A HUMAN HISTORY IN RUST

In rubbish, there’s beauty—and hope for what can be renewed

- Dorothy Woodend FROM THE TYEE

THE RELATIONSHIP between people and their junk is a curious one. A 2022 documentary called Scrap shows just how oddly intertwined these two things can be.

When the film’s director, Stacey Tenenbaum, came across a photo of an aeroplane graveyard just outside of Moscow, the place’s ghostly quality—seemingly frozen in time— led her to wonder what happens to these kinds of things when they are no longer useful.

The film is chock-a-block with visual pleasure. Viewers float alongside retired trams and peer into the rotting husks of muscle cars, spotted with moss and lichen. But a harder message lurks beneath the lilting images: the way back from irrelevance and obsolescence demands work—often the hard, dirty and dangerous kind.

That humans use and then discard endless amounts of stuff isn’t exactly news. But how do we interact with what we throw away? The film showcases an alternative approach to the cycle of junking things once they’ve reached the end of their active life: there is worth in the saddest old hulks of rubbish, including a downed plane, a wizened train or an ancient phone booth. In fact, old stuff can be transformed into something not only useful but beautiful.

Take, for example, the iconic red phone booth, an object synonymous with the UK. Back in the 1980s, when Tony Inglis, who ran a trucking firm in England at the time, got the contract to remove phone booths that had fallen into ruin, he thought, We can’t just let them go.