Graduation week here in Gainesville is known as "poor people couch and chair shopping week" as students move out, etc. and leave couches, easy chairs, desks, tables, etc out to be thrown away. Get a buddy with a truck, drive thru the student ghetto and take what you want.

I've been following someone doing this and saw them stop, grab a couch, drive 3 more blocks, stop, take that couch out and leave it on the curb and grab a different one.

At the University of South Carolina, they make money off the students moving out. It is like a giant yard sale. The students can (but don't need to) leave whatever they like behind at the end of the year. "Shoppers" go room to room in the dorms and pay as they leave.

Very different from my college days when I could not afford to leave anything behind.

Downtown Charleston, SC there are some very nice homes to say the least. I read an article where the writer described her weekly drives downtown the night before trash pickup to see if she could find some "gems". On one occasion, she found a nice area rug and brought it home. Only 24 hours later, her home was filled with the smell of cat pee. She then understood why it was by the curb.

Regardless of where you live, I think local garbage haulers should have a free pick-up every month. It would (hopefully) help keep the cheap bastards from dumping items on the side of the roads instead of taking them to the dumps. When we lived in the Bay Area it was not uncommon to see a whole truck load dumped on the side of a road.

We used to list items we would pull from our attic or basement on NextDoor as a "Sidewalk Alert" and we could barely get the product actually to the sidewalk before someone was pulling up to take it for repurposing. On the rare occasion we'd call the city to pick up a large derelict item it would take weeks to even get a response for when they "might" be out the next time. Once I cleared out some old luggage and it never hit the ground---I simply walked out of the garage and placed it into the bed of the pickup that was pulling up as I stepped outside!

Some years ago while gutting a house I dragged a cast iron pedestal tub out to the front yard. Then went back in to get the pedestal and hardware. As I came out of the front door dragging that, two guys were loading the tub onto their truck. They were almost as happy to get the rest of it as I was to get rid of lt.