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Personal Narrative

Decent Essays

My family and I love searching for junk in our neighborhood. We don’t often come across something reusable, but what we do find becomes a treasured part of our household for many years. In Australia, junk removal is more commonly known as “white-goods collection” where people place their unwanted fridges, dishwaters, and driers on the front lawn for council pick-up trucks to dispose of. Opportunities such as this only come around twice every year, so one could imagine the occasion to be very hectic for many suburban communities. At the peak of collection season, junk piles would grow so large that they would almost prevent the mail carrier from reaching letterboxes. My mother and I regularly joke about our neighbors throwing all their household …show more content…

On such days, we walk from pile to pile, eager to turn someone else’s trash into our treasure. I remember stumbling across a golf set on an unpleasantly hot summer afternoon on the way home from school. I couldn’t believe my luck. Several shiny clubs nestled inside a green leather golf bag complete with a stainless-steel stand. My father, supposedly an avid golfer during his teenage years, vowed to show me some of his abilities. However, in the past seven years, the closest we’ve been to playing real golf was cleaning the funneling cobwebs from the rusting irons from its time living in our …show more content…

I specifically remember a BBC documentary by British television presenter Reggie Yates, about Ghanaian “burner boys” in the wasteland known as “Agbogbloshie.” Every day, garbage trucks discard what recyclers call “Western waste” onto the world’s largest electronic wasteland. Every day, toxic burnings release dangerous fumes into the smoke blanketed air where these men work and live. I was truly startled. I struggled to accept what I had witnessed. My sanity repeatedly tried to deny the disturbing consequences of unparalleled advancements in technology coupled with growing global demands for consumer goods. Unfortunately, that is the reality. What legacy is this generation leaving for future

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