It's amazing how many people around here go "cruising for trash" on these special bulk waste / clean-up days. It almost seems like a neighborhood gathering 'event' in some areas.
You see the same people driving up and down the streets looking for stuff out on the curb the night before the pick-up day. Sometimes people can get a bit carried away, though, as shown in the attached photo of a vehicle I saw last year on one of these trash days.
I've never seen anyone get upset when picking up trash items from the curb. As a matter of fact, many people seem to try to encourage people to take large items (by putting signs on things like "Works!" or "Free!"). That might be because even on bulk-trash days around here, I think some cities still charge for removal of certain types of large appliances (refrigerators, for example), even though it's otherwise pretty much a free-for-all in terms of what you can set out on the curb on those days.
By the way, I've noticed a surprising number of not-all-that-old PCs on the curb so far this year, including several PIII-class machines in the 500-800 MHz range. I've usually left them alone (unless there was something else interesting with them), but tonight I found in front of one house an Athlon 1.0 GHz (Sony VAIO) *and* a very new-looking Celeron 2.7 GHz (Compaq) machine, and couldn't resist. Haven't tested the Sony yet, but the Compaq works fine. I've only powered it up briefly, but it appears to have a bunch of spyware installed on it bogging down the system, perhaps that's why it was tossed away. I guess even a personal computer has become "disposable" enough that people will just throw away a perfectly good PC just because of something like that...
