TRASH: It can be golden

I wholeheartedly agree with Jim Hollingsworth. After spending four years of evenings and weekends building my house in Laguna Canyon (Orange County) in 1971, my wife and I moved in. At that time we did not subscribe to a trash service so I would load up my utility trailer with trash and occasionally drop it off at the county’s landfill on the way to work.

On one occasion I found a lot of office carpeting, staples included, which I took home and used until we could afford new padded carpet. I remember finding about 13 spools of rebar wire, which served me well over the years. Offhand I don’t recall anything more, but it was always an adventure to see what treasure I could find and use. I worked for Orange County surveys for 37 years and saw a lot of change in the Coyote Landfill. One thing was they stopped letting people salvage. As a surveyor, I saw that dump grow from an elevation of 200 feet to 600 feet. As we were tasked with mapping certain areas of interest, we also mapped other landfills in the county.

In Rathdrum here, we have a week in May that the maintenance yard has a few dumpsters open to citizens to drop off trash. I found that to be a bonanza as I rescued a lot of usable metals. I have always said, “One man’s trash — another man’s treasure.”

DAVE MINICH

Rathdrum