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.

Flea Market Finds

This past weekend, I did something that I very rarely, if ever, do. I bought a box (a whole box!) of comics.
At a local flea market I found myself flipping through a single long box sitting below a vendor's table. I'd been disappointed with this trip to the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Centre, as this was the only box of cheap comics (and actually the only cheap comics, period) that I could find. There was one other vendor selling key Silver Age issues at guide prices, but no other "dollar bins." This particular one had quite a few issues of the latter bits of Avengers v.1, issues up in the 300s, which is the section of that series that I'm currently in the process of tracking down. So I'd decided to pick up a few, maybe $10 worth, when the lady behind the table said she'd do a good deal on the whole box. I considered for a few long moments, and then asked what kind of deal. She said $50 for the whole thing. Again, a few long moments passed, and then I agreed. I dashed to the ATM, got another $40 out, and left with a box of comics.

I've spent the last 4 days going through, databasing, bagging, boarding, removing duplicates. In the end, doubles included, there were 228 comics, which very roughly breaks down to 22 cents per issue. I think I did alright there.

Up above, there, you can see the collection laid out after I got home. The stacks of comics are all issues from the same, or similar, series. Thus, the Avengers pile is all Avengers. The Archie Comics pile is all Archie Comics (the only bit I haven't finished cataloging quite yet). I bought the collection primarily on the strength of the number of Avengers comics in it, though, of all the runs in the box, that was the one that produced the most duplicates. It was, in fact, the stuff that I initially dismissed as "filler" that turned out to be the gold amongst the dross (yep, I'm looking squarely at that enhanced cover Silver Sable #1 from the 90s).

Up in the top left corner there is a pile of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, both initial and deluxe editions. I love these encyclopedias, so it was a nice treat to get them. I'm also in the process of tracking down duplicate issues of each one so I can remove the covers and use them as posters. There were a few doubles in that pile, but mostly it was new stuff. The large pile of Archie comics is mostly mid to late 80s. Betty and Veronica's fashion sense was, in a word, atrocious in that era. I remember living through those fashions, both the first time and in the ill-advised 80s revival that seemed to take the world by storm a few years back.

Next to the Archies is the pile of comics I was most surprised by. It's an almost complete run of Marvel Two-In-One, Marvel's solo title for The Thing, from #80 to #100. I had little to no interest in this run, written predominantly by Tom DeFalco, who I immediately associate with the deplorable Clone Saga. But, as my impetus for the 40 Years of Comics Project had it, I shouldn't automatically assume that a comic is bad having not read it. I did read a few of these issues (once I'm done with Age of Ultron, I'm going to devote a few weeks to the stuff in this collection), and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. In particular, issue #86, and the story "Time Runs Like Sand," now ranks as one of my favourite comics ever. I'll re-read it and blog it next week some time.

There was also some late-era Fantastic Four v.1 in the box, which, again, I had little interest in, until I realized that it encompasses the majority of Walt Simonson's run on the title that I have been meaning to read for quite a few years now. So I'll chalk that up as a win too.

Before I talk about the other piles, I'll note that there were, as you can see, a number of individual issues of various comics. The ones I've read (Guardians of the Galaxy, Silver Sable) were pretty unremarkable, which is probably why whoever bought these in the first place didn't get any more.

I've already noted the Avengers comics as being the most important, at least from a collecting viewpoint, in the lot. Most of the pile of Superboy were duplicates, and in truly terrible shape. That version of the character was never one I had that much interest in, though the "Zero Hour" tie-in issue does feature the old, pre-Crisis Superboy, so that should be interesting. One thing I will note about the Avengers comics is that they included full runs of both Walt Simonson and John Byrne's tenures as writers on the title, both quite short, but probably pretty good.

The last little bit is that pile of Marvel Age comics, a good 30 of them in sequential order. This might seem a low point to end the assessment of the collection on, until one realizes that, by and large, these are comics that have never been reprinted. That is, of course, because the series functioned as a news magazine, and only included the occasional sequential strip (Fred Hembeck's center pages notwithstanding). What they do contain, however, is a chronological recounting of the events of each year of Marvel Comics narratives in the "Marvel Age" feature at the end of each issue. The earliest one I have starts in 1973, more than a decade after the "Age" begins. The articles are fantastic for the fact that rather than recounting publication history, they actually tell the fictional histories of the characters. I envision this as a scanning-and-sharing/cataloging project for the future. There's also occasional exclusive comics (like the Kirby/Stern piece that graces Marvel Age Annual #2, or the Shadowline summary from Annual #4) and the aforementioned Hembeck work, which I'm assuming has been reprinted somewhere, but maybe hasn't. Add to this the occasional article about the workings of the company, faux Daily Bugles, and such, and it's actually a pretty great find. Not one that I ever would have gone out of my way for, but pretty great nonetheless.

And that's it. As I said, I don't buy collections like this very often, due to both space and financial constraints, but I felt like treating myself on the weekend, and it turned out to be more of a treat than I'd expected. Look for some examples of what was in the collection over the next couple of weeks of the 40 Years project.