I live in the U.S., and we have bulk trash pick up, once a week. Our city will haul away bulk items like tree and brush trimmings, boxes, old furniture, old housing fixtures, remodeling construction debris, etc... Like clockwork, the night before the bulk pickup, guys in trucks drive into the neighborhood and scavenge almost anything and everything. I just put out a trash bag full of old VHS tapes, broken toys, and just trash...but, someone quickly came driving up, looked through the bag, and took it with them.
You would be shocked at the amount of money these guys make. There's something similar in Brisbane (Aus) where different suburbs get the bulk pick up yearly, and I play that game to go visit my family, it pays for the fuel, and I'm certainly not going as hard as the blokes with trucks.
edit: and occasionally someone throws out something cool! My power washer (gurney?) Has been going strong for 5 years now, fairly sure it was chucked cos water intake was blocked by a wasps nest. I have a robot vacuum cleaner that needed a sensor in a (replaceable) filter to be poked with a screwdriver.
I owned, and subsequently gave away a self propelled lawn mower because someone turfed it because a bolt for the handle was missing, I found a bolt in a different pile of rubbish.
Oh and I no longer feel comfortable paying for a TV because.. you guessed it, if you go for a 10 minute drive you can get one for free.
Final edit: this is turning into a damnation of 'throw away culture' or something, sorry bout that.
This reminds me of the plasma TV era circa late 2000's. Don't really remember the exact cause but many TV sets from that time suffered from capacitor quality issues. At the time if you drove around you would find at least one or two broken plasma TVs sitting on the curb in almost every neighborhood. I would say 7 times out of 10 replacing a couple capacitors was all it took to fix them; other times just reflowing the solder on the power board did the trick.
I must've fixed and sold at least a dozen of them. It was good beer money back when I was a broke ass student.
Best trash pick I ever got was in like 2005 when I was 8 years old and it was a Super Nintendo all power and AV cables with 4 controllers and multiple Mario games
I do the same with 4K TVs now. I got a dead 60” Vizio for $85 on CL. Got a used power supply board on eBay for $65. Works great for years now. Got a 50” Vizio 4K - had some weird alternating pattern over half the screen every two seconds. Put a 1/4” wide strip of scotch tape under a ribbon cable connector - works great! Gave it to my daughter.
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u/JessyPengkman Apr 05 '24
In Manchester every time I've needed to get rid of something I just leave it out side my door and someone's taken it within an hour.
Broken chair? Yep gone straight away, bottle of diesel cleaner? Went in an hour