A long time ago, when I first moved to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, I soon started hearing stories about the ‘dump’. In a community where most everything had to be driven in or flown in from outside, recycling had become a fine art long before it caught on in southern Canada. People would go and pick through the discards, taking home things that they might need.

And it continued that way for a long time, even as Yellowknife grew larger and the big box stores had moved in. I remember my friend John Bayly showing up to a gathering of our writers’ group with a wonderful loaf he had baked using a pan discarded at the dump. It got more complicated as the city got more and more organized, but the human desire to scavenge didn’t go away, as far as I can tell.

So I was fascinated to read a story in the Progress Network’s first 2022 newsletter, about Stillbruch, which it called the Ikea of waste. “ Stilbruch is run by the city’s sanitation department, and instead of destroying or disposing of these throwaways, the municipal team checks and, if necessary, repairs them, before putting them on sale to the public. It touts itself as “for everyone who prefers used to new—used is the new sexy.”