The Trouble of Recycling Toys

It will come as no surprise to many of you that I am a thrifter. One of my great pleasures in life is spending an hour carefully going through the book section at Goodwill, or the toy section at Value Village, agog at the bizarre, bizarre artifacts that greet my eyes.

Seriously, there’s been a book written about everything you can possibly imagine, and about a whole bunch of things you can’t.

Thrifting is where you move up to a higher tax bracket, in some ways – from garage sale to thrift shop. I say this not to denigrate either practice. Let me be clear on that. This kind of shopping is essentially an environmental act. The garage sale represents an ideal – the buyer and the seller directly interact. While the very thought of that sends shivers down the spines of many, the thought of unmediated human interaction in an economic transaction, it has moments of great joy. Of conversation over shared interests, over histories of objects. Perhaps the garage sale represents an interesting point between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Marx. Exchange of manufactured goods without the mediation of rich.

In that case, the thrift shop, with its retail store and its higher prices, represents both a willingness to pay more for your environmental action (in that, you pay more money for what is essentially the same environmental action as a garage sale), and also your willingness to ignore to some extent the direst relation between even a relatively small corporate entity and environmental degradation. The fact of the Corporate Entity is directly to blame for many of the perils facing the planet. This is a part of the higher tax bracket I speak of. Being taxed isn’t always about money. Sometimes it can be about accountability.

When I go to thrift shops, I’m searching for a couple of things. Books and toys, most generally. A lot of the time, of late, I’m looking for manga and Bionicle chapterbooks. And Lego. Bionicle Lego. Lots, and lots, and lots of Bionicle Lego.

Part of my practice in collecting these toys is the careful sorting, upon initially tearing into a bag, of the Bionicle from the non-Bionicle. Once this is done, a further process separates the non-Bionicle I want to keep from the non-Bionicle I do not want to keep. Of the things I keep, they are sorted again into their own classifications (thus becoming non-Bionicle), and are then stored (or more often, left on the floor for a month and then stored) in their respective locations. The non-Bionicle that I do not want to keep goes through one further sort: things that I will take back and donate to a thrift shop, and things that I will not. Once a large enough pile of thrift shop-worthy items accrues, I take them there, and of course wander about for an hour or so, beginning the process anew.

Of course, the Bionicle I want to keep is itself sorted into components and then catalogued into the storage system I have that TAKES UP A WHOLE CORNER OF MY BASEMENT!!!!

(Please don’t ever mistake me for not understanding the pathological nature of collecting. I’m well aware.)

That other stuff goes into the recycling.

Today, a chilly November 18^th, 2016, I took the recycling bin from my office out to the dumpster in our complex. There is a bar across the lid, sometimes, that gets locked in place, so you have to take each individual piece out of the recycling and place it into the receptacle. This keeps one from putting boxes in that aren’t broken down (which seems to vex recyclers for reasons that no one has ever quite made clear to me), I suppose, but it’s a pain in the ass on a cold Calgary morning, let me tell you. Thankfully, today, the lid was not locked down, so I lifted it and dumped the entire contents in, thus saving my already-chilly fingers some pain. As I tipped the contents of the bin into the dumpster, I saw those last parts, the non-Bionicle, non-kept, non-rethrifted pieces, the death of a number of toys.

This is how I came to think of it. 

In the critical exegesis to my Garage Saling Manifesto, I make an argument that the garage sale and the thrift shop represent an expansion on the spectrum of “value” that material objects are assigned in culture. Use value and exchange value give way in these settings to disposal value – once something has passed through the crucible of consumer culture, what is the least amount of capital that that thing can bring? There are, of course, different valences of this depending on where in the spectrum of the secondary markets you are buying, or selling, an item. Church Basement sales carry with them a whole other branch of ideological reasoning that inflects this reading. Used book or record shops are somewhere else on this spectrum, and bring with them their own concerns.

But at some point, somewhere in the process, there has to come a time when the disposal value is zero, that the thing, whatever it is, ceases to have an identity as an economic entity attached to it, and is therefore no longer of use. When this happens, they are consigned back to the materials from which they rose – plastic. If, as Kansas says, we’re naught but dust in the wind, then these sad, broken, occasionally unidentifiable parts of toys are plastic on the heap. This act, too, is an environmental one for the thrifter/saler. You are tasked with making that decision, making that call for the end of this particular piece of the production process, and all that that process represents, for the cessation of its place in the structure of capital. And if you think of it that way, it’s a huge thing to do. One thinks, “This no longer has economic value, nor could it have economic value to anyone, therefore I shall terminate its existence, so that it can be changed back into something that does have economic value, a different something. The process of that change will damage the environment, but not as much as throwing it away, so I will accept my accountability in environmental degradation.” 

I did this today for a number of things. I thought it was worth thinking about.