Transfer Station. What an apt name. We load our broken ceiling tiles, plastic recyclables, flattened cardboard boxes, bound newspapers and junk mail, bags of tissue and floss, empty ice cream containers, coffee grounds and all manner of garbage tied up in plastic bags, into our car, slam the trunk and drive to the Transfer Station.
Many folks still call it the dump out of habit. Dumps and landfills have slowly given way to transfer stations from Maine to California. A friend of mine was helping her mom clean out her home before moving into a condo. She took endless trips to the town transfer station, each time driving from bin #17 back to bin #4 to bin #12 to find the appropriate drop off point for an old mattress, stacks of magazines, NiCad batteries and all manner of refuse that collects, untended, in a home over the decades.
My town's transfer station is less fussy-- one huge metal hole for recyclables-- ALL recyclables, one huge metal hole for garbage, a medium sized shed for 'second time around donations.' and some large mysterious piles for demolition material and tires. The cavernous metal holes drop into gigantic metal containers. Every month or so the containers are hauled away, to transfer their contents to someone else's town.
But where is all of this refuse transferring to? Who is on the receiving end? The term itself, 'transfer station' seems to echo the transitory nature of the material goods that we collect, hang on to and then chose to discard. So we 'transfer' them. To where? To whom? Is one large dump environmentally superior to a multitude of smaller landfills or is it simply more palatable to transfer our refuse somewhere else, somewhere farther out of site and out of mind.
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