Community Waste Solutions manager Craig Franke lifted the water-logged rug with a mini digger.
Andrew Letchworth salvaged a pet-stained Persian rug likely worth thousands of dollars from the landfill last month.
Letchworth’s family has a passion for the rugs after his grandparents, who were missionaries in Pakistan for 20 years, routinely brought them home. When visiting a friend’s home in Haines, Letchworth noticed what looked like an authentic Persian rug in their garage last summer, which flooded during the Dec. 2 storms.
“I told him it could be a $20,000 rug you have there. If you ever get rid of it, let me know,” Letchworth said. “I have the soap, I can clean it. I went to visit them. The rug was gone. During the storm their basement flooded and they threw it away. He said, ‘Yeah we just took it to the dump last week.'”
Letchworth called Community Waste Solutions manager Craig Franke to see if he could search for the rug among Haines’ trash. Franke said he’d help Letchworth look for the rug.
“You have compassion for anybody who is looking for something with historic or sentimental value,” Franke told the CVN.
Letchworth said he wasn’t optimistic that he’d find the rug and expected it to be buried under a heap of garbage. “I’m walking around and I turned a corner and it’s sitting, rolled up on a pile,” he said. “It was so heavy and waterlogged (Craig) had to get the backhoe. He carried it all the way to the house I was staying in.”
It took five days of painstaking cleaning to remove the dog stains and dirt from the rug. He used a special detergent with a low PH balance. In order to remove the stains, he had to keep water circulating over the rug to remove the dirt. Letchworth set up fans and electric heaters to circulate air and dry out the wool. He gently squeegeed the water out with a push broom.
“I gently rubbed it into the fibers many times to let it dry totally out. It was too heavy for me to move,” he said. It created a river in my friend’s garage. I created a pool with a four by fours and a tarp. It was so cold the water would freeze once it left the garage. I did that for twenty-four hours. I used a push broom to squeegee out the water.”
Letchworth has a friend, Frank Shaia, who happens to be a Persian rug dealer out of North Carolina. He sent photos of the rug to Shaia who said he could sell the rug for roughly $8,000.
“My best guess is that it’s from Iran,” Shaia said. “It’s definitely a Heriz design.”
The rug has patterns and colors that indicate it was designed and woven in Heris, an area in Northwest Iran. Many Persian rugs have designs that identify the region they were woven from.
“Even machine-made rugs you would see in Walmart, they may copy that design,” Shaia said. “This is a handmade rug. He sent me one photo of a closeup of the knots, the way they’re woven, so I can see it’s handmade, without a doubt.”
Shaia said he’s never heard of a person finding a Persian rug at a dump, but likened the situation to Nantucket, where they open the dump weekly so people can pick through furniture and other items often discarded before their lifespan is actually over.
“In Nantucket, I know a person that half of his yearly income is from things he picks up at the dump and puts on Ebay and sells,” Shaia said. “It’s amazing what some people will throw away.”
Franke said he sees similar items thrown away at the Haines landfill, but that they don’t have the staff or time to set things aside for people to pick through.
“It’s staggering to me when I see the stuff that comes in,” Franke said. “We see a lot of electronics and appliances. A lot of them have life left in them; exercise equipment, treadmills. People get involved for a while and then it starts to take up space and collect dust and off it goes. It is a shame to see the stuff that goes to waste.”
Franke, musing on consumerism, wonders if products have become too affordable.
“An item can become a whimsical buy and you don’t have enough investment in it to commit to hang onto it or put it to beneficial use elsewhere,” Franke said.
Franke and Letchworth both volunteer on the solid waste working group and are part of an effort to create a document called “Reducing Our Waste”, a list of recyclable and reusable items and ideas to reduce one’s waste.
Haines Friends of Recycling and solid waste working group chairperson Melissa Aronson, the document’s creator, said the document will also include a “waste audit” that can be used in businesses and households, along with an activity called “Ecoguilt” designed to set goals for waste reduction.
Letchworth said landfills are full of buried value, especially metals that will never be reclaimed.
“You spend a couple million to create a mine, you spend another couple million to manufacture and create something with it. You (ship) it, someone’s going to pay money for it and they’re going to hang onto it and put that metal back in the ground. In my mind, if you’re just looking at it from an economic standpoint, that’s a waste.”
As for the Persian rug, Letchworth said he doesn’t plan on selling it and economics aren’t part of his thinking.
“For me, it would be priceless because of the history it has in my family,” he said. “I will probably never sell it.”