Croatia Empty House Notes (5) Squat Life - What Is Garbage? Dumpster Diving
Editor's note: The author is a student in the Department of Environmental Engineering at National Cheng Kung University and is studying agriculture in Croatia on an exchange program. This article follows an earlier piece, and after the squat (occupying vacant houses) action, it continues to discuss the definition of what counts as "garbage" and the possibility and life history of these "garbage" items being put to continued use.
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Dumpster diving, by my definition, is the act of finding garbage to recycle and even to eat. A dumpster is a large-size garbage bin, usually used to hold the trash of supermarkets, businesses, hospitals or apartment buildings. Diving should refer to bungee jumping; the reason it is described this way is that the dumpster is so large that many people looking for garbage often stick half their body inside it or even jump right in.
In Europe and America, this kind of behavior is very common, even extremely widespread. On the streets of Croatia, every few minutes you will see a person carrying several plastic bags, walking along while rummaging through roadside trash cans to see if there is anything good. As for Taiwan, China.... not too sure. What is more commonly seen on the streets are grandpas and grandmas picking up junk; a person rummaging through trash cans alone outside would probably be taken for a homeless person or a beggar.
Items Treated as Garbage
Squat is basically a place pieced together from "garbage." Almost all the furniture here was picked up by them on the street. On a few nights each month, people put out all the large unwanted garbage from their homes outside their doors or on street corners, and then a garbage truck comes to collect it.
When they have nothing to do, they push a cart along the road to see if there is anything useful. Sofas, dining tables, cups, pots and pans and even toilets were all picked up on the street. I only went once, and that time we picked up a solid wood desk with a broken drawer handle, an ornately decorated mirror, a pile of notebooks, a film SLR camera without a battery, several foreign-language textbooks, and a pile of clothes and hats that were washed and then put into the free shop.
Of course there were also some interesting things, such as this Nintendo from over a decade ago. Everyone was thrilled to find it, and after fixing the joystick, the regular activity for everyone on those nights was reliving childhood's most passionate Super Mario. There was also this big pile of DVDs, the vast majority zombie horror films, bought in a moment of madness by a girl with a broken heart; after watching them once she threw them all away, and as a result we spent those nights screaming our way through each one.
