Just what I always wanted, an empty gum wrapper

Originally Posted by Washington Post, edited for space

Christopher Goodwin spends his days driving a dump truck but continues to pick up trash even when he's off the clock. On V Street NW last week, he collects a losing lottery ticket, a cigarette butt and a packet of parmesan cheese. He stoops over for a clear candy wrapper and holds it up for inspection.

"Obviously, this is a very banal piece of trash," Goodwin says. "But I kind of think everything deserves a second look. . . . Someone designed this, manufactured it, used it and tossed it away."

Goodwin, a 37-year-old Northeast Washington resident, is the founder of a project called Trashball. He collects garbage and puts it in one-inch plastic balls that dispense from gumball machines. Special or oversize pieces of trash get posted on the Trashball blog, http://www.guyclinch.blogspot.com.

Washington's two Trashball machines sit at the Warehouse Theater on Seventh Street NW and the restaurant Busboys and Poets on 14th Street NW. Goodwin plans to install two more, perhaps on H Street NE.

It's more of an artistic pursuit than a financial one: So far, he has sold about 3,000 Trashballs at a quarter a pop. That's $750.

Goodwin is a "proud dropout" of the Corcoran College of Art and Design and boasts that he has dropped out of every school he has ever enrolled in, except for his junior high. Trashball grew out of an idea to use garbage as a medium for fine art, but then Goodwin says he got lazy and thought the gumball machines would be easier. He says he considers Trashball "quasi-art."

Goodwin works for a Chevy Chase-based junk-removal company called Junk in the Trunk, though Trashball existed before he started working there last summer. Owner Frank Coyne says he found out about Trashball when he noticed Goodwin was taking trash home and he "started asking questions."

To protect his clients' privacy, Coyne insists that Goodwin not root through financial, medical or otherwise private records. Goodwin says he tears off any identifying information, such as names and Social Security numbers.

Goodwin enjoys hauling away trash so much that he quit his part-time corporate job earlier this month.

"I wanted to focus more on driving a dump truck," he says. "Office work corrodes my soul."

Trashball contents can get dicey. Goodwin has been known to toss dead bugs, drug baggies and broken glass into the plastic capsules. A sign atop each machine asks that no one under 18 buy a Trashball.

A handful of Warehouse regulars are Trashball devotees who plunk down a quarter every time they come, Warehouse manager Molly Ruppert says.

He gets some of his best Trashball material from eBay auctions of ephemera, or people's collections of vintage junk. But he hasn't abandoned Washington's litter, especially the Trashball gold mine of Columbia Heights, he says.

"Another way to look at it is I'm cleaning up the city in a very slow, inefficient way," he says.

I get the whole "One man's trash is another man's treasure" concept, and I myself have pulled a few items out of the trash (once I found a working Nintendo 64). Still, why would anyone pay 25 cents to get a possibly disgusting item that you'd purposely avoid if you saw it lying on the ground?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

My first apartment in DC was a gold mine for trash. It was a high rise complex, with trash rooms on the bottom floor, and people would leave all sorts of stuff in there. That's where I found the N64, and I also found furniture in decent shape, tennis rackets, and a baby's crib mattress still sealed in the factory plastic. I took that for a cat bed.

On top of the trash, the complex was in a ghetto neighborhood, and people were evicted for non-payment of rent on a regular basis. When this happened, their stuff was carted out onto the lawn in front of the building, and passersby were free to take whatever they wanted. I felt guilty at first, but then I saw everyone taking stuff. I got a nice measuring cup and some Rubbermaid containers for my kitchen that I still use today.

There's nowhere I can't reach.