How do I dispose of....

After my step dad died, my mam gave me a plastic box full of various bits and pieces that my step dad had accumulated. Mostly car stuff but a few other bits too.

There is a bottle of anti-freeze, some brake fluid, and some unused butane case canisters of the type you might attach to a camp stove.

I don't want them, and nobody I know in the immediate vicinity has a use for them.

I don't think you can just chuck things like that in the bin. How do you get rid of stuff like that?

 

There is definitely a place at our local tip for the canisters. I would try them with the other things too.

 

Says about gas bottles, but not brake fluid.

http://www.redcar-cleveland.gov.uk/...9EC1C75BF248DCD580256D9D0054A632?OpenDocument

 

I'll pop along and the see them. I never thought about the tip because I thought maybe they couldn't deal with 'hazardous' stuff. The staff at the tip are usually quite helpful, so if they can't take it all, I'll just bring it back and put it back in the shed and leave it there til some archealogists find it and learn that primitive space age man had figured out how to harness fire.

 

Have you tried local Freecycle sites? there are ones in Redcar, Middlesbrough and Stockton. - someone will surely find a use for them.

 

Its gone to the tip now. I suspect little has been wasted. I saw the chaps who work there and they told me to stick it in general waste. I told them no, because there are butane gas canisters in it, along with various car related fluids. This got their attention. One chap asked, 'no power steering fluid in there is there mate?'. I told him, 'dunno, brake fluid any good? hydraulic fluid?'. So I got told to just leave the lot on the floor and they'd sort through it.

 

BIG signs at our local tip/recycling place, take nothing away, or words to that effect. ,obviously doesn`t apply to the staff then.

 

I know the staff at tips unofficially get first dibs on whatever comes in. To be honest I don't begrudge them it, because at the end of the day the stuff has been designated by the owner as rubbish, and the tip staff work quite hard and are probably on minimum wage so if they can salvage something for themselves that I'm binning, good luck to them.

That said, I do miss the 'old' days. About 20 years ago I had an allotment, and the allotment site was very close to the tip site. Back then the tip was unmanned and was open 24/7. The entire frame of my rather large home made greenhouse came from stuff I'd scrounged from the tip, same with much of my perimeter fence and a lot of other stuff. This was the norm. The tip was almost as much a social ground as the allotment site itself, and whenever a car or van arrived to drop off loads of junk, whoever happened to be around would offer to help unload just so they could have first dibs on anything they wanted.

That tip was quite busy, yet the wagons used to only collect the skips maybe once a fortnight, because stuff would be liberated almost as fast as it arrived. Some folks might find that concept a bit strange nowadays, but back then the tip really was a recycling centre. No vast machines needed to sort stuff, no great wagons carrying stuff from one depot to another or cargo ships to take stuff half way round the world, just a bunch of scroungers physically carrying their day's catch to the allotments 100 yards or so away, where old stuff would just be reused, or stacked neatly in a corner until a job could be found for it.

 

I miss those days, used to get all sorts, in fact i'm still using a metal document box I got in the 60's I keep all the important stuff in it, passports, birth certificates, pact with the devil etc. So I know where to grab it in the event of the Mayan calendar running out again.

Even got the front door of my last house from the tip.

 

Wish ours would do that, there were some really good condition 1950's oil cans dumped in the metal skip that they wouldn't let me have

 

We recycle everything at the amenity sites here. Every time I go there and see the piles of waste wood I think of you Zigs, you'd have a field day there! Anything that has been left there for some while is eventually taken to the incinerator.

 

Remember the 70s I think it was, when it was fashionable to go "skip diving" and people would proudly show their finds.

 

And the 80s and even the early part of the 90s round my way.

 

Waste Management has got a lot to answer to.