Go green: Shopping at the Yellowknife dump

By Matt Barron

One person's trash really is another person's treasure. Here's how one man learned to take the three Rs seriously.

Shortly after moving to Yellowknife three years ago, I complained to a coworker that I was unable to afford furniture for my bare apartment and was having to serve candlelit dinners on the linoleum floor. My newspaper reporting paid too little and –- owing to the diamond-mining boom in the North -– my substantially mediocre apartment cost far too much. The solution, my coworker said, was obvious: I could pick up free furniture at the city dump.

Yellowknife, I soon learned, has enjoyed a long history of dump salvaging, a heritage driven by the revolving-door transience of its workforce. Many Yellowknifers -– returning to the “South,” but faced with near-criminal shipping costs -– simply throw up their hands and drive their belongings out to the dump.

Consequently, everything from decent furniture and appliances to nearly-new TVs and computers are up for grabs.

Even so, when I went seeking my furniture, I was hardly prepared to see prominent businesspeople, a well-known lawyer and a member of the legislature strolling earnestly among the trash as if through a hobby garden. Nor did I, for some reason, really expect to find a real dump, thousands of screeching seagulls clouding the landfill and an unbearable stench scorching the nostrils. This all took a sensory backseat, when I spotted what looked to my amateur gaze like a new pine chair.

“That's bird's-eye maple! Quite the find, that is!” piped up a nearby woman, who proceeded to praise the merits of furniture built with this rare kind of wood. Though I noticed it was missing a rung or two, I decided to take it, and soon felt that I couldn't have done better had a plaid-afflicted salesman sold me the chair.

After several visits, my apartment featured a table, two chairs and a recliner, all more or less immaculate. The furniture made for an ensemble that strictly observed the principles of dump decor: it was wildly mismatched. But now my girlfriend and I could clink wineglasses without bumping the dog dish.

A half-year later, my girlfriend decided to take a job down south and, like so many other Yellowknifers, we prepared to move. I drove the furniture to the dump and, on a whim, left it roughly where I'd found it. When I returned with a last-minute load, a man who looked to be in his early 30s -– like me -– was working the bird's-eye maple chair into his station wagon. He may even have thought it the perfect chair to give his candlelit dinners that little extra something.