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When it’s time to move or renovate residents will often make some hard choices about what to throw out.
Some don’t.
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Sofas, fridges, gaming consoles, pianos and a dead cat.
All were offered, at some point, to a Windsor-based crew from Just Junk, a removal firm that picks up whatever customers want disposed of.
The dead cat didn’t make the cut.
“I told her no, we weren’t taking her dead cat, but it was like half-decayed and I don’t know how long it had been in there,” said Flynn Mulligan, a University of Windsor business student who works part-time at Just Junk.
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But the rest are part of an eclectic mix of articles that get tossed, or at least handed over, to the junk specialists.
Some of it gets recycled, some of it gets donated and, only after those items are culled, the rest goes to the landfill.
Apart from the strange stuff, Just Junk is often called after a real estate transaction. Someone is moving in, someone is moving out, said Kevin Murray, who owns the local Just Junk franchise. “A lot of times people will move into a house and the previous owner will have left all sorts of things.”
Houses also need to be cleared out when people move into retirement homes, or in estate situations where someone has died.
“Everyone in the family is going to go through the home, take whatever they may need, but then, a weed whipper, or a lawn mower, everyone’s got one already. So they just tell us to remove them.”
Oddly, pianos are also often on the dustbin list. “We do pianos all the time,” said Murray. “We probably take apart 20 pianos a year.
“We ‘demo’ them. We can have a piano done and out the door in five minutes.”
But the oddest thing Murray sees lying around for disposal is money. “I’ll just go into a clean-up and I walk out, I’ll have my pockets full of change. People just leave money lying around everywhere. It’s just insane.”
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Even people who are evicted for not paying their rent will leave money lying around when the cleanup crew arrives, he said.
“People throw out really good things sometimes,” said Zack Sullen, who is also working part-time while studying sports and recreation management at St. Clair College.
“People throw out a lot of furniture that’s in good condition because they just don’t like it for whatever reason. People just really have no space for it, or they’re getting something new, so they have to throw something perfectly fine.”
And then there’s the expensive toys.
“A lot of times they’ll throw out working electronics,” said Sullen. “They’ll throw out a TV that’s perfectly good. Sometimes we get PlayStations that are still working and people are just throwing them out.”
The flooding in Essex County last August kept the removal firm busy, said Murray.
“We’re hired to go into homes, they’ll bundle all the materials up, they bring it up to the road.”
But pickup crews also find themselves in basements, hauling away destroyed furniture after a flood.
On average, each local household disposes of just over half a tonne of waste a year at the regional landfill, with more than 35 per cent of solid waste diverted from the site. For those who can’t manage to move their big-ticket items, residents of Windsor and Essex County of Essex can arrange for the pickup of “white goods” — appliances, metal items, hot-water tanks, barbecues, etc. — upon request.
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Windsor also has a robust waste diversion program, said Cathy Cobot-Nepszy, the city’s manager of waste diversion. Electronics and bicycles, for example, can be repurposed and diverted at the drop-off points in Kingsville, Essex and Windsor.
“When you divert those materials we don’t charge you because we want you to do what’s right,” she said. “We want to protect the landfill.”
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Otherwise, there is always the online forums.
“We get a lot of phone calls and inquiries,” said Cobot-Nepszy. “We’ll get like anything, from boats to pianos.
“Any time anything’s reusable, we say, post it on Kijiji, put it on Facebook (marketplace). Or maybe donate it to a school, or Saint Vincent De Paul.”
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