unskipping with joy

 Once or twice a year our housing association has a skip for people to dump stuff they don't want, as do the local allotments. Today I took a load of useful lengths of wood out of the housing skip to be used at the allotments (also taking a neighbour's used grow bags for earthing up the potatoes),

 I then took multiple tins of paints out of the skip at the allotments and brought them home to decorate our house with.

Most of the stuff in the two skips could be reused in the local area as straightforwardly as I did with the wood and the paint (and a splendid TV and an unused laundry basket we now happily own).

At the risk of sounding churlish given the quality of the stuff we've taken from these skips, it would be much better if people offered stuff to their neighbours, put it on Freecycle or gave it to a charity shop thus negating the need for a skip or reducing the frequency of their use.

After all, skip lorries are amongst the noisiest and most dangerous vehicles on our streets - never mind the wastefulness and danger involved in making and transporting new products when existing ones can so easily be reused.