20 Weirdest Finds in London's Rubbish

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07 October 2016 | Updated 01 January 1970

James Rubin, owner of EnviroWaste, highlights some of the most unusual items he and his staff have found in commercial and domestic hauls and skip hire collections in the greater London area.

As an environmental waste removal company, our removal jobs from homes, offices, warehouses, ex-retail units and plenty of other locations around London throw up a seemingly never-ending supply of weird and wonderful items.

And we’ve been keeping a record of the weird items found in our hauls as a fun internal exercise since we started the company.

Here are the twenty weirdest and most wonderful things we’ve found in our waste hauls in the last five years.

Finds include the bones of Apostle St Clement – the third ever Pope, and the successor to St Peter, a sealed box full of maggots, a nude painting of Albert Einstein and a dead, stuffed cat… dressed in a baby’s onesie.

Our favourite weird and wonderful finds are as follows, collated by the team here at EnviroWaste:

• A dead, stuffed cat dressed in a baby’s onesie

• The bones of Apostle St Clement

• A nude painting of Albert Einstein

• A sealed box full of maggots

• A life sized rubber doll (still inflated)

• A fully working Apple Macbook

• A vacuum sealed £5 note with Prince Charles’ signature

• A Super Soaker full of urine

• A prosthetic leg

• A laminated love letter

• Sony PlayStation Portable Development Kit

• A bag of what looked like body hair

• Goodrich Standby Attitude Indicator – worth £2,500

• 100 year old Suffragette leaflets

• A 60 year old Kodak camera

• A Victorian dildo

• A 116 year old scientific drawing set by Davis & Son

• A notebook filled, from cover to cover, with the words ‘I’m the Devil’

• A shoebox filled with dozens of mouse skeletons

• Old chips (from casinos that have since closed down)

With some items that could have sentimental or high monetary value, measures were taken to return the item back to its owner, for example the Apple Macbook was given back to its owner after it was stolen and then later dumped in an EnviroWaste skip.

I think it’s safe to say that waste disposal is not a glamorous job, however it can certainly be an interesting one! We started keeping a tally of these items quite early on because it helps keep morale high and provides the team with sometimes a much needed laugh!

The majority of these items were found in domestic clearances where a person has passed away and EnviroWaste was hired to dispose of the contents of their house in an environmentally friendly way. London as we all know is a very vibrant and diverse place with lots of quirks, so it’s not surprising that we come across some really unusual and wonderful items.

Often these unusual items can pose a problem on how to dispose of them in an environmentally safe way. For instance, the stuffed dead cat ended up going to a collector - minus the onesie - and the nude Einstein painting went home with one of our employees!”

Picture: The bones of Apostle St Clement 

Article written by James Rubin | Published 07 October 2016

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