The Art of Dumpster Diving

“Dumpster Diving”, is a combination of 2 words, one very elegant and smooth, the other coaxing visions of maggots and rotten food. When combined they equal a beautiful but not so widely practiced activity that is commonly part of an anti-consumerism lifestyle. This practice has adopted many other great names over the years such as urban foraging, dumpstering, D-Mart, and garbage gleaning, but dumpster diving has become the most widely accepted term. Various forms of dumpster diving (gleaning) are certainly not new, but have been practiced since medieval times, and the beginning of wasteful societies like our own.

I have been Dumpster Diving since an early age, not so much out of necessity, but out of curiosity, and from being raised in a low-income single mother family. Never once do I remember going shopping for clothing as a child. All I ever wore growing up, and mostly what I wear even today, are hand-me-downs. One of our very kind neighbors worked at the local grocery store, and would always bring us lots of discarded food from the grocery store. Eating meat throughout the year was largely dependent on my brother’s and my’s hunting and fishing successes. It was growing up in an extremely conservative conditions like this that I believe taught me my anti-consumerism practices I value so much today.

I believe working at Ace Hardware through high school and having access to all the things we threw out really kick started my Dumpster Diving habits as well. Whenever we received a store return, the item was simply written off and discarded. I would commonly come home with anything from space heaters with broken switches, to neon car lights with loose connections, and even things that weren’t broken. Over the four years of working at Ace, I must have brought home and fixed thousands of dollars worth of tools, appliances, and such.

Computers are unfortunately one of the most common improperly disposed of items. I’ll quote myself out of a Christian Science Monitor article written on the topic of electronics recycling, "There are so many computer illiterate people out there who have lots of money," says Clayton Kern, an environmental biology major at Unity College in Unity, Maine, who makes it a habit to pick up and recycle computers left on the curb. "If some small, easily fixable thing breaks on their two-year-old computer, they just chuck it and get a new one." I have seen this time and time again. luckily I am able to find some of the computers before they get trashed, and fix them up and sell them. According to the EPA, only 6 percent of the computers disposed of in the United States are actually recycled. I am also a member of a non-profit electronics recycling program. Through this program I have obtained several practically brand new computers, including one Mac, and a portable DVD player, all for free.

I then went on to college up here in good ‘ole Unity, dragging my Dumpster Diving habits along for the ride. I came to Unity certainly not expecting such an “Environmental” college to have such non-environmentally minded students and other members of the campus. My freshman year, while taking out the trash I came across numerous valuable finds including a mini-fridge. As the years went on, I noticed the absolutely disgusting practice of students throwing everything in the trash at the end of the year. I often wonder how people can do this and still hold a good conscience. At the end of my sophomore year, I decided to do rounds to all the trash cans in all the dorms, and root through them. I was flabbergasted with what I found; silverware, bowls, plates, unopened spices, unopened boxes of food, canned goods, a leather brand name laptop bag, 2 pairs of barely worn sneakers (that fit me btw), printers, cordless phones, clothing, text books, USB cords, car seat covers, unopened packs of paper and notebooks, and so many other things I can’t even remember them all. By just haphazardly sorting through the top of the trash cans, I must have gathered several hundred dollars worth of goods.

The following year (last year), I came up with the idea of placing boxes in all the dorms with the explicit purpose of throwing possibly useful junk into. The idea was that my friends and I would go through all the stuff and pick out what we want, and then I’d take the rest of the stuff to the Good-Will in Waterville. I didn’t even realize the monumental task I was setting myself up for. A week before the end of school, I collected about 15 large boxes and distributed them throughout the dorms with signs indicating their purpose. The day after I finished all my classes and finals, I drove around to all the dorms to begin collection of the “junk”. I was absolutely blown away with the monstrous heaps of fantastic junk piled all around my boxes. It took me about 2 hours to drive to all the dorms, bag everything up, and throw them in my truck. I then dumped everything out and went through it, gathering stuff I could use. A few days later, I did a second round and all the boxes were overflowing again!

Some of the highlights include a surround sound computer stereo system, a half-size fridge, silverware, a really nice wind breaker, lots of clothing, and full bottles of Garnier shampoo. I think that’s all I kept personally, but my friends got lots of other things too. I ended up taking 5 of the huge 55 gallon bags full of stuff, plus rugs, TV’s pillows, lights, and other random things to the Good-Will in Waterville. All in all I probably spent 15 hours on this project, and gas driving to Waterville, but in my opinion it was definitely worth it.

Today, most of the free “junk” I find and don’t need I just sell on Ebay to make some cash to pay tuition and other expenses. Several years ago one of our professors at Unity retired, and all of his text books were going to be thrown away. Before they were however, I took about 20 of them and made around $500 selling those 20 books on Ebay. Now some of the professors come directly to me to “recycle” their non-needed textbooks for them.

At the beginning of this year I happened upon a really nice Giant Boulder SE mountain bike in the maintenance dumpster. After investing $50 buying a derailleur hanger, a chain, a seat post, and a seat, I had a fully functional kickass $50 mountain bike worth $400.

Just recently I came back to my cottage to find our refrigerator absolutely jam packed full of Odwalla juice of every type and flavor. After interrogating my housemate Jake Harr of the source of all this fruity goodness, he admitted to dumpster diving at an Odwalla distributor in Portland. I was so proud! Most of the juice wasn’t even outdated, but would be in a few days. Needless to say, we enjoyed drinking nothing but Odwalla juice for the next 2 weeks. Even the McCormick’s in little ‘ole Unity has quite a large amount of great food in their dumpster. Our first excursion to McCormick’s yielded about 25 lbs of potatoes, several pounds of onions, bread, and even neatly packaged individual pizza slices.

Also, I recently found an awesome less than 2 year old laptop computer complete with a DVD-burner and built-in wireless. The only problem with it was the hard drive was fried. A new $50 hard drive later, and I had a laptop worth several hundred dollars. Of course I don’t need another one, so it is currently on Ebay. Ask me the next time you see me how much $ I got for it. Over the years of selling all sorts of random things on Ebay, I would roughly estimate I have made at least $2,000.

Is it really that difficult to send a simple email out to UCVoices saying “I have such and such for free”? People send enough other stupid crap to UCVoices; I don’t think this is asking too much. If no one responds then toss it, or maybe even do something responsible for the Earth like taking it to the Good-Will.

Now I am certainly not writing this because I don’t like getting all this free stuff. In fact, I absolutely love getting free stuff, and I love the fact that probably 85% of all the things I own, I got for free. What I really hate though is the thought that for all the stuff I do happen upon and rescue from an eternal burial in a mountainous trash heap, there must be millions of dollars worth of stuff that receives an early and unnecessary eternal burial. According to the USDA more than one-fourth of all the food produced in the United States is thrown away. In 1995, this came out to be 95 billion pounds of food (95,000,000,000 lbs). All this happens while millions of people around our country and the world are practically starving, and have so little. For this World to change, our society needs to change, and our attitudes need to change. No longer can we live in this disposable society. No longer can we throw away so wantonly. We are all in this World together, and it is time we start acting like it.

If anyone is interested in helping out with my end of the year junk recycling efforts please email me, or come chat with me in the LRC. If you have any other ideas or thoughts about this topic, feel free to email me, chat with me or start a UCvoices Discussion on the topic. I am also more than willing to be a dumpster diving mentor as well, so let me know if you ever want to go dumpster diving! I guarantee you’ll be amazed!

More information on the subject can also be found at these websites www.wikihow.com/Dumpster-Dive, www.freegan.info, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_diving, and some great news coverage on dumpster diving can be watched here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_L612od8Ng.