Would you obtain your hardware from Mitre11?

Apparently, in these tougher economical times, more and more people, and particularly in the Bush, are obtaining a lot of very useful things, and even more useful raw source material, from Mitre 11 these days.
Now, perhaps you, like me, and although you may have heard of Bunnings and even Mitre 10 Hardware stores before, you have not heard of Mitre 11 until now? Well if so, don’t worry too much. It is just a rebranding/naming of an old, old previous Supplier: The Local Tip.
Yes! What once used to be called “scavenging”, now it has the trendier name off “ Recycling”. I don’t know about where you are, but here it is technically illegal. Not that that stops anyone though, especially where street Hard Rubbish Collections are concerned.
In our shire, we used to have twice annual Hard Rubbish collections where people would put unwanted “stuff” out on their front nature strip twice a year on a designated day and sometime in that week (or the next), a truck would come along and pick it all up and remove it all for recycling at their plant. That was the perfect fit in theory.
However two things happened to make it a lot less than perfect in practice: People often started putting stuff out a month or more before the pick up date and professional scavengers used to drive around the collection area before the pick up, ‘stealing' the best stuff and scattering everything else to get at the good stuff underneath.
Well as I said our Shire/Municipality used to do that too, but have now come up with a new system to try and beat the professional scavengers and the ugly eyesore of scattered rubbish sitting on nature strips for weeks, if not months. With this system you can still get two pickups a year, but you are supposed to ring them first and arrange a pick-up date and then and only then, on the weekend before that date, put your junk out the Front with a lovely big Pink sticker that says “BOOKED” on it.
However, so far two people have used this system in our court, and it still hasn’t stopped the scavengers, and in one case the rubbish was still there a week later.
However the point of this blog is to again point out that often we waste a lot of valuable and precious commodities, all because something no longer has value to us, although still valuable to someone else, but not profitable for us to personally sell or recycle, so we just throw it out, rather than trying to find someone who really wants or can use it.
Sometimes I have visited someone and seen something really great and learnt that it came from a tip, or nature strip recycling attempt, In other words it was junk until this person reclaimed it and restored or reshaped it into something more valuable again.
At times like that, one wonders at the amount of good things constantly thrown out, simply because the person who has it, no longer wants it and can find no other way to get rid of it.
So today before you discard anything as rubbish, please make sure that it is rubbish and not something that can be reclaimed or restored or even sold at an “Opportunity Shop” and not only be used again, but able to make some funds for a worthy Cause. Thus you not only get rid of your unwanted things and help someone else, you also help our environment in conserving valuable resources and reduce the need for massive Land Fill Projects.
What say you now? How much of your own junk could you yourself reclaim with a little thought and effort and help both your own pocket and the environment in general? Over to you for now.