In the early days of the strike, it was all about piles. Neat little mounds of individualized rubbish behind every house. Now, crafty Vancouverites have rallied their collective waste-management abilities to create a new form of trash disposal, the Informal Neighborhood Trash Heap.

Examples of INTH’s can be found on almost every block, but some areas have been hit harder by vigilante “dump and run” tactics, amassing impressively large and intricate crap piles. In an exhaustive bicycle survey of Vancouver’s back alleys, Tooth and Dagger has discovered that our city’s residents seem to agree on one thing: it is totally acceptable to dump your crap in the same place that other people have already dumped their crap.

The Downtown Eastside, in particular, is suffering, perhaps due to the fact that there was more crap there to begin with, therefore justifying the dumping of crap in greater volumes.

These piles may be scary to the average Vancouverite, but many are actually quite safe, and worthy of exploration. “This is not a health risk,” says Viviana Zanocco, Media Relations officer of Vancouver Coastal Health. “It’s mostly non-perishables, because the organic waste is getting picked up commercially.”

Still, wading through piles of junk made me uncomfortable. I believe this is a problem of conceptual categories.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas defines dirt as “matter out of place.” Junk piles are dirty, because they are things that have no place. And dirty things make us uncomfortable, because they are polluted, and cause sickness. “Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event,” she states. “Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”

In the absence of garbage authority, we have now adopted a systematic 
approach to dealing with junk. It goes like this: Once a thing is placed in an alley, it is out of place, and dirty. And once there is a single piece of dirt, however small, the space around the dirt becomes “dirty.” Dirt belongs with other dirt, because things must go into neat categories and remain orderly. Junk, therefore, belongs with other junk. Hence, the Informal Neighborhood Trash Heaps.

Once we have established areas of dirt, these areas become “polluted,” and we avoid them. Kirsten Seale explores this idea in a study of trash heaps in England. “This is the paradox of refuse; our sense of order depends upon it, yet in affluent society we are anxious about confronting it.” In casting out our junk, we feel somehow cleaner.

Recent media coverage of the mounting garbage reflects this urge to define what is clean, what is dirty, and where this dirt is allowed to exist.

In an article describing the filth in an alley off Hastings, the National Post quoted a city manager as saying “that’s just normal here. I’d venture to say the rest of the city is cleaner than usual.” What he is actually saying is, the dirt in the Downtown Eastside is acceptable trash because it has already been defined as dirty, while dirt in other neighborhoods has been deemed unacceptable. What would happen if Kitsilano residents woke up to find rodent families scurrying through piles of used needles? Would the strike then be a health risk?

To add insult to injury, the headline reads “City Strike No Sweat, Unless You’re a Manager.” Or…unless you live in the Downtown Eastside, and apparently don’t read the National Post.

The Globe and Mail has been slightly more sensitive in their coverage, mentioning that “the impoverished community, with its homelessness and substance-abuse problems, is always difficult to keep clean.” Although this may be true, I find it hard to believe that the recent accumulation of mattresses and used furniture were created by the homeless.

Let us now examine some piles of trash.

This alley off Gore St. (Fig. 1) caught my eye immediately. I stopped, bicycle in one hand, camera in the other, to frame an assortment of mattresses and televisions. A man’s voice projected from behind me: “Disgusting, isn’t it?” My first reaction was to agree. In terms of hygeine, however, this 
assortment of junk was relatively harmless.

“Disgust is the product of conceptual trauma,” states David Trotter in The Anatomy of Disgust. Perhaps the location of the junk outside the dumpster was too much for this man to handle, and violated his sense of appropriate space. In all likelihood, this man has both a broken TV and an old mattress somewhere in his basement that are not “disgusting,” simply by virtue of their location inside the category of acceptable junk.

These are Mike’s hands (Fig. 2) I met him in a wide, well-kept alley between 4th and 5th Ave. near Ontario. The third dumpster in looked profitable – I had been eyeing it myself until Mike pulled up with a shopping cart and a backpack.

“Anything good today?” I asked.

“Extension cords.” He pointed to his cart.

A quick scan of Mike’s things revealed a scattering of wires, computer parts, and an IBM laptop. I assumed his good fortune must be a result of the garbage strike.

“Not really,” he said. “Around here it’s all commercial pickup, so I find the same things as before.”

I noted the relative cleanliness of the alley, and Mike looked around him with pride. “I see things messy, and I make them clean. I like this neighborhood. They respect me….no cameras, no locks, and I respect them by keeping it clean. Actually, in construction areas, the biggest thing is to wear a hard hat and boots. Then they leave me alone.”

My own categories of junk and not-junk are still defined heavily by location, and proximity to other junk. I can spend hours pointing out the fallacy in disgust, yet hesitate when reaching out to shake Mike’s hand, which had just been digging through computer parts. Afterwards I looked down at my own hands, covered in bike grease, and had to laugh. We are all disgusting when we stand next to junk.

After all of this exploring and rooting around, I took only one thing from the mounds of displaced rubbish: a giant golden tin plate bearing a large rooster and the words, “Take Courage.”