I’m guessing there’s very little in the way of abandoned sources and almost all of the “collecting” is theft from active sources.
Where I live is roughly 17 sq. miles. There was an abandoned factory that sat for several years. It was the only potential long term source of "legal’ scrap in town.
At its most basic, it isn’t up to you to decide when someone else’s property gets to be your property. That’s theft and saying “It should be okay for me to steal it” isn’t any way to operate a society. Whatever the chain of ownership is: an active owner, an estate, a bought-out company unaware of its existence, a bank, the state, etc – You ain’t on it. So the authorities have an obligation to stop you.
Besides, it’s not as though scrappers trying to pillage a building are doing so with either an active concern for ownership nor much worry about preserving the building integrity as they pull the piping out. So the state probably doesn’t need the buildings getting gutted and damaged any faster than it’s happening via standard neglect.
Providing safety is preserved ( see the above post regarding a gas explosion killing a man ), I’d say it is better for stuff to be used than to rot.
For the same reason, excluding the ghouls ( who famously at Waterloo crept among and ignored the dying ) if a chap’s dead on the battlefield and one takes his boots, it seems to me only right. And to much extent the same with rings and other stuff he’s not gonna be using any time fast.
A few years back the new Conservative government in Britain broke with tradition and criminalized squatting. I wouldn’t like squatting myself for a myriad of reasons; but this seemed excessively nastily spiteful ( in the same vein as do those American cities arresting christians for feeding the homeless ) and no doubt helped bring us to the present number of rough sleepers and foodbanks we never had before. I would prefer a property left unused to be temporarily taken by an alternative culture gang and at least put to use, and fuck property rights.
Like any other ‘right’ they are a useful fiction, but it’s the old tale of what do you do when from a 1000 inhabitants one man, a private individual, ( like a Robber Baron, such as Gould or Vanderbilt ) owns 99% of a small island and refuses it’s resources to the rest. Something gives.
If someone wants to harvest scrap from an abandoned piece of real estate, then there’s obviously some value there. If the property is truly abandoned, then the city would like to sell it to someone - and they can sell it for more if there is valuable scrap on it, which the buyer can turn around and sell to help offset the cost of redeveloping the property.
TL,DR: scrap on disused real estate belongs to somebody, even if it’s only the city.
For starters, someone still owns it, right? The scrappers are both stealing from the current owner and if they get hurt while stealing this stuff the owners could be held liable.
Also, as others have said, most scrappers aren’t taking things places that have been empty for 50 years. Most places that have been empty for 50 years were stripped of everything but concrete 49 years ago. Scrappers are stealing from places either construction sites, where they’re taking supplies that aren’t garbage. Like, just stealing spools of wire and running them over the copper place for a few dollars. They’re stealing them from demo sites (which I think is what you’re partially talking about), in which case the person doing the demo probably wants, and certainly owns, the scrap for the same reason the the thief is stealing it.
There’s no way to justify stealing the scrap. If you want something and it’s not yours and you take it anyways, you’re stealing it. If you see an abandoned building and you want the scrap, you can call the owner and inquire about it. I have a friend that does this as part of how he makes a living. Tears down old buildings, scraps what he can, auctions some of it, the rest is garbage. But he can’t just go in there and tear the place apart because he hasn’t seen anyone there in a while.
Also, I get a lot of stuff stolen from my store under the guise of ‘oh, I thought it was garbage’. Yeah, sure you did. I’ve had probably 40-50 wooden pallets stolen this week. Someone’s been showing up every few hours and snatching them. IME, the people that steal them during the day use the ‘I thought they were free/garbage’ excuse (yet, they’ll usually have prior arrests for exactly the same thing)*.
*Reminds me, I have to go move one of my outdoor cameras to point at my stack of pallets. Maybe I can catch this guy this week.
Funny update to that. I moved my camera the day after I made that post and got video of the/a person stealing some of my pallets within a few hours.
Also, it was some guy very slowly loading them into the back of a minivan. Normally they use a pick up truck and they’re in and out as fast as possible.
That was the last time the pallets were stolen. While he may have noticed the cameras, IME, they tend to get stolen on a regular basis for a few weeks, then stop. When they stop, I usually assume the person got picked up somewhere.
We actually had a few sleazy dealers busted in our area buying suspicious metal products from undercover cops. They were assessed fines. :dubious:
Hey, as long as there’s big profits in buying and selling this stuff, the fines are just a cost of doing business. Too bad their asses aren’t thrown in jail for at least a few years.
Before the recession lowered prices and the police cracked down we had a couple of houses blow up when the gas mains were stolen. Man-hole covers, overhead electrical wires from train lines and even some catalytic converters were reported stolen.
I got a call from a lawyer one day. He was representing a guy who had come to my house to pick up scrap metal. He wanted to use me as an alibi on the day they caught him stealing a screen door. The police were trying to charge him for every theft of aluminum in the state. I had to decline, he had been at my house months before the alleged theft but the grapevine was saying this guy certainly was stealing aluminum where ever he could find it, including new sign poles that were dropped off by the highway.
In recent years around here bronze bells were stolen from a church, and a bronze statue was stolen from the property of the late Anthony Quinn.
Reminds me of one of the guys we caught. He probably took 10 or 15 pallets but had 30 or 40 of them loaded on his truck. The cop asked him if he got them all from me and trying to defend himself he said ‘no, they’re from like three different places’. All I could think was that if he had just said they all from my location, he’d get one ticket, now he’s going to get three.
Yup. Seems common, industrious guy that’s not too bright. How hard is it to do some honest work instead? Sometimes I think these guys get off on thinking they pulled off a heist. But like gamblers they only think of the wins and ignore all the losses. Kind of relates to the thread on psychopaths: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=826520
A local restaurant lost power for three days when it had to replace copper wiring that was pulled out of it.
Demolition is partly (sometimes entirely) funded by scrap. If you’ve had all the metal taken out, and all the structure destroyed, you have to pay / pay more to get the building demolished.
Of course if you don’t want the building demolished, it’s just vandalism and theft.
Making them only slightly less convenient than Sacagawea dollars.
Really, the only place manhole covers fail as currency is the fact that vending machines don’t take 'em. Yet, anyway. :dubious: