Twice a year my well-heeled neighbour orders a skip and fills it with new, or nearly new, designer clothes, toys, books, tapes and other tempting items. I frequent charity shops and can’t resist a bargain. I itch to rescue some of the items in his skip and use them myself, or redistribute them to deserving friends. Is the stuff up for grabs, or am I stealing?
Of course, recycling your neighbour’s cast-offs is morally OK. Everybody recycles nowadays. Companies boast that their stationery is made from recycled paper. Fashionable dressers now wear only vintage Yves Saint Laurent. C-list celebrities are endlessly recycled until, like compost, they sink to the bottom of the rotting heap before eventually re-emerging as a new, albeit lower, life form in Celebrity Big Brother. With George W. Bush having followed his father into the White House, and with his brother, Jeb, eyeing up the same prize, America recycles even its presidential families. The Bushes recycle Dick Cheney as the power behind their thrones.
In many countries, people furnish their houses with perfectly serviceable goods left on the street by their former owners in the hope that they will find a good new home. In gadget-loving Japan, for instance, where houses are compact, and the electronics industry inventive, the streets are regularly lined with valuable, near-new items that their upgrade-hungry owners fully expect to be picked up by less well-off neighbours.
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So you may root around in your neighbour’s skip with a clear conscience. But should you find George Galloway or Michael Barrymore under a heap of books, just leave them there: some things have reached the end of their useful cycle.
FACING A DILEMMA
Have you got a dilemma of your own?
Write to Modern Morals, Times features, 1 Pennington Street, London, E98 1TT. E-mail: modernmorals@thetimes.co.uk