I have seen a bunch of bikes out for recycling around my neighborhood the past few nights. If there appears to be anything salvageable are they worth dropping off to Free Ride? I don't wanna load them up with stuff that was being thrown away but the frequency has been high enough that I am sure there is at least one good bikes worth of parts if not every bike being good.
use your best judgement. if the bikes look like they should be going into the trash, or are department store bikes, then leave them there.
if they are nicer and/or higher quality, and at least have good salvageable parts, then try to bring them to fr if it's not too much trouble. people do throw away good, older stuff all the time, but there's also a lot of stuff that is legit trash. i guess long story short is that it's impossible to answer on the internet
CMU sent this out last night. They are really REALLY conservative about tagging the bikes. At my building, there are about a dozen that should have been tagged, but only two actually were. It appears that they will donate the absolute rusted junk to FR.
Campus Community,
University Police and Facilities Management Services will be removing abandoned bicycles from the main Pittsburgh campus on Thursday and Friday November 8-9. University Police will identify and tag the abandoned bikes by Friday, November 2.
Abandoned bikes are those that are in poor condition from not being used. Bikes in poor condition are identified by such features that include, but not limited to, two flat tires, missing major parts, frozen brakes and rusted chains that make the bike unusable.
Tagged bikes, bikeparts, and locks will be removed Nov. 8-9. Those that are deemed to be operational will be stored on campus for six months. Owners seeking to claim their bikes should contact University Police at 412-268-2323. Non-operational bikes and bike parts will be donated to Free Ride, http://freeridepgh.org/donate/bikes-and-parts/.
University Police
You could also just throw them in the recycle metal dumpster at Construction Junction. That way they get recycled and CJ gets some money. Depending on your inclination to haul trash around, that is.
Cheap department store bikes are ok for free ride too, not everyone is looking for a diamond in the rough. They can also be used for the Christmas police give away that Kranicks runs, or the kids project on the Northside - and I believe FR will forward them on to both of those groups. Besides, just about any bike will have usable parts on it even if it’s a POS, and as jon said they will also sell the scrap metal when all the good bits are taken off.
Keep them out of the landfill if you can.
for Agree with Marco! I am always rescuing things from the trash in my neighborhood, often pretty nice bikes. I often take a few of the parts for personal use before taking to free ride.
The dump should only get very small part of what it receives.
well, this is what free ride's website says:
We accept all kinds of bicycles: cruisers, road, mountain, kids and bmx bikes, but prefer them not to be piles of rust. If the bike has tons of rusty parts and appears beyond repair, it probably is. In this case, bring the bike(s) to a scrap yard, since this is where we are sending them anyway.
For a list of scrapyards in the Pittsburgh area, click here.
Cool deal. None of the bikes I saw last night were there in the morning. Appears as if others took them before garbage/recycling went through. Will make a future not to just grab them and go from there.
@orionz06 Appears as if others took them before garbage/recycling went through.
I guess that means the problem is being taken care of.
You could keep an eye out for quality stuff, but otherwise it seems someone has the recycling of trash bikes covered.
Yeah, but they might just be scrapping them. There are people who drive around trash night and pick up anything metal for recycling. Which is fine in general, but kind of a shame for a bike that just needs some love.
Scrappers suck. They walked onto my fenced in property and stole my metal awnings that were going to be put up the next day. My friend lost a whole bunch of car parts to them too. Really the scummiest of scum.
We have quite a few scrappers that stop by the shop I work for on a regular basis.
Early this summer I tried to set something up with them so they would leave the abandoned bikes with me and from there I would donate whatever was remotely useful to free ride.
The scrapper way of thought is that every ounce counts towards cash they use for income and besides a few almost completely undesirable condition chain store bikes I received from them they were less than enthusiastic about the idea of donation in the long term.
It would be ideal to have something set up with a few scrapyards in the area and bypassing the random personalities/ interests of the scrappers.
Being that money is involved that could also turn out to be a dead end.
If you offered say $5 a bike that would be way more than the scrap weight. The only problem would be that it would give incentive for more bike theft since five bucks might be a good deal for some of these guys. I like the idea of setting something up at the scrap yard, but in reality it would slow them down and time is money.
@rice rocket, you had thieves, not scrappers (Ok, there's some overlap). Pulling metal out of trash and getting it to a scrapyard instead of a landfill is a useful service. But there are lots of lowlifes who look for aluminum or copper that nobody has locked down and steal it for recycling. It's worth a fair bit of money these days.
