One 50cc baby blue motor scooter
In yesterday's post about toilet seats, I mentioned that the commodes ended up elsewhere, while I saved several seats for a future project. This scooter is headed to the same place.
Over the summer of last year a private contractor was hired by the prefectural or national government to gather up the rest of the tsunami debris and to also tear down those houses damaged by the earthquakes. They piled up a gigantic mountain of trash and then hauled it in dump trucks little by little to the port and loaded it onto a huge garbage barge that sailed for Ishinomaki City on the mainland. From there it was distributed around the country to be sorted at various garbage processing centers and eventually to be recycled (metals: like parts of today's scooter), incinerated (all burnables, plastics and organic matter: like all the food and sweets wrappers) or dumped in the ocean (everything else: like the toilet commodes).
The demolition crew took an early winter break and are now back on the island to finish tearing down several old houses. So, at this point for about the next month or so until they are finished and the last barge sails away, I have access to the dump. I am bringing all the junk I find but cannot use to the dump. And, once there, I am desperately searching for anything of potential use. I have rescued all kinds of great and useful materials from the shores and dump over the past two years. I will blog about them later on, maybe when it rains/snows and I cannot get out for my daily garbage clean up!
The majority of the garbage I am gathering was here long before the disaster. But, it is exactly because of the disaster that we have the opportunity to rid the island of as much junk as possible. After the effort I put in to dragging the scooter out of the forest and lifting it into the back of the truck all by myself, I do, however, doubt that I will have much overall impact. The demolition crew is here for the old houses, not the old junk littered about by the people of those households. Once the last garbage barge sets sail, it will be infinitely more difficult and expensive to take care of all the scattered junk. I will do the best I can, because that is all I can do.