Personally, I reckon if some bugger leaves a skip full of valuable or useful stuff, that is to the former owner, mere waste, to be tossed out for landfill or recycle, they cannot want it THAT Much, and if its in the street, without going onto private owned property, then anything in it is fair game.
The scrap thats come from those in the past, its meant the difference between going hungry, and heaving food on my table. In that situation, you fucking bet I'm going to take all the Pb and Cu, and hike it up to the scrap yard. Old TVs yield vacuum tubes, and whilst not huge, at least a couple of decently rated capacitors and some misc. assorted components.
Just waiting until I have enough respectable caps for a marx generator fit to power a decent gauss gun, can be ok on ebay, but hell, I haven't spent a single penny on caps, and if I built it with the ones I'd scrounged for nothing, I bet I could still, even before getting enough for my preferences, put a round through sheet metal without too much difficulty, and thats not even using discarding sabot type AP tungsten-cored rounds :D
Best haul ever from a skip?
Found one coming home from an appt w/ my GP one day, saw a dumpster nearby and of course decided to check it. Spent a couple of hours searching it, after finding a gold and diamond woman's rolex (fake rolex, but high quality, still true Au and diamonds) and a jerusalem templar-style cross, solid silver, more modern, but still nice silver chain, hallmarked, etc.
Date-1600s.
Plus a load of very silver-like looking buttons, took as many as I could find, and at home, tested one with hydrogen sulfide, upon which it blackened rapidly, showing they are at least partially composed of Ag.
Plus some antique stamps, a 'penny red' amongst them, cigarette cards (full set, bar just one. I think I'll try to hunt down the missing one for sale,and then flog the entire lot, these ones are pretty old, and doubtless the entire set will be worth more than the same, missing one card.
Abandoned buildings are good finds too, if somewhere is literally falling to pieces, being reclaimed by nature, I see no moral problem with walking/climbing in there, and taking a set of pipe cutters and a hacksaw to the plumbing. Hell, recovered almost £40 in copper alone, before counting what got made in lead, and that wasn't even taking into account stripping out all the copper wiring.
Heh...breaking into a long-abandoned nursing home once as a kid, even found an absolute fucking shiteload of unused, sterile-packed rigs needles, and a few bottles of temazepam jelly eggs too
Oh boy, that was quite a find, being barely into my teens at the time, if i was at all, that represented a huge boost to my usual finances. Not like anybody is going to come and renovate those crumbling old shitpits, or ever use the stuff in skips.
Throw it out? give it to somebody that might USE it (like the gutted TVs slowly but surely building up a sodding great bastard of a cap bank for railgun/coilgun experimentation), or if not use directly, then sell. There are people out there that would really welcome the extra meal opportunities afforded by a few kilos of copper (made a tenner on a slight more than just 3kg just recently actually, some lead, but almost all copper, few bits of brass etc, all saved up, any time offcuts, or scrap bits were made, metal turnings, welding garbage etc., car wheel weights in the street, I toss the lot into a bucket or two until theres eventually built up enough to scrap it all in. I always make a decent few bob off hat.
That skip with the silver and stuff in it was nuts though...wtf;...who the hades throws out antique silver jewelery ffs? Not that I'm going to sell that piece, I really quite like it for myself. Goes great with my trenchcoat and combat boots
But if someone's tossed it, and I find something like that....its mine!
The pork eventually came, couple of plastic pigs. They were more than happy to leave, after seeing I'd stacked unwanted waste in neat piles, for sorting, and then returning to whence it came, all the more so on learning that someone was throwing out valuable antiques. Its sickening enough when stuff like that gets melted for scrap metal, but just to throw things out?
Hell....I recycle even so little as a few hundred mg of plat cat, or Pd/C. Absolutely bloody criminal to go destroying or rubbishing antiques like that.
Got a whole bit haul of cut glass drinking vessels too, a lot of REALLY ancient video games on floppy disk, including a couple of my childhood favourites, terminator-future shock, and system shock 1.
Old buildings are the best, great for casing, nobody loses out, if its just going to be pulled down or allowed to lie in mouldering ruins. Way I see things, if somebody can turn that into food on the table where otherwise, they had none, good.
I've been in that situation before-either eat, or make sure the pets have their food. And going hungry is no fun.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")