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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (8892)	2/10/2009 10:47:56 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24231

Corporate Social Responsibility It's Just Garbage Cory Doctorow, 12.08.08, 06:00 AM EST What corporations throw away provides Darren Atkinson with profit and happiness. Cory Doctorow Darren Atkinson has discovered a marvelous fact about selling garbage: There's always more to be had. The 40-something dumpster diver (as a rock and roll drummer, Atkinson is shy about giving out his exact age for fear of dating himself) has been in the game for 16 years, and he's learned to stop worrying and love the trash. (See Jack of All Trades, Master of Drums.) "It's all about the relationships," he says. "I meet people, maybe they've got a degree, six years studying chemistry, and now they're working at Starbucks, or they used to work in some industry that they still have connections to. They take the junk that they think they can fix or sell, and give me back a cut in cash or trade. And if they rip me off, what have I lost? It's just garbage." Just garbage--but also a successful business. Atkinson has built an empire collecting high-tech junk out of corporate trash bins, repairing it and selling the second-hand goods to customers worldwide on sites like eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) and Craigslist. It started when a punk-rock neighbor in his rooming house tipped Atkinson off to the amplifiers to be found in the dumpsters at Bose. As a marginally employed drummer recently arrived from rural North Ontario, Atkinson was motivated to check it out for himself--and thus began an illustrious career in garbage. Before long, Atkinson was recovering dozens of 386 motherboards--the 486 chip had just come out, making older machines obsolete--and selling them at garage sales. This connected him with a network of smart, broke, geeky students and early new-media types who helped him learn what was worth keeping and was just junk, and before long, Atkinson was making money hand over fist. Some of that money went into founding businesses--a recording studio, a storefront--neither of which prospered. But Atkinson isn't bothered by the failures: "I'm my own rich uncle. I bankroll my own ventures. I couldn't have this laid-back attitude if I'd paid for my stuff, or if I'd borrowed money from a relative, if I'd had to save face or felt the desperate need to service a loan or service my relationship with a bank or something. So I can afford to let go. I can build another studio. I don't know how other people do it--they've got a family and loans." Garrulous and hilarious, Atkinson's a poet of garbage who fancies himself a scatologist, spending his nights nipple-deep in corporate excrement. "My dad was a hunter, and though I was never into that myself, I never forgot him explaining to me that the way you track your prey is though its crap. You can tell how the herd is eating, if there's a sick animal in the group, whether they're growing or contracting. If I was a CEO, I'd spend some time out back in the garbage every day--you learn more here than you ever could from a balance sheet." He's got a point. As we tool around industrial suburbs like Markham and Etobicoke, whipping down cul-de-sacs ("a lot of places, they only put out the trash once a year, so I just cruise by, check 'em out without stopping") and pulling over to leap out and lever ourselves into the giant steel middens, we find the strangest evidence of the goings-on within the anonymous, low-slung buildings. First of all, no one recycles. Even at the companies with giant recycling dumpsters ("I don't touch anything like recycling or scrap, where the company has an arrangement with a dealer"), the trash brims with things that just shouldn't be headed to landfills--mountains of cardboard, Styrofoam, paint, paper and e-waste for months. Comment On This Story In the two decades I've known Atkinson, I've only seen him get really mad when he sees this disregard for proper waste disposal: "I've got a son, and we recycle like crazy so that he'll have a future. But for every thousand old ladies washing and flattening their cans and putting them in a blue box, there's a company like this with twice as much recyclable waste going straight into the landfill." forbes.com