Things I find in the garbage

I’ve always had an interest in hidden treasures, although I never made much time for it. I got a basic but good metal detector for my 19th birthday (I think, that was an eternity ago), but only really used it a few times. I had other priorities.

Recently, I got interested in trying it again. My old metal detector didn’t seem to detect much of anything anymore, so I left it on the curb and bought a new one late last year. Winter came early though, so I didn’t have a chance to really use it until this year.

At my new place my landlords/friends live on the ground floor. They were doing some gardening and yard work, which seemed like a good excuse to bring out the metal detector. We mostly dug up old rusty nails, but there was one reading coming from fairly deep which got me digging further. It was just a piece of old sheet metal, but I was also digging up pottery sherds and old glass. So I convinced them to let me dig a hole, peddling tales of finding a cache of gold coins to get them excited.

(We all knew this was mostly a joke though – the odds of finding gold in this part of the Plateau were probably worse than the odds of winning the lottery. Most of the people who lived in this part of town originally moved there to work in or around the nearby limestone quarry).

The metal detector quickly became useless, because most of the interesting finds were not metal. In the first picture you can see a bit of a glass bottle poking out, in the second was the biggest pottery sherd I managed to save.

These were all my finds after maybe 4-5 hours digging. I ended up spending probably like 18-20 hours in that hole overall.

And here’s a display of some of my finds after all that digging. There was a lot more of the relatively common items (ie: nails and random rusty iron/steel, plain white porcelain, bones and relatively clear glass), but it wouldn’t have been photogenic. Below are some of my favourite finds, including unusual coloured glass, sherds of transferware and stoneware jugs, and a whole bunch of clay pipe fragments. I’m able to date one of the clay pipe as being made between 1805 and 1891 (most likely close to the latter), because it had the markings of William White of Glasgow, whose factory operated in that time-frame.

I also enjoyed finding the buttons, a single brass ring, and a clay marble (I found another, in red clay, after taking this photo). However, the top finds in my mind were the segments of a broken bisque doll, and an odd piece that seems to be dated 1902. There is a horseshoe motif and some faint writing underneath, which I’ll try to decipher with wax paper at some point. I think it is bisque as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the rest.

At first I was actually hoping this was the location of an old outhouse, as sometimes those can produce fun finds. But in the end, I’m not sure this was even dump digging. Instead, I’m pretty sure this was just a spot where they dumped some landfill a long time ago, maybe to even out the yard or something. With privy digging or dump digging, you’d expect to find more of each item in the same place, but this stuff almost seemed like it was tossed in a blender before being dumped. I’d find one piece over here, one over there, and never anything that seemed complete.

It also made digging pretty difficult. That’s the main reason I think I’m done with this particular hole. The quantity of finds has dried up, but also some of the layers in there are basically like rock. My hands in particular felt pretty worn out … it was good exercise though! I got about 3 feet deep in places.

However, it was a pretty fun experience, and I think I got an interesting hands-on look at what garbage looked like in the early 1900s. Maybe I’ll expand on the experience in my book. Regardless, I look forward to digging more holes in the future in the hopes of finding a different kind of trash than I’m used to.

As for regular trash, the July 1 moving day was pretty mediocre but at least I got some exercise biking and walking around. The trash otherwise hasn’t been super bountiful lately, but I’m still finding some things. Sometimes the summer is a little slower because people are going on vacation, visiting friends and family and whatnot.

 

Astronomical spring is almost over. The season was pretty good to me, although things have been a bit slower (but still decent) as of late. Moving day is coming up, and although the phenomenon has rarely been a great source of trash for me, I have some new ideas for this year that I’ll be trying out.

One spot in a nice part of town was very good to me over a period of a couple of months. I saved lots of yard sale stuff, and some decent electronics such as digital cameras and a Nintendo DS. However, I was pretty busy at the time so I only got around to taking pictures of the jewelry, most of which came in two hauls over a few weeks. The first box on the left is the silver from the first haul, the middle the silver from the second, and the right is the gold from both.

The silver jewelry was pretty cool, and included a couple of Tiffany pieces (the skeleton key pendant and the classic Elsa Peretti heart pendant) and a Links of London necklace. That one pendant on the left is huge and ornate. All in all there was about 250 grams of silver (including stones), and a little over 6 grams of gold. Most likely, it belonged to teenagers or recently former teenagers who don’t know the value of their possessions.

I’m pretty sure this stuff was tossed by someone famous, but trash pickers are bound by professional ethics laws so I’m not telling. The sports cards were high quality and never opened, they made me around 300$ at auction. The jewelry there is all silver or white gold. And there may be a trend where people are now throwing away unlocked iPhones. Maybe now that you can transfer your info to a new phone just by bringing it next to the old one, more phones are being factory reset than in the past. I posted about an iPhone not long ago, found an unlocked 10 elsewhere, and then this 13 Pro Max. There were some cracks on the back glass, but was otherwise in fine condition. I sold it to a friend for 230$, which is about what I would have gotten from that local company I’ve started using to sell relatively new cell phones.

This one house was a one-hit wonder that I had high hopes for. On the first day, I salvaged a bunch of yard sale quality stuff, including some nice if unexceptional pens. I also saved a near-perfect vintage c. 50s or 60s Canadiens wool sweater. This was during our playoff run, so I did an eBay auction and it sold for 100$. I also found my first ever silver bar, a 1oz by Johnson Matthey for Scotiabank. I had to cut it out from the plastic to take a closer look, even if that might devalue it slightly in the eyes of some nerds. I was hoping for more bars, but I think this one just got overlooked. A couple weeks later I found a bunch of 1976 Olympic coin set boxes, but they were all empty.

In the random ephemera category, I found an old stock certificate for a Brooks Steam Motors Ltd, which from the sounds of things was an early automobile scam. Almost 100 years later Nikola would pull a similar trick, but with electric cars. The certificate is probably worth a little bit, but I’m thinking of getting it framed and put on my wall.

I also really like the New Lotus Cafe restaurant menu. This was a Chinese Restaurant in Montreal, and presumably it was designed around Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.

And lastly, a few other miscellaneous finds. I’m pretty confident the pieces on the top left are ivory. The heart has an unmarked 10k gold loop, and the bracelet has a 14k embellishment with a nice looking red stone. In completely random one-off piles, I found a gold pin that relates to dentistry somehow, and a 1976 Olympics participation medal. It’s made of copper and seems to be worth like 150$ bucks, just as a collectible.

I’m trying to do some work on my book. For now the progress is slow, but sometimes things can evolve quickly. So I have a bit of an absurd question that might help me on one chapter, which is: why don’t you become a professional trash picker like me? I know there are many reasons not to, I just want to hear them!