Picking through the Trash

Refuse seems to be the theme of the week for us. After posting a few days back about the way garbage is collected in Mexico City, we ended up learning a lot more than we expected about what happens to it after it’s collected.

Our favorite furniture dealer hooked us up with a guy called Antonio to drive around the city for a day in search of stuff that we could use in our renovation - old door handles, drain covers, hooks, and the like. Antonio, a specialist in furniture restoration, was hard pressed to find these items so instead took us furniture shopping.

First up, we taxied north for an hour to a part of the city called San Felipe (cost: 80 pesos!). Antonio took us to a warehouse filled with old furniture, lamps and bits of broken down taco stands. There we found our first items, a mid-century vinyl sofa for 300 pesos and a copper lamp used in police interrogations (40 pesos).

Next, we drove south for another hour to a Colonia called Iztapalapa that accepts and processes the city’s waste. We drove down narrow streets with huge bags of collected refuse, waiting to be sorted by the occupants of each house.

Every house specialized in specific items. Some had old computer parts where men sat outside under umbrellas stripping discarded motherboards of their precious metals. Others processed old medical equipment, empty perfume bottles and metal shelves.

We were hunting for some Eames-style bucket chairs that were originally manufactured en masse in Guadalajara in the middle of last century. Antonio led us to a “chair” place were we picked through a mountain of office chairs in search of our loot.

After 20 minutes of digging, we had what we wanted, 7 excellent specimens in blue and green for 100 pesos each.

We ended the day browsing an open air trash market. This place was amazing, stretching off into the distance for about half a mile. There were literally thousands of vendors, each displaying various wares on a tarp. Some were selling old toys such as dolls with no arms and racing cars with chipped paint. Others had old cordless telephone base stations, cameras with no lens glass, hammers with broken handles, and so on and so forth into the distance.

An hour at this market got us seriously thinking about our waste stream, and where the items we throw out end up. As we snapped a few photos, we wondered how long it would be before our camera, less than one week old, would find its way to one of these tarps.