After I checked the meaning of "dilapidated" I will give you some background to explain some of the reasoning why I wrote that in my previous post.
I used to live in Denmark for about 3 years, so I know what their recycling systems looks like as
@Ebo explained on the previous page in fair details. If I wanted I'd have a FAAAR better dumpster-diving collection than him. People there throw away working utlrabooks with I5's for a cracked screen, you can get on Ebay for a thousand quid or so (some of the stuff I've encountered in my experience). I am not saying this to parade I am a better person than him,
no and again no. I simply think I have a good understanding of what it feels like to sacavange the "wasteland" and be a dumbster-diver and accumulate so much working parts. Now that I got that out of the way, let me give you this example. Most containers for electronic stuff in DK (and it looks like in Australia) are on the open: no cameras, weather doing its thing with rain/sun etc. Let's say a university buys 50 PCs. Uses them and in the end throws them out in one of those unwatched dumpsters-> no fences/ open to the public. I don't know if they are obliged by law or not or if they are compensated in some way. Let's say someone stumbles upon this and gets a few of the PC's and then sells them after a few repairs. What do we have here:
A) PC's were bought with tax payers' money back in the day
B) that person did not contact the IT department or in any other way the uni's administration whether he/she can use those objects
C) they are not used for personal need/ friend etc's need. Nor for donors for capacitors for personal projects/ heatsinks/ cables/ practice sleeving PSU's etc etc
D) the person realized a profit (size of the profit is not important, we are talking prinicples here)
You can substitute the uni with a company/ small business and if those 4 conditions are met at the same time, yes I do believe this is a theft ( theft as a deceitful taking of property without permission). That's what I ment.
I am not saying this is the case with OP. And I agree with you in the sense it matters if you know the circumstances around what you take and what are you going to do with it. In my opinion, it's a fine line with dumpster-diving for hardware stuff.