Often in my life I have come across instances that hold true to the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." I have even been guilty of seeing something that someone no longer wants out on the curb and asking if I could claim it as my own to work on! With a few new parts and a little elbow grease, I have been able to score a couple choice "treasures" of my own. Sometimes this saying can mean something different than scoring a good “curb alert” and I now a first-hand account of just that...everyone else’s trash becoming my own treasure!
It started about three weeks ago when I was in need of a steady backhaul out of the city of Los Angeles to come back home into what we SoCal locals call the "Inland Empire". I stumbled upon a decent paying haul from a broker who listed the load simply as "recycled plastic". So I thought what most anybody might have in this circumstance in that it might be water bottles, or even crushed bales of plastic bottles. As I pulled up to the shipper to load, I was a bit taken back to see that it literally was a small waste sorting facility. With conveyor belts and giant front-loading tractors all around, I began to wonder what I might have got myself into this time!
The load that started it all might have been the last for most drivers. When I looked at the scene illustrated here in the picture, I thought, “This is not happening!” Believe it or not, this picture was how they were loading it, not unloading it! As always, so long as it doesn’t hurt my trailer or cost me too much time, I will haul just about anything that fits in my 53-foot box.
As it turns out, this load allowed me to prove my worth to this new broker that I had not done business with before. Since I did not complain, charged a fair rate and had customer requests that I come back, I am now on the top of their list for these loads and given “first-dibs” when they get them in. That suits me just fine, since they offer the perfect haul to get me back into my home area the three to four days a week they get these. Also, the product they are loading has been cleaned up a little since that wonderful load of plastic rolls and is now loosely palletized or put in cardboard gaylords for easier loading/unloading.
It is just this sort of thing that makes me think twice when I throw something away or recycle it. Will it end up in a landfill buried in dirt to decay away, or will it ultimately end up in a shipping container being taken overseas on an ocean freighter such as these loads? I find it absolutely amazing that most of what we discard gets bought by other countries and ultimately re-used or re-purposed in some way. So in the end, not only did I lock into the gig that most other drivers might not want to bother with in the first place, but in doing so have truly turned these loads of “trash” into my own little “treasure”. Goes to show, you just never know where you might find good steady hauls!