Over the past five years I’ve done some work at my Dad’s company, just a week here or two weeks there, quick, and…well, dirty. My Dad is an environmental engineer/consultant – he designs systems that basically deal with the flow of our garbage. Because, when you put your garbage out on the curb it doesn’t just magically disappear. It goes on a truck, to a transfer station, dumped, then pushed into another truck, and depending on where you live, most likely it gets hauled (a long way) to a landfill site.
The work that I did from time to time (often with some of my best friends, which made the work tolerable) was called waste auditing, code word for sorting through bags of garbage and categorizing them. Different types of paper, plastics, metals, recyclables and non recyclables, a whole wack of categories had to be sorted. The goal, to find what people were throwing out in order to see what could be recycled further or see what kind of energy could be extracted from the waste. Turns out almost half of your garbage is organic waste – fruits, veggies, stuff that could be composted and therefore not even enter the waste stream. Go figure.
Despite the messy nature of the job, it was an interesting type of surveillance into people’s lives, you can tell a lot about a household from what they throw away. It took us to some interesting places as well. The images below were taken in Red Deer, Alberta in the winter. Red Deer isn’t known as the warmest place on earth, so for this sort the garbage was all frozen, which cut down on the smell. At various times when I should have been working, I’d take off my manky rubber gloves and snap some photos. I’m no longer doing garbage sorting, for a variety of reasons, but I do look back on it fondly for some odd reason. Click below to browse the photos:
[...] of an environmental engineer. Manley recently sent us a link to this stunning photo essay, “A look back at…garbage,” documenting the dirty work he has been roped into doing for his dad over the years, mainly [...]