5 of the weirdest things ever found in a skip

Sorting through the waste produced by Suffolk and Cambridgeshire is a meticulous task that usually has SunSkips’ pickers staring at a lot of rubble and soil.

But every now and again, something unusual crops up that we simply can’t believe ended up in a skip.

Here are some of the weirdest things people have thrown in a skip, and in one case, balanced on top…

A sculpture worth £600,000

One of Kapoor’s more famous sculptures in Chicago, USA

Valuable works of art are best kept in galleries and museums under tight security – but this masterpiece somehow found its way to the bottom of a skip.

Swiss art collector Ofir Scheps was gobsmacked to find workmen at a storage company he’d hired had thrown his sculpture by Turner Prize winner Anish Kapoor into a skip – before it was destroyed.

Fortunately for the owner, he managed to win £350,000 in damages after having paid £18,000 for the piece (despite claiming it was worth almost double in court).

A married couple’s life savings

It was a desperate scramble for this couple when a bedroom clear-out went horribly wrong, according to Instant Waste Management in Australia.

After pulling out some bags from under the bed, the wife promptly put them with the rest of the things to be thrown away. But little did she know that her husband had stuffed the bags full of cash…

Sadly, the bags were never retrieved from the skip, so technically weren’t found at all.

Amy Winehouse’s wedding album

Treasured photos are normally at the top of the list of things people would grab if there was a fire in their home, so the last thing you’d expect to find at the bottom of a skip is a wedding album.

And not just any wedding album – Amy Winehouse’s wedding album!

Kilburn resident Dermot O’Regan found the photos of the late singer’s nuptials to Blake Fielder-Civil tossed in the skip. Winehouse, who was later divorced, claimed it had gone missing and wanted it back.

An entire caravan

It’s hard to say that this item was found in a skip because it’s obviously far too big to fit.

But a driver at Welsh skip hire company GD Environmental Services was dismayed to find someone had perched a whole caravan on top of one of their containers.

After quite rightly refusing to collect the skip (the maximum fill line is there for a reason), the customer eventually agreed to dismantle the caravan before it was taken away.

A grenade

It’s Friday morning. You’re sorting through the waste you collected from a skip when all of a sudden, you find yourself holding an actual grenade!

Fortunately for this Salford waste management worker, the bomb squad found that the grenade was empty and didn’t pose a danger.

Hopefully his boss gave him the rest of the day off to recover from the shock!

Needless to say, these are definitely not things you should throw in a skip. See the SunSkips blog for a complete guide to what you can’t put in a skip.