Furnished from a skip

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

In the US, they call it dumpster diving. Here, it’s skip diving or, for the more urbane, skip raiding. In essence, it’s the physical expression of a disagreement over what constitutes rubbish. It’s not new and, it would appear, is largely impervious to economic conditions. Clotworthy’s amp was tossed away in the depths of the recession, Geoghegan’s eight laptops were jettisoned at the height of the boom.

“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.”

Evidencing a streak of philanthropy that runs through skip diving, he passed all eight on to an uncle, a lecturer in a north Dublin college, who put them to good use in a student lab. Further finds have allowed Geoghegan to sort out four friends with a desktop computer each, and he’s even managed to send a couple of machines out to Belarus as part of a charity drive. They were not, he says, the most high-spec machines in the world, but perfect if all you want is Word, Excel and web browsing.

“Somebody told me once that they put a man on the moon with a 64-bit computer, so these things, even though most people would laugh at them, they’re still very powerful,” he says.

Geoghegan has also found modems, printers, servers and shrink-wrapped, unopened software, complete with enabling licence numbers. A Co Wexford man now living in Scotland, he also sourced a pram for his baby son in a skip outside Mothercare in Inverness. “It was in perfect working order. An intensive clean brought it up looking, well, not exactly new, but definitely better and perfectly usable.”

Skip diving, it must be understood, is not for the squeamish. “I dont really worry about skip hygiene,” says Michelle Russell. “Commonsense hygiene is enough – if it’s from a skip, don’t put it in your mouth.”

Her interest in skip diving started on a study exchange in Germany. Low on art materials and money, she came upon a skip outside a print shop and found enough paper inside to make all further art purchases unnecessary for the rest of her stay. “I made nearly all my work during those four or five months from stuff found in skips,” she says. For Russell, skip diving runs in the family. “My dad did it too – we had a chair at home for years that he found in a skip.”

The coolest thing she’s found is a gas mask. “The filters were gone, but it was fully functional. I got a huge bag of thread, I found hairdryers a few times, which still worked, I found old books . . . I can’t take furniture because I don’t have a car.”

Teemu Auersalo, a Finn based in Dublin, does have a car and, as a result, he’s got a flat full of skip furniture. Last year, he started up a Facebook group, Dublin Skip Raiders, to circulate information on the whereabouts and contents of skips about town. “There was a similar group set up in Finland,” he says, “and it was very successful. They had thousands of members.”

Thus far, Dublin Skip Raiders has a membership of 137 and rising. “There’s a really big culture of this back in Finland,” Auersalo says. “I used to live in this apartment, and every year the caretaker would bring in a skip and put it in the backyard. People could bring their old stuff there and also take whatever they wanted. There was this mad couple of days where people brought stuff and it would disappear in a couple of hours.”

Skip diving is a kind of benign theft. The skip and its contents remain the property of whoever hired the skip until the company hauls it away. The companies report, though, that customers are hassled more by people trying to put stuff in skips than by people trying to take stuff out. And while skip diving may be tolerated, trespass isn’t. One veteran skip diver I spoke to got taken into custody for trying to liberate computer equipment from a skip sitting in the car park of a south Dublin-based multinational.

The Environmental Protection Agency and local authorities categorise waste by type, but nobody keeps data on the amount of waste taken up in skips every year. One thing for sure is that the implosion of the construction industry has had a serious impact on skip hire. Brian McCabe, of Panda Waste Management Solutions, says that during the good times his company used to process 4,000 tonnes of skip waste every week. That’s now down to between 800 and 1,000 tonnes. But there’s no evidence that this contraction is having any adverse impact on the skip-diving community.

The best sites tend to be commercial refurbs and house clearances. Ian Clotworthy found his amp in a house-clearance skip. “People dump quite a lot of still working electrical equipment . . . The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was just to get rid of it,” he says. There’s the rub. Convenience, it seems, is what lies behind this waste. Tossing it in a skip is easier than finding a better place for it.

Brendan Geoghegan mentions a skip-diving friend who found a cache of unopened software. “He took it home and looked up the price of it. It was a work edition of some Microsoft package, worth something like €10,000. The user codes were there and everything.”

WASTE. WITHOUT IT, consumer capitalism couldn't exist. Once the new model comes out, the old becomes suddenly distasteful. Moreover, it used to be the case that when something broke, you got it fixed. But cheap parts and even cheaper labour from abroad means you can get all kinds of things for a fraction of what they used to cost, with the consequence that the second-hand market for old TVs, stereos and white goods isn't up to much any more. And getting things fixed is no longer a simple, or cheap, option.

“I’ve often had people asking me, ‘what are you at?’,” says Michelle Russell. “I always say, ‘I’m just getting this out of a skip’. They shrug and move on. Sometimes people are disgusted. But the truth is, people do throw away some great stuff.”

Tips For Skip Divers

Dress for the mess– A pair of thick gloves is a must. Avoid evening wear and tennis whites

Move fast– Don't leave a skip until next day – if it's not gone, anything useful inside it will be

Stay off private property– If you have to jump a fence to get at it, you're on dangerous territory. CCTV is everywhere these days

If you can't use it, pass it on– check out Dublin Skip Raiders on Facebook

Scout the best spots– Building-site skips contain rubble, mostly, but some will have usable timber. House clearances are usually the best source of skipped treasure

Read up– The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving, by John Hoffman, an American who's made a career out of skip-diving