“Actual Fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their stuff for different stuff, day in day out.”
—Barbara Kingslover, Demon Copperhead
Museum Mission Statement: “To rethink the value of every cheap ‘thing’ in our lives. To understand its history, its function and its deeper meaning or worthlessness. To recognize that in our modern culture we’ve made too many things, with reduced life expectancy and value. To reignite interest in old unexceptional things lost or forgotten.”
Thinking back to all of the things we’ve possessed in our lives and thrown away, we may not remember exactly how many. In the hundreds or the thousands, perhaps? Many reasons we get rid of things: (1) broken, (2) no need for them, (3) loss of interest, (4) replaced with something new. We have choices for how to dispose of these things: in the trash and eventually the landfill, give them away, sell them in a yard/garage sale or online, or take them to a reuse center.
In our work in recycling education, we teach the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The sequence is important. How do we reduce what we consume? How can someone else find use in what we no longer need or want? What of it can be recycled? Honestly, the recycling industry does not want most of this stuff —it’s considered as a contaminant in the residential recycling stream. So, the choices are to send to the landfill — or reuse.
Today, I visited Ithaca Reuse Center where reuse goes beyond a thrift shop kind of place to a moral compunction. (From this perspective, it could be called the rescue center.) It represents the obsession of committed individuals to not only reduce waste, but fulfill the mission of a higher purpose: social justice, economic equality, gender equality, and environmental responsibility, challenging us to make good by bringing back our forlorn possessions. In short, “to make us more caring for the earth by being more resourceful.”
In our museum projects, people and objects are often elevated to a place of stature, awe and reverence. So here I imagine the Reuse Center as the REUSE MUSEUM. I am a guest curator here to survey and appraise this large collection of stuff. Stuff that, if it could talk, would tell the stories of the people who once held them and the history of their making –spanning over 100 years of inventiveness. Yet in this museum is a collection of “unwanted” things, like unwanted people, possessing an aura of “unwanted.” So the simpler question is, “why, in an effort to save humanity and the earth, have we rescued these things for someone else to use?” Is it foolish or a noble cause?
Ithaca, New York
January, 2025