Philippa Stevenson: Store with dumped stock

COMMENT

Here's a puzzle. What shop gets free stock - ranging from children's plastic toys to antique oak furniture - yet has customers lining up to buy it?

It's the Department Store of the Dumped or, if you are in Hamilton, it's Russell Recycling.

Here you can buy golf clubs for $3, and a golf bag to carry them, a wet suit, skis, soccer balls or a badminton racket or three.

An executive could pick up a briefcase, or a traveller a suitcase, for a fraction of the cost anywhere else. A bit of spit and polish will quickly have it looking fashionably down-at-heel.

Perhaps you don't want to eat McDonald's salads but the kids still want to collect the McD toys. Here you can buy them for 20c each or $2 a bag.

The range at this last-chance depot before the Horotiu dump - the city's refuse transfer station - is gobsmacking.

Garden furniture and tools, a popular line in lawn mower catchers, beds and mattresses, countless CD racks, the odd wine rack (sans wine), electronic goods galore, a bathroom basin today, a kitchen sink tomorrow.

Owners Barbara and Murray Russell have to hold sales of Christmas decorations up to three times a year to shift the vast volumes of baubles, tinsel and trees.

They supply two secondhand clothing shops and an electronic goods repairer; their daughter Kylie has launched Starting Over, an outlet for sought-after labels; one customer gets all his stock for a weekly market; others regularly buy up for garage sales; collectors and antique dealers pop along every six weeks for a night sale where they compete for the choicer pieces of porcelain and furniture.

The top prices realised have been $900 for an oak sideboard, and the same figure for an amethyst and seed pearl brooch.

And all this enterprise is based on stuff people dump. Sometimes it is dropped off directly at the shop, other times its about-to-be former owner tips it into the pit thinking it only good for burial. But the massive job of sorting the treasure from the trash often unearths its best pieces at the bottom of that concrete hole.

Eighty per cent of the shop's merchandise is rescued from the pit.

It's not surprising that the Russells, who migrated from Zimbabwe, think New Zealanders are a wasteful lot. In Africa, Barbara says, everything surplus to requirements is passed on to someone else.

But 18 years of contracting to the Hamilton City Council has taught them a lot about their adopted homeland, as well as given them a profitable business and provided employment for seven fulltime and nine part-time staff, including their daughter and son.

The stock may be free and plentiful but flow varies from a steady trickle to a torrent, making it a very labour- intensive business. It's also a growing business.

Seven years ago, Barbara joined the business to recycle cardboard three days a week. Another operator had a small shop on their present site using goods that were dropped off.

Everything dumped into the pit was the Russells'. Soon Barbara realised "how much good stuff" was being jettisoned. She started a shop near the pit, eventually moving to today's site when the other contractor left.

Now the shop is bulging, the sorting areas are cramped and often overrun. Lack of space sometimes even forces them to dump. Larger goods have spread on to a nearby grassed space and the Russells hope the council will allow them to move to a larger area.

But it's more than a fascinating business. It's also a study in consumerism and a commentary about our society.

You can't help but feel ashamed that many of us are so blinded by plenty that we see little value in goods that are, well, still good, and astonished that we can be so wealthy that we don't bother to turn a buck from things we no longer need.

Russell Recycling, and others in the recycling sector, also provide a graphic example - in a country committed to zero waste - of the wider benefits of recycling.

Barbara is justly proud that the business employs 18 people.

It's been calculated that incinerating 10,000 tonnes of waste creates one job, dumping it in landfills creates six jobs and recycling it 36.

Each month, New Zealanders dispose of enough rubbish to fill a rugby field 30 storeys high even though 65 per cent of the average rubbish bag could be recycled or composted.

The amount we could recycle or compost monthly would pile up 20 storeys on that rugby pitch.

The proof is at Barbara and Murray Russell's department store.

* Email Philippa Stevenson

Zero Waste NZ