Brian Rudman: One man's trash is another's treasure

In the Old World, special social safety valves were invented to enable the underlings to let off steam. In Europe on one day a year, the lord of the manor waited on his staff. On another, the Pope kissed poor people's feet.

In India there is still a festival of colours when even the untouchables can get away with throwing coloured dyes at their betters.

In Auckland we make do with the inorganic rubbish collection.

It's a time when all the strict rules - written and otherwise - about tidiness and not poking your nose in your neighbour's business, go out the window.

Not only can you toss any junk you like on to the sacred grass verge with impunity, it's also permissible to go ferreting in next door's middens.

As traditions go, it mightn't be up there with Trooping the Colour or egg and spoon racing at Easter, but it's ours, and if Auckland City works chairman Bill Christian and his officials try to kill it, I predict big bother.

The council's already cut it back from a once every year ritual to once every two years.

Now it's being seduced by Christchurch's SuperShed scheme, which is a citywide bring and buy system, where you apparently bring in your useable junk and leave with someone else's.

Good old socialist Christchurch would create a whole bureacratic way of recycling its junk, wouldn't it?

What the Auckland officials don't seem to realise is that free enterprise Auckland already has such a system, with nary a middleman in sight.

Our SuperShed is the grass verge. Instead of going to a "recovery site" to inspect the wares, we cruise the streets, on foot or by car, jamming on the anchors when a tempting morsel heaves into view.

There is a certain etiquette involved. It's not considered polite to pounce on the loot while the discarder is still in sight. Particularly if they're the next door neighbour. Other than that, anything goes.

I recall a few years back there was a fancy garden shop next door to my place. They used to repot the shrubs they'd got from the nursery into fancy pots and charge accordingly. One recycle day a pile of large plastic discard pots appeared on my front verge. I'd whipped them around the back almost before they'd touched the ground. I peeped over the fence again to discover a new pile was just arriving in the hands of the shop owner, obviously bemused by the mysterious disappearance of his first load.

As soon as he disappeared, so did the new lot. And wonderful little micro gardens for lettuces and chilli plants they turned out to be.

If he was a little upset the stuff had gone so quickly, I can understand. Even though you've persuaded yourself you can do without the treasures you plonked on the lawn outside, you still feel proprietorial when a cruising junk-hunter pulls up in a van groaning with loot and starts sifting, with scant respect, your pile.

I remember being most affronted when I heard someone start demolishing a long-dead computer monitor I'd just put out, glaring out my window as the wrecker made off with some gewgaw she'd retrieved from it's innards.

News of the pending review appeared the same day as a cheery "it's inorganic time" brochure appeared in my letterbox, complete with pictures of improbably high quality junk piles. A matching pair of gumboots? An intact wicker basket? Sure. In the real world, such goodies wouldn't have remained long enough for the photographer to get focused.

Senior council policy analyst Stephen Lindfield talks of setting up one or more "resource recovery parks" - whatever happened to the good old earthy four-letter word "dump"? - where Aucklanders will be expected to bring their inorganic rubbish. He thinks there might be a need for satellite sites to make it easier for people without readily accessible transport to dispose of unwanted inorganic materials.

Very thoughtful that. Perhaps he should think of going a step further and siting the satellites along the Link bus route. That way the carless and those without a tow bar won't have to carry the dead telly too far on their backs.

One of the great things about the present system is we all have access to it. The resource recovery park plan immediately excludes those without wheels.

The officials talk of how ugly the grass verges can become with the rubbish piles. The easy answer to that is to hire more contractors, so collection takes place on the days announced, not a week or three later.