Downsizing without adding to landfill? I’m giving it a red-hot go

I’m standing at the counter at Reverse Garbage in Marrickville (kinda like Reverse Art Truck in Melbourne) and I’m bawling my eyes out. If you’ve never been there, I recommend a visit, although it usually inspires wonder, not woe. It’s what you call a creative reuse centre. You drop off stuff you no longer need. Someone else turns it into magic. Just like Julia Gutman who won the Archibald Prize a couple of years back with her fabric collages, ingredients all from “reverse garbage”.

But here I am handing over my entire collection of Sydney 2000, my old tickets, old programs, clippings from the stories I wrote at the time. I’ve always had a thing for the rings, and now all of that was going to a new home, at least temporarily.

We are moving house after 30-odd years. In my mind, as we both considered sorting through the home we shared at various times with one parent, three kids, four grandkids, other relatives, strangers, four British hockey players, three family members of Sydney 2000 Mongolian wrestlers, one Ghanaian PhD student and a host of others, I guess I thought we’d just hire a skip and dump what we no longer needed.

Not that I wanted to do that. I didn’t want to send it to landfill, but I didn’t have a better idea. So hard. You are throwing parts of your life away, things you’ve loved, fragments with intense memories, the scrawled notes of your life. Chairs you got as a wedding present but were the most uncomfortable seats ever sat on. The rocking chair in which you breastfed your babies. Also stuff I swear you’ve never seen in your life. You have zero idea how it got there.

At home, we recycle everything we can. The tins. The jars. The, ah, newspapers and magazines. The old mobile phones which no longer work and the ones which do go to local domestic violence shelters. Batteries. We use the local council pick-up and the chemical dropoff. Books go in the back lane and disappear before morning. But this is next level. We must cull about half the contents of our house, and we only have a few weeks left in which to do it. We weren’t ready for a Swedish Death Clean, despite being well north of 50.

Jennifer Macklin, senior research fellow at Monash University’s BehaviourWorks Australia, explained my out-of-character response about the skip. She researches what we call the circular economy and why it is important to eliminate waste and pollution and use up what we’ve already used. Repair. Reuse. Recycle. Remake.

Anyhow, why was I tearful at Reverse Garbage? Macklin says it is important to acknowledge that moving can be chaos.

“You’re often time poor, a bit emotional, and making hundreds of decisions at once. So lots of stuff often ends up in landfill, not because people don’t care, but because it’s easiest when so much else feels hard.”

Macklin moved six times in three years in her 20s so she knows it’s tough – but she’s also done lots of research with real people about why they don’t put their environmental values into action.

“So many of the stories are about how hard life is already without having to add more on top. That’s why I think it’s important to not only recognise how hard it is for people, but that what we really need is the systems to change so it’s not so hard.”

Turns out there is already a lot in place and I’ve been giving it a red-hot go.

But first let me tell you about the contents of our roof. It’s been home to leftovers for decades. One relative left a box of stuff up there for 12 years. Various other relatives too. A wedding dress no one in my whole family has ever seen*. Same with a box filled with statues of cats*. Kick boards from a long-disbanded swimming club. My mother’s old silver-plated tea strainer. A bag filled with offcuts of old fur, leather, bags of wool and a few knitted squares. A piano stool.

Macklin has a rough hierarchy to make decisions easier. Sell online. Donate to charities (make sure it is good enough quality for them to on sell). Check out Charitable Reuse Australia, which lists its members, all of whom have decades of experience in the collection and sale of donated goods.

Then put items on various Pay It Forward (PiF) groups. Our local PiF page has been a saviour. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to buy our much loved piano – but I did find a jazz pianist who’d just moved to Australia and couldn’t afford one of her own. Another PiFer, Juliet, happily took my mother’s old silver and cleaned it that night (the angel sent me photos because it was clear I was a bit sooky about it). Same with Lisa, who sent me photos of Mum’s punch bowl in use. A French student took the fabrics and furs. Nic took the wool. And Jackie Phillis, a vet nurse of 20 years, rehomed the many mysterious cat statues. Turns out her mother-in-law is also a feline enthusiast. I showed her a photo of 20 statues but then found a whole new clowder in the roof. I dropped them off quickly so she couldn’t say no.

The local Vinnies staff greet me courteously on a near daily basis as I lower boxes and boxes of plates and cups* no one in my family claims to know anything about. Bags of clothes which similarly have appeared in the roof by magic. Green sheets*. It’s a known fact that children never take all their stuff with them.

Reuse. Repair. Recycle. Give to people you know. Or don’t. Give away. But whatever you do, don’t put stuff in the skip. You’d be surprised at what people want. And I’ve surprised myself.

It’s possible to let go without too many tears. Well, not too many.

*** If any of this stuff belongs to you, too late. You might find it at Reverse Garbage. Or Vinnies.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist.