scrounging for biomass and outside materials

Hi

Its fall and everyone is cutting back their gardens and fixing up their homes. We put a classifieds add on ebay and were overwhelmed with offers of branches, greens, trimmings, wood chips and leaves. we found a few usefull things on curb pickups too. I found a set of old clothing washing equiptment,  building wood and scrap metal people would have otherwise paid to throw away. Is anyone else taking advantage of fall cleanup and how?  

Hey there Taryn,

I'm surprise this hasn't got responses yet!

In the suburbs in my area, people love those large paper bags from the hardware store. They fill'm up with leaves, branches, and other goodies and leave them out on the curb for me

I've also learned to keep a weather eye on the craigslist free section, particularly for building materials it's is an amazing resource.

I had a friend make me a giant bag by showing 3 sides and part of the last side of two queen size sheets together.  I throw my generator and leaf shredder into the back of my pickup and drive around sucking up everyone's piles of leaves.  the shredder makes 10-12 trash bags full of leaves into one bag full, so you can imagine how many bags of leaves fit into two queen size sheets sown together

I guess I'm spoiled, as I live about 300 ft away from 4 recycling bins. Since this is a small municipality, I just go up once a week and grab a trunk load of newspapers/cardboard out of them.

I am not sure if it's fine if I do that or not, but at worst I figure I can always use the logic that I'm saving the municipality a lot of money each year. Usually every 1.5 weeks a large truck comes and takes the stuff in the containers to a recycling plant 1.5 hours away - I figure that's at least a $300 charge.  

---

Not exactly a freebie, but I find it to be a miracle considering how remote we are. Last week a guy from the classifieds delivered(35km away) three 1000L totes for $100 total, all of which previously had a canola oil-ish product in them for use in commercial drills. He had lots of scrap metal in the back of his truck at the time, so I inquired about any good finds - hopefully that will lead to some freebies in the future.