I went through terrible guilt pains as I realised this otherwise fully functioning piece of fridgery was going to landfill somewhere.
And somewhere today that piece of steel and plastic is littering the green fields of this country.
But there is hope. There are good recycling ideas and one of the best came from a recent discussion with Mark Bunting on Free-FM breakfast.
And it’s all about recycling cycling.
It is a quite brilliant idea that hits several hot spots at once. The problem: Kids grow out of their bikes and they are easy to discard as the second-hand market is static and likely declining with little demand. So instead of throwing bikes away as waste, the solution is to recycle cycling.
1. Donate your old bike to the bike bank.
2. Some of them go to middle or high schools where elderly community members run bikefixing classes.
3. Bikes are presented to lowerdecile schools where kids can earn their own bike by cycling to school and racking up points to a point where the bike is theirs.
4. When they grow out of their bike they can ‘‘trade it in’’ and earn a newer bike by either riding or fixing.
It’s an idea that gets kids exercising, gets the retired community involved with teaching hands-on skills and provides a sense of working to earn things for young students.
And it saves needless waste. For those who have a hoarding affliction it can be a way of moving bikes and bikes parts out of the ‘‘It might be in here box’’ and into the hands of kids who could enjoy owning and earning a bike for the first time.
Recycling Cycling – how can Hamilton make this idea work for the kids, for the community and set an example for the rest of the country?
It’s an idea that gets kids exercising, gets the retired community involved with teaching hands-on skills and provides a sense of working to earn things for young students.