Yeah.it is a shame to see what gets tossed at a lot of construction sites!..
I have a friend who works for a large contractor ,and he ends up bringing a lot of leftover stuff home,to either use,or sell for scrap..he often gets hundreds of feet of thick copper cables and other wiring when they do demolition work on old mills and factories,and one day when he showed me pictures of some of the old metal lathes and other machinery in one mill that was being ripped out with forklifts or cranes and scrapped,I about cried!..
I have gotten some good scores from him,like long pieces of Uni-Strut,some large diameter conduit,and one day he came back with a huge box full of brand new electrical boxes,outlets,covers,conduit clamps and lock nuts,and breaker boxes,which he gave me,and one day they had to rip out brand new copper tubing when a building inspector "failed" their install ,and they found it easier to rip it right out and start fresh,rather than risk leaky solder joints,etc..
So he ended up with a good two dozen lengths of tubing 9 feet 7" long,instead of the 10 foot original length--they lopped them off with a sawsall..he was going to sell them as scrap,but he ended up using most of them to re-plumb the shop and his house after some pipes froze and popped last winter..
Another day he came back with a truck bed FULL of those street sign square tubing posts ,that are galvanized and have holes punched in them every inch or so,on all 4 sides...I gave him 50 bucks for all of them--most were like new except where they were bent over at the bases,I guess many fell victim to snow plows and accidents--I just chopped off the "bad" parts and still had many over 8' long and its childs play to bolt pieces together to make long ones from shorter ones..I have built several "yard trailers" and a 10x24 foot "lean too" off a shed out of that stuff,and countless other things...
It makes me sick sometimes,when I go to the dump or a scrapyard,and see all kinds of perfectly useable stuff that isn't always easy or cheap to get locally,just being "junked"...
I have a roof rack that is just like the one Metdrops has on his Dante Peak Suburban I found at the dump one day,that had a diamond plate aluminum floor on it!--I made it into a trailer to tow around behind my tractor,and I used the plate in my pickup bed to cover rotted wood planks...just to buy that aluminum plate would be well over 150 bucks locally..
