Elmira’s Shopping Cart Graveyard; why?
Elmira, NY (WETM)– A graveyard sits near the Elmira Department of Public Works building off Industrial Boulevard and near the City Animal Shelter. One won’t find headstones or memorial plaques here. The things that go here do have a history. But there is no one to speak of their service, of their use to society, or how they ended up abandoned, on the streets of Elmira and then, eventually, at this place.
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In this graveyard, there are hundreds of shopping carts from local stores. There are plastic ones from Weis and Big Lots. There are metal ones, that weigh so much it’s hard to understand how they got pushed around on city streets for who knows how long. There are carts from Wegman’s. The metal ones come from there.
There are carts from Aldi, which makes one wonder why the quarters weren’t there or why someone would forfeit a quarter. Note; if you’ve never shopped at Aldi you don’t know about the quarters. One must insert a quarter into a cart to use that cart, and then one gets his/her quarter returned to them when the cart is replaced when one is finished with it. There were no quarters in the abandoned carts on this day. Yes, I checked.
There are hundreds of carts here. Some are badly damaged and not usable. Some have security devices attached to a back wheel, which are supposed to prevent the cart from being taken off a store’s parking lot. It seems that the technology, at least in these cases, has lost the battle to the ingenuity, or brute force, of cart thieves. Some still work well and have no visible damage. Yet, all are here. At the shopping cart graveyard, next door to the DPW.
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There are reasons the carts are here. They were abandoned on the streets of Elmira. You can imagine how they got there. The carts won’t tell you. They were then picked up by city crews and dumped in their current location. They won’t be there forever, decomposing into a thousand-year pile of plastics and metals. They will be dismantled and recycled by the city.
The carts, it seems, have nowhere else to go. That’s because in the State of New York, it is illegal for a recycler to accept, or recycle, a shopping cart. Side note: it’s too bad there can’t be a law that recyclers can’t accept all or parts of a vehicle’s catalytic converter. So, even if someone with an illicitly obtained shopping cart presents it to a recycler, it likely will get refused, which means it will end up, eventually, here.
So, the carts sit in this pile which, from the street below, looks like a giant pile of plastic and metal. That is what it is, but it’s so much more. What would these carts tell us if they could speak of the families that used them, of the days and nights they spent in cold, rain, and snow, or the heat of the day? Or, about how they ended up on the streets and then ended up here, in a place where they wait to get torn apart, and then used again.
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