Simply Garbage? Rubbish! It's Found Treasure

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."

He still paints -- mostly abstracts, portraits and cityscapes of abandoned buildings.

"He sees beauty and value in all things, which is interesting to me," says his wife, Phung Vong, a fashion designer.

The love affair with trash started when Goodwin was 10 years old and growing up in Dayton, Ohio. His neighborhood garbage collectors occasionally let him ride along in their truck. They had their own collection of souvenirs, and Goodwin saw them as cool, 20-something roughneck-types. He also credits his mother, an environmental nonprofit executive, with instilling him with "a deep-seated urge to recycle," he says.

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.

"We really try to promote reuse and recycling, so he's a perfect example of that," Coyne says. "And also the other benefit of having someone like Chris is, he . . . actually enjoys hauling away trash because he knows he might get some cool stuff."