Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Resisting Temptation to Drag Things from Dumpsters
I recently spent an altogether lovely weekend in Cheltenham Spa, up in the Cotswolds. It was a 'hen party' weekend for my friend the Lynneguist, who is getting married in a couple of weeks. It was a great town, and we spent a lot of time walking around. If I had been at home, I certainly would have retrieved the nice glass door in this skip (the British word for a dumpster): But oh well, hopefully someone else took it home and put it to good use. I see these skips all over the place, much smaller than ours at home.
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I think of a skip as something slightly different than a dumpster. A dumpster (in the US) is usually something that is (rather) permanently located in a place for taking the everyday trash/rubbish of the place. A skip like this one is rented for limited periods--i.e. when you're tearing out a bathroom and putting in a kitchen or whatever. So, they tend to be stuck in parking spaces and filled with building rubble, like this one is. If we have these things in the US, then they'd be called dumpsters, but they're not quite the prototypical dumpster.
There are so many around because real estate is such a hot commodity here--everyone's putting in an extra bathroom or updating a kitchen in order to get more money for a place.
I blogged about this a little back here. The thing in my neighbo(u)rhood that is permanently placed for people to put their household rubbish in would be called a dumpster in the US, but in Brighton they're called communal bins.
Maybe because, as best as I can recall, I've only once lived in a place that had dumpsters for regular household garbage, when I hear or see the word 'dumpster' I think of the temporarily placed containers for collecting construction debris (or unwanted contents of student dorms, for that matter), which is the very same thing then of the skip pictured here, though in the U.S. they are much bigger. So I'm not sure that one or the other can fairly be thought of as 'prototypical'. They're both ubiquitous and both called 'dumpsters'.
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