Daily Telegraph

Tomb raiders

Want some digital debris? Then head for the skips and see
what's been thrown out. You'll be surprised, says Daniel
Pemberton

EVERY year companies in Britain throw away millions of
pounds worth of supposedly obsolete machinery in a bid to
keep up with the latest technology. However these days the
rubbish isn't just antique 1mb PCs with green screens and
clapped out disc drives. It can include anything from fully
functional laser printers to slightly damaged network
servers. For most companies though, finding a home for this
digital debris is often more hassle than it's worth; the
most common and convenient solution is simply to chuck it
all in a skip.

"It's too expensive to do anything with it," explains artist
and occasional skip raider Heath Bunting. "The choice is do
they employ someone on a full salary in an office to have an
official position to do something with this stuff or do they
just get the security guard downstairs to get a skip over
for £50 and chuck the stuff in. It's £50 or £50,000 and they
choose the £50 option everytime."

Surprisingly this corporate complacency is actually good
news for Heath and his counterparts; over the past few years
they've been using self-proclaimed "hunter-gatherer"
techniques on skips and garbage cans the country over to
find everything from working fax machines and server systems
to confidential security files and personal memos.

"I first started skip-raiding when I was living in Bristol,
several years ago. It was exciting to find lots of technical
and scientific equipment along the street that you could
just take and use for things," he explains, "At first it was
just out of interest but soon I realised that most of what I
found still worked and that I could still do things with
them."

Moving to London, Heath found that the streets were paved
with motherboards, ethernet cards and CPUs rather than gold
and soon published a series of maps to the capital's best
skips on the Internet (www.irational.org/skip/). Despite
also encouraging friends through informal tours of these
maps his own activity in the area has since declined.

"I don't do so much corporate skip raiding now because I'm a
mainstream artist. I'm an ambassador for the UK when I'm
abroad so I have to be quite well behaved," he quips.
"Although I've found all sorts of things from computers to
fax machines these days I'm not so interested in the
hardware; I'm more into the documents and strange things you
can find, and not so much for the secrets rather the bizarre
aesthetic appeal of business talk and the weird little memos
to people; loads of post-it notes."

This viewpoint is shared by a bunch of art students from
Camberwell College who I bump into while on a tour of skips
in the London Bridge area with Heath. "We've just got some
envelopes from this skip," one of them explains as they leaf
through the refuse of a foreign banking firm near the
Thames.

When I tell them (in my best Dragnet voice) that they're
performing an illegal activity by removing material from the
skip they act surprised.

Although technically the act of skip raiding is illegal,
it's an area of the law that most are unaware of. If you're
playing it by the book you are only allowed to take stuff if
it is abandoned - putting something in a skip or a bin does
not classify as abandonment. The best solution generally is
to approach the company involved. At BT, for example, a
genial security guard is more than helpful: "You can take
whatever you want from the skip - once it's thrown out we're
not bothered about it."

However not all the skip raiders are doing it for the right
reasons: "The most hassle I've had is actually not with any
of the companies but with professional skip raiders who turn
up in a van and push you out of the way" says Heath.

We head for the Financial Times building where one of
Heath's counterparts, James Wallbank, says he has already
seen two monitors being thrown into the firm's big yellow
container. On arrival we can also see two UNIX server
machines in there and possibly a printer as well.

"Ten to one they actually work," says Wallbank. "If they're
taking on new staff it's not worth training the staff how to
use the old machines."

However our request to relieve the company of its rubbish
ends up simply getting passed from department to department
with no one able to decide whether we can actually have it
or not.

Having travelled all the way down from Sheffield to collect
trashed equipment for a forthcoming exhibition by Redundant
Technology Initiative, a non-profit arts organisation
(details at www.lowtech.org), Wallbank is determined to find
some material.

The next day I receive an email from Wallbank: "After you
left I went hunting for more skips and hit the jackpot about
an hour later at Guy's Hospital," he writes, "Got more than
30 monitors and keyboards, plus half a dozen base units.
Pictures attached."

If you'd like to donate any old discarded (preferably
working) computer equipment to RTI (who will collect it as
well) please contact them via rti@lowtech.org.