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INFORMATION technology consultant Brendan Geoghegan once found eight laptops in a skip. Teemu Auersalo, a Finn based in Dublin, furnished his flat from the contents of a skip. Art students Ian Clotworthy and Michelle Russell rely on skips for art materials, and Clotworthy recently dug a guitar amp from a skip of junk, writes JOHN HEARNE

“Admittedly they were fairly old, but they were still laptops,” says Geoghegan. “They had black-and-white screens and Windows 3.1, but they had all their transformers.”