I have found two in store parking lots, the ones that hold 6-2liter bottles. One was left in a shopping cart, the other at the edge of the lot.
One showed up where I work when they got pop for a party, and I asked if I could have it. The owner said, "Sure, save me from throwing it out."
This was several years ago. Maybe delivery people are more careful now about leaving them with the pop...?
Now I'm feeling a bit guilty...
No reason to feel guilty for repurposing someone else's trash.
Reminds me of last year when I was picking up pallets at a dumpster out in the parking lot behind the mall. Then a store manager comes running out and telling me that I can't take those pallets. Well, mix up because I had talked to the manager of Harbor Freight and he told me that I could pick up any pallets by the dumpster. But that dumpster was for a different store, evidently, although in the same area.
So, I asked that manager why he was concerned about pallets next to the dumpster that looked like they were free for pick up. He said he had to return them to the shipper, but he did not have any space inside the store or elsewhere to stage them. I guess he felt he deserved to use public property to stage his old pallets for returns, and that nobody should consider them for free pick up just because they were stacked up at the dumpsters.
I think he was in the wrong, but I already had enough pallets at that point, and it was not even worth the effort to argue the issue. I am pretty sure that anything you put out at the dumpsters is considered trash and that a company cannot use public property as storage.
If I really wanted those pallets, I would just come back after store hours and pick them up. The mall is too cheap to have any security cameras outside so they would never know who took them. More importantly, I don't the store would have a leg to stand on if someone took their pallets they stage alongside the dumpsters - no signs or anything asking people not to take those pallets.
How do I know they don't have cameras? Because I saw a woman being accosted by a young person begging for money outside the Harbor Freight store. So, I talked to the manager of Harbor Freight and asked him if they have security cameras outside so they can go after these aggressive people. He said they were aware of the problem, but that the mall management was not going to put up camera and, in fact, did not even have lights out in the parking lot after dark. That's too bad, I told him, because I would never let Dear Wife park out there in the lot and pick up anything inside of Harbor Freight for me. It's just not safe.
Coming back around to the initial point, there are always a lot of people thankful for you to take their old pallets because otherwise they have to pay to have them hauled off to the landfill, then they get charged a dumping fee at the landfill, and then our county landfill buries them like trash, and we pay more taxes for more landfill operations.
EPAL Pallet Disassembly with Minimum Tools
