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“Outstanding service. They were extremely careful delivering the extra large container into our driveway.” -- A. L. GARNER
Bedford, Dow erected a wedding tent in the front yard to shelter water-logged odds and ends while the team hurried to disinfect walls and floors. The owner, a woman living alone, refused to allow the moldering objects, seen by her as treasured and essential, to be carted away - losing a $30,000 insurance claim. "She made us bring everything back down to the basement," Dow recalls. "She almost threw us off the property when we tried to remove a bag of used baby diapers." People grieve when their possessions, however useless or unhealthy, are removed, he says. Hoarding - the out-of-control accumulation of objects and an inability to discard them, including things others deem worthless - is a mental illness affecting at least 2 to 6 percent of the world's population, roughly 15 million people in the U.S., many of whom are 50 or older. "It's really paralyzing. They just can't get rid of things," says Rachel Lakin, administrator of New Hampshire's Bureau of Elderly and Adult Services. Hoarders "don't know how to assign value to something. Therefore, anything becomes valuable."At the other end of the spectrum are seniors who amass possessions over a lifetime and don't discard much, whether from sentimental attachment or a lack of strength, energy and organizational skills needed to divest and keep house. Whatever the cause, crisis levels of clutter produce unhealthy environments that are difficult to navigate, and downright dangerous for seniors with medical and mobility issues, as well as for emergency responders trying to rescue them from overstuffed homes. The clutter encountered by Scene Care, a company whose services include cleaning up hoarding situations, made this kitchen dangerous to navigate. (Courtesy) Dangerous pilesAs New Hampshire's baby-boom population ages, incidents of hoarding and perilous levels of clutter are rising, drawing the attention of public safety and health officials and people who work with elders, as well as communities trying to identify problems and coordinate help before situations turn tragic. Hoarding complaints "are becoming more common. And it's not just seniors," says Manchester Fire Marshal Peter Lennon. "We get one every couple of weeks that draws the attention of the Fire Prevention Bureau. It definitely hinders us if we have to go in there. We've had a couple of fatalities in the city where hoarding was a factor." Lora Gerard is program director for the Northern New England Geriatric Education Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. "We don't really understand how widespread it is. We don't know about... (lver Linings: Dwellings strewn with garbage and waste overshadow the mental health crisis)
Methamphetamine is an addictive stimulant, one that can be smoked, swallowed, snorted or injected. The drug comes as a pill or a powder, though crystal meth looks like glass or shiny blueish white rocks. Users who smoke or inject meth report feeling a brief and intense rush, while ingesting or snorting produces a long-lasting high, according to information from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Both effects release dopamine into the brain that regulate feelings of pleasure. It's sometimes used for medical treatment of attention deficit disorder or obesity. Small amounts create increased wakefulness, decreased appetite and violent behavior, along with rapid and irregular heart rate, increased blood pressure and hyperthermia. High doses can elevate body temperature to lethal levels or cause cardiovascular collapse, extreme anorexia, dental problems and memory loss. Overdosing causes death from heart attacks or organ problems generated by overheating. To home inspector Jared Fenn, meth is a huge issue that no one seems to talk about. "It's a much bigger problem than people want to admit or realize," he said. "The problem here in Utah County is that it's 'Happy Valley.' Nothing goes wrong here and everybody's happy. But meth is a huge problem." He and his team in Orem work as home inspectors with the national franchise Pillar to Post. They inspect homes in Utah, Sanpete, Juab, Carbon, Emery, Sevier and Millard counties, often working with home buyers worried about buying a meth-contaminated house. Inspecting a residence for meth contamination is an extra service his business provides in addition to regular home inspections, much like radon or mold screening. "It's the first step in getting that peace of mind when you're buying a property," he explained. But when it comes to meth contamination, "there's really nothing that you can look for." ... (eaning up contamination: What happens to meth houses)
After clearing out organic materials (decomposing fruit, a bag of coleslaw, half a chicken squashed in tin foil) and scrubbing the dumpster’s inside walls to get rid of any “dribblage contamination” and smelly residues, he set to work creating order out of chaos. Although he sketches out ideas for the structure, he does not know what the finished work will look like until he starts building it. But he always starts with an understanding of the materials he has to work with, in this case everything from cement blocks, bricks and a large-format printer hidden at the core of the sculpture to scraps of paper, Styrofoam and sheets of black rubber. “You start getting a feel for different weights and a sense of how it will come out,” Harman says. During the visit, he cut cardboard boxes into smaller strips and broke apart wooden pallets—New York apparently has “the strongest known to man”—to create Skip 16’s sedimentary layers. Harman says that sorting through the rubbish and making it into something that is recognisably art is “like therapy”, but he gets the most satisfaction from the conversations he has with passers-by as they watch the work develop. One of them, a local man named Lionel who had visited regularly, stopped by on his way home from work and repeatedly said, “I can’t believe it!” as he walked around the dumpster, seeing the neatly formed block where once there was just a jumble of trash. Kevin Harman's completed Skip 16 (2018), before it was transported to the fairPhoto: Christopher L. Cook... (Art Newspaper)
One wall is devoted to seven local artists and organizations that address urban waste, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles who recently had a retrospective on her work as artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, streetscape photographer Larry Racioppo, Hack:Trash:NYC that hosts hackathons on waste management, the Lower East Side Ecology Center that collects electronic waste, and Material for the Arts that collects and distributes art supplies to schools and nonprofits. The City Reliquary is also hosting complementary programing, such as an upcoming screening of Canners (2017) on collectors of New York City’s cans and bottles, and a tour of the Treasures in the Trash Museum. In April, an installation of trash art by local artists will open in the City Reliquary sculpture garden. While the exhibition itself is small, it is an engaging portal to the ongoing challenge of New York’s trash, and how your trash does not truly disappear after it vanishes from the sidewalk curb.Installation view of NYC Trash! Past, Present, & Future at the City ReliquaryInstallation...
C&D waste. The most common materials making up C&D waste includes aggregates, drywall, cardboard, shingles, dimensional lumber and plywood, scrap metal and carpet. While opportunities exist for recycling and reuse of C&D waste, there are a number of challenges that prevent more of this material from being diverted from the landfill. Lack of Recycling Facilities. C&D waste is commonly mixed on-site with all waste materials placed in a single container. In order to recycle this waste, it must be sorted, much like how our curbside single stream recyclables are handled. Facilities for sorting C&D waste, called material recovery facilities, are prevalent in states such as California, but there are no official material recovery facilities in Colorado. One of the main reasons for this is that Colorado’s low landfill tipping fees make it much cheaper for mixed C&D waste to be sent to the landfill rather than processed and recycled. Therefore, there is often little economic incentive to building facilities for sorting mixed C&D. Colorado does have a number of private and public facilities for the recycling of some source-separated materials, such as aggregates, scrap metal, cardboard and wood, which helps divert thousands of tons of waste from the landfill every year. However, their availability often varies by community. For communities far away from recycling centers, transportation costs can make recycling cost prohibitive.Lack of Markets. For many of the materials making up C&D waste, there are few or no markets in Colorado for processing and recycling the material. One example is asphalt ... (BizWest Media)
