What do you do on an afternoon in September when the clouds in
the sky are whiny and can’t make up their minds if they want to move on by to dump their sorrow elsewhere? You hop on a bus down at the
senior hall and head to a recycling center that covers 65 acres where we got to
watch a machine shred cars. This place isn’t your standard recycling
center where the neighborhood moms and dads conjugate on Saturdays to drop off
their newspapers, tin cans, glass bottles and plastic trash. This place is like a modernized junk yard of olden days that, when you
think about it, have been recycling long before it became cool.
I’ve got a long history of going to junk yards. When I was a
kid one of my favorite things to do was to go with my dad when he’d take a load
of stuff to the junk yard. Back in those days they let you pick through what
other people left behind until they got smart and had one of their workers set
aside any useable goods and they started selling them out of a building they
put up on the property. That place is still there. In its current form it’s a
popular place for people restoring old homes to find architectural savage.
Then along came my husband and his three front-end loaders
and street sweeper and I was introduced to specialized heavy equipment recycling
centers---bone yards. If a part broke on one of those secondhand ‘beasts’ off
we went to spend an afternoon out of town at one of the three bone yards in the
state where similar equipment could be found. The rule, back in those days, was
customers had to disassemble whatever needed to come apart to get at the part they
wanted to buy. Unless an extra set of hands was needed, I’d usually be in our
pickup truck near-by with the dog, reading a book. People who own places like
that were always down to earth and pretty interesting when you got to know
them. One guy in particular stands out in my memory. He once charged my husband
$60 for a part, then handed one of the twenties to me and said, “Have this guy
take you out to dinner tonight. No reason why you should have to cook after
keeping him company all afternoon.” You should have seen the look on Don’s
face. “Hey, that’s my twenty!” he said. “Not anymore,” the bone yard owner
said. “It’s hers now.” He was a sweet guy with a beach front “cottage” in Hawaii. When he died he had a large, marble bulldozer on his grave and, of
course, Don and I had to go see it.
And then there was the junk yard for cars out by Lake
Michigan that we always had to stop at on our way to the Big Lake. Not that we
needed to buy anything there, but my husband had met the owner at a gas &
oil memorabilia swap meet and he had a private museum that you couldn’t get
into without an invitation. Don, being a likeable storyteller, finally got the
invitation. Come to find out the guy had a one piece glass gas globe that was highly
sought after and that knowledge started “the dance.” It took two years but eventually
Don talked the guy into to selling him the globe for $6,500. Let me
tell, I about had a cow at that price and for something so fragile, having been
responsible already for breaking a lesser quality globe. But that hand-painted gas globe was his
pride and joy for several decades and when I sold it after he died, I got three
times what Don paid for it. The man who bought it, just died
and his gas globe collection is up in the air because the out-of-state daughter
in charge of the estate is an idiot. I passed along the contact information for
the leading appraiser in the field but she'll probably have a junk dealer haul it all away---all 300 globes.
NOTE: The photo at the top is what the junk looks like before going through the shredder and next two photos is what the sorted and smelted metal looks like when it comes out the other side of the shredder. And the third photo shows a pile of wiring that somehow in the process of shredding mixed junk gets separated out from rest. Oh, and this place has other areas where they process paper, plastic and electronic equipment into a form that can be used in manufacturing more stuff. This place is where all the community recycling centers and pickup services bring their stuff after they've sorted and bundled it on their sites.
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| photos off their website |
