Trust me on this, skip scavenging is your only man

Because of the times we’re in, when we heard the company next door was moving, we assumed the worst. In fact, the reason is the best: they’re moving to bigger premises because they’re doing fine, thank you very much.

We are, nonetheless, sorry to see them go, not least because their smokers and our smokers used to have friendly chats as they froze themselves out on the metal fire escapes. They also didn’t mind the men in our company jumping over the wall into their back garden as a short cut exit at the end of the day’s work.

The outward and visible sign of their impending departure is the outsize skip on the pavement at the front of our joined-up buildings. You don’t see that many skips, these days, compared to the nineties. Cranes and skips have been emigrating in response to the economic downturn, and, as a committed skip-scavenger, this causes me much grief.

I was taught to skip-scavenge by American writer Rita Mae Brown, who put herself through college in New York by nocturnal rifling of dumpsters. Rita Mae would take discarded lamps, furniture, cans of paint and anything else in a dumpster that showed promise. She would repair the electrical goods, refurbish the furniture and, once she’d furnished her own loft apartment, sell them on. She would use the paint in decorating homes, which was her money-earner at the time. Every now and again she would get exceptionally lucky, as when she found an assortment of antique bronze door handles carelessly tossed away by their owners. The only problems were cruising police cars attracted by the sight of a fetching female shape emerging from a dumpster in the dark.

By the time I interviewed her, Rita Mae was rich, as a result of her breakthrough book, Rubyfruit Jungle, a series of detective novels and a number of screenplays. She no longer needed to support herself on other people’s discards, but she was so nostalgic for her days of dumpster-prowling, I ended up trying it out for myself. And getting hooked on the practice. Trust me on this. Skip scavenging is your only man.

The best time for skip-scavenging is the middle of the night or the very early morning, and the best skips are those which have been filled by amateurs. Professional builders have their own systems for making the best use of the space within a skip. They first of all build up the sides with a palisade of wood. The wood can be floorboards, rafters, widow frames or doors, and it serves the same purpose as greaseproof paper around the top of a cold soufflé; it allows you to put twice as much stuff into the container as it would otherwise hold.

However, it also means that the skip-scavenger has difficulty getting into the thing. Unless — as in my case — the scavenger wants wood for their wood-burning stove, in which case you just haul out the long planks of wood from one side and shove them in your car. A van is probably the best vehicle for this purpose, but a convertible is good, too. Once the roof is down, you can angle the wood so its lowest point is jammed behind the front seat and you’re set. Never mind the looks you get on cold November days from other motorists. Turn on the car heater, roll up the windows, sit low in the seat and get that free fuel home.

Once you’ve created a space in the barrier to entry provided by the wooden uprights, you can then get into the skip for a good rummage. Usually, when I’m ready for this second phase, I remember, too late, that four inch heels are not the best footwear for the purpose, but do a to-hell-with-it and climb in anyway.

Because the company next door to us are not disassembling their building (if you try to put a drawing pin in a wall in a building in Northumberland Road, Dublin, the local authority and An Taisce execute you) they have no wood barriers on the sides of their skip. So, on the way to work one early morning last week, I was attracted by easily-identified contents. Lovely ring-binder folders. Gorgeous three-tiered desk document holders. I couldn’t carry all my booty and didn’t get back out to get the rest until mid-morning, when one of the executives from next door caught me at it. I was mortified.

“Do you like flower pots?” she asked, holding out the three she had carried down to put in the skip. I nodded, dumbly.

“In an hour or so, we’ll be putting out quite good chairs,” she offered in a kindly way.

For the rest of the day, the two of us did an instant-recycling dance. She would put out items they didn’t consider worth bringing to their spanking new premises. I would retrieve them. It was a clear win/win. They got much more use out of their skip than they would otherwise have been able to get, because of the space I kept creating within it, and I got clean detritus. (The great thing about skips is that, for the most part, people don’t throw organic waste into them, so a scavenger rarely has to cope with dead tea bags or indeterminate slime.) The only people who disapproved were the ones I work with, who thought I was bringing down the tone of our operation and were terrified important clients would see me in the skip, filling discarded waste baskets with abandoned staplers.

I pointed out to them that millions of people in Malaysia make their living from fulltime scavenging on landfills. This was greeted with a shudder, as was the retrieved toaster I brandished.

The irrational consensus was that you could get a disease from a toaster that had (very briefly) visited a skip. Never mind that the heat within a toaster would kill off any skip-specific germ. Nobody would eat the toast I made with it. Worse, one of my colleagues likened me to “The Suits that scam Marks & Spencers.”

I hadn’t known about these Suits or their scam. But apparently it works like this. (Or did in the past — M&S undoubtedly have developed preventive measures in recent times.) Well-dressed male executives would climb into skips at the back of M&S to locate packages of food tossed out because they were at or close to their sell-by date. They would clean off the wrapping, shove them in a bag and go into the shop, where they would visit the courtesy desk, produce a couple of packages, claiming they’d bought them earlier that day and only now spotted the date stamp. The M&S people — shocked — would immediately replace the packages thereby providing the scammers with free food.

That kind of crookery brings the rest of us scavengers into disrepute. Anyone who takes such a low-life approach should be subject to an Ethics in Public Skip Scavenging Act. If there was one.

Sadly, there’s no point in bringing such legislation in at this point. Skips are becoming an endangered species, and good committed, highly-skilled scavengers mourn their passing.