Clear your conscience AND your basement on Trash to Treasures Day

By Adrian Barnes

This Saturday, April 24, sees the return of Trash to Treasures. Kind of like Christmas in reverse or a circus without clowns, T2T combines the best of the four great Canadian virtues: recycling, sharing, spring cleaning, and parsimoniousness (look it up) .

The sponsors of this event, the RDKB and RDCK, are hoping you'll all accept their invitation. "As stewards of our landfills, your regional district hopes that by giving a longer life to our items we can reduce the amount of resources that end up in our dumps," says Tim Dueck of the RDKB. "We are asking residents to make this a day to clean out the clutter and have some fun."

The hope is that locals will do some soul AND basement searching--clean up their houses and their consciences--and place all that bad karma and those unused treadmills and bean bag chairs at the end of their driveways with a nice big 'FREE' sign on them. (NOTE: 'Free' signs can be downloaded from the hot topics section of the RDKB web site.)

According to Dueck, "The Solid Waste Management function of the RDKB has a mandate to manage waste according to the familiar 3 R’s. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle …and then Residuals Management. Trash To Treasure Day  has been planned as an event to celebrate Earth Day (Thursday, April 22). It is a day when we all get together as a region and a community to celebrate Reuse as a fun waste reduction technique. Reusing items prolongs their lives, keeping them out of the landfill and reducing the amount of ‘new stuff’ we have to buy."

There's nothing particularly new about communities sharing their stuff--this is just a twist on an old idea. "The idea of giving unwanted ‘stuff’ away is as old as the idea of private property. In North America the T2T event became a traditional event at universities (and ski hills!) as an end-of-term way for exiting students to get rid of large items that they couldn’t strap to the roof of their Volswagens.

"Here in the Kootenays, the Village of Fruitvale started this event ten years ago as a municipal event. They soon realized that this was a good thing that everyone in the region should be doing. They asked the RDKB to get involved. We determined that this was something that everyone in the Kootenay-Boundary could do together. The RDKB and the Regional District of Central Kootenay have now joined up to make this a Kootenay-wide tradition."

The event's popularity relies on that eternal component of Kootenay-Boundary life--the weather. Says Dueck, "If it is a nice day there will be a lot of stuff out there. I would also note that the idea of T2T is not a one-day-only event. You can put stuff at the end of your driveway with a Free sign on it any time you like. On any given Saturday you will often see residents put a chair, or something interesting, beside the road with a Free sign on it. It’s not radical--it’s just what we do here in the Kootenay-Boundary!"

Dueck himself will be participating, although we can't publish his address. "A couple of years ago I scored a old smoke-glassed stereo stand on wheels that I now use as a storage cabinet in the basement to organize my power tools. This year I will be putting out a perfectly good computer desk. I need to make room for the exercise bike I picked up last year…"

One final note: T2T does NOT involve a municipal pick up at the end of the day. If no one takes your black velvet Snoopy painting or 80s-style floor lamp, don't sulk, just bring it back inside and wait until next year--or  the next sunny Saturday morning!

In conjunction with this event, the RDKB will be offering backyard composting workshops. The dates are as follows:

• April 23 – Freeman’s Farm Supplies Rock Creek (call Joanne: 446.2899)
• April 27 – Grand Forks RDKB Board Room (call Grand Forks Rec: 442.2202)
• April 29 – Communities in Bloom gardening workshops – Selkirk College-Trail (call Selkirk College @ 364.5770)