Herbert's story: how one shopping cart made a difference

In 2015 two “two-footers” reimagined how a shopping cart might make a meaningful difference to the residents of Surrey Centre. Kate Elliot and Tammas Grogan won the 2015 Student-Community Engagement Competition for their project, Gro-Carts. And for shopping carts like Herbert, it was a destiny-changing project.

“I am haunted by what might have become of me if not for a handful of humans who recognized me as something more.”

In the fall of 2015, I lost my job. I was replaced. In the human world, this would have been devastating enough. But for me it was about to become tragic: instead of being set free to find another job, the plan for me was destruction. I was to be melted down.

You see, I am a grocery cart: my bosses owned me. And they decided that I was too small – they wanted their customers to buy more, so I was being replaced by a bigger cart. My fellow grocery carts and I were locked up in a cramped warehouse to await our hot and horrible fate.

I admit I was surprised that humans could even think this way – my experience with them had mostly involved some pushing around, occasional collisions and assorted expletives – normally, they’re so mindlessly preoccupied with inspecting things, reading packaging or talking about prices. But here I was being rescued. These humans believed my true potential lay not in transporting people’s plastic-wrapped vegetables from store to car, but rather in rolling a mobile vegetable garden to someone’s balcony, someone’s rooftop, someone’s patio.

And so my second life began.

Twenty-four other grocery carts and I were lined with straw and hay, filled with soil and planted with seeds. We rolled home with people who had no access to land to grow their own food. Today, when some of us stroll around our neighbourhoods with our two-footed companions, we are carefully pushed. Human hands care for the gardens inside us. Human fingers gently probe the dirt, searching for radishes, carrots, onions, beets. Human eyes admire our foliage, gaze at the butterflies that flit from nasturtium to lemon verbena. And sometimes human voices sing softly or read us favourite stories. Not only have I never felt so useful and meaningful before – I have never felt so loved.