Street cleaners saving books: from Messina to Ankara

Reading is also continuing thanks to these initiatives. Books are saved from the waste stream and new readers are won over.

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street cleaners who save books

Who saves the books? - street cleanersWe're used to complaining, sometimes not for the best of reasons, about the incredibly hard work these people do. We even curse them when we find them on our street loading garbage, perhaps at hours that aren't exactly convenient for this type of service.

Garbage Collectors Who Save Books

And yet it is precisely them, the garbage collectors, who are giving everyone in different parts of the world, including Italy, a good lesson on one of the most absurd wastes we consume every day: the waste of books. From Turkey to the Sicilia, passing through the Colombia, just to mention the three most striking cases, were the street cleaners save books from the waste paper basket, from the buckets of thegarbage, from a scandalous removal. To restore them to a second life. Where? In a local library, open to all.

ALSO READ: The bookstore where books are priceless is located in Rome and fights against waste of paper and culture.

Garbage Collectors' Library

We are in the Turkish capital, Ankara, particularly in the Cankaya neighborhood, where the experiment started successfully and then expanded to other areas of the city. The street cleaners collect the books that residents want to get rid of and, instead of taking them to the dump, transfer them to a new library, made available by the municipal administration and managed by the same street cleaners. In the city, they call it the garbage collectors' library, where they are collected almost 10 thousand volumesFiction, essays, detective stories, and children's books. Comics and travel books. In English, French, and Turkish. Divided into 17 categories.

The circle has closed by creating, in this space dominated by books that come back to life, also a reading room e an area for playing billiardsFurthermore, anyone can borrow the books collected by Ankara's street cleaners and have two weeks to return them. Not only that, Turkish street cleaners have made agreements with schools and prisons to distribute the collected texts even in these places, where reading of printed texts is certainly not always well-regarded and widespread. He was also a street cleaner in Colombia, as we tell you. in this story, to save approximately 20 thousand volumes from being destroyed.

TO KNOW MORE: Books in exchange for plastic bottles and cans, an initiative by Michele, a bookseller from Polla, to revive a love of reading and raise awareness of recycling.

Garbage Collectors Saving Books in Sicily

From Türkiye to Colombia, up to the SiciliaHere we are at Pistunine, in the province of Messina, where the heroes of the book are once again two street cleaners. Their names are Carmelo Spadaro e Francesco CarpenzoneSame mechanism as Ankara: no more wasted books, no more texts ending up in the garbage. And recycling and reuse of books to organize them in a small municipal library.

SAVING BOOKS FROM THE WASTE

Here, such simple yet enormously powerful gestures demonstrate two important things. First: the paper book isn't dead, and it never will. In fact, it can live more than once. All it takes is a modicum of goodwill and the desire to feel useful, even to others. Second: we can all make an important contribution to avoid the devastation of books that become waste (A book is never rubbish.) And who knows, maybe the stories we've told will make other people want to get involved in saving books. Ours the memory, our present, and our future.

(In the cover image, the street cleaners of Ankara in Türkiye. Source: CNN)

INITIATIVES TO PROMOTE READING:

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