Recycling - slight return

Even on my way home from work, I'm on the look out for items to rescue and re-use.  My walk from the hospital to Kings Cross station is along a busy road, and as commercial waste is often not recycled but sent to landfill, regardless of its usefulness, I am not embarrassed by getting my trusty string bag out, sticking my head round the door of a shop of restaurant to get permission and gathering stuff to take home for a further productive life.

The blue plastic trays that are used to deliver salad leaves and mushrooms to sandwich bars and restaurants are a prime example of what can be claimed.  As they stack, they are easy to store and use as storage.  Being perforated, they make great seed trays, especially when lined with a couple of sheets of newspaper.  The card egg trays I rescued from the work canteen last year still act as backup storage to my Eggskelter.

But sometimes, however much you want to, however perfect the item is for a project you have in mind, you have to walk by and let it go to waste.  Such was the gem I let go tonight.   There's a photography studio on the Gray's Inn Road, which I think is undergoing refurbishment.  Outside their door, ready for the refuse collection, were several sheets of perspex.  All seemed to be in near perfect condition, and I could have given them a second life as shed windows and cold frames, and possibly other things I have yet to imagine.  But the building was closed, and the sheets were in all honesty to big and unwieldy for me to carry up the road, down the escalator on onto a crowded tube train.  So I had to walk by, sad that I couldn't use them for something productive, and equally sad that no-one in the building had the forethought to keep them for another time.

Just have to keep looking.