a long ramble on urban scavenging
When I was a kid, on two occasions, my dad and my uncle made Trash Boats. This may have been an idea my dad got from an old issue of MAKE Magazine or some forum somewhere. The idea was to make a boat without spending more than $30 or so. You'd then put this boat into your local river and travel as long as you could until you got tired or until your boat sunk, at which point you'd call your buddies and have them pick you up and help you throw your crumpled mass of PVC pipes and tarps into the nearest dumpster.
I never embarked on one of these low-budget voyages, but I did ride along in the family van for the second most important part of the project: the gathering of materials. The low budget meant that most of your materials had to be acquired through unconventional means. Spending $20 on plywood and rope and $10 on inner tubes wasn't in the spirit of the thing.
The first year they did it, I rode along with my dad through the alleys of Indianapolis, helping him look through dumpsters for ship-building materials. That there might be useful things in the trash was something that had never occured to me until then. I remember when we pulled up to a dumpster behind some business and my dad found a huge yellow banner, think the kind that they hang up in front of a Spirit Halloween, and he excitedly rolled it up and put it in the van. That banner would go on to live a second life as the skin of a PCV pipe based canoe.
Dumpster diving was an occasional thing for my dad. The only thing I can distinctly remember him pulling out of a dumpster and putting into our house was a pair of speakers. The concept stuck around in my mind though.
If you look up "dumpster diving" on youtube, you'll find dozens of channels dedicated to it. They're full of head-mounted gopro videos of people hopping into commercial dumpsters and pulling out bags of old bagels, boxes of 1-day-expired food, and handfuls of out-of-season cosmetics. Businesses in the US (and probably around the world) are incredibly wasteful, throwing things out that could be sold at a TJ-Maxx-style business or donated to a food bank. Some are even malicious about it, with chains like Gamestop requiring their employees to physically destroy anything that someone might otherwise be able to use.
What these channels don't show are all of the failures. The fact of the matter is most dumpsters are full of trash. Some of the more hardcore dumpster divers slice bags open and dig through even those dumpsters, but this is rarely worth it. Most of the time any retail dumpster you look in will be full of trash bags of wet paper towels, wads of plastic wrap, and cigarette butts. Many big-box stores put all of their trash into a compactor, making dumpster diving anywhere from impossible to deadly. For these reasons, I don't know that I've ever tried dumpster diving in commercial dumpsters.
I went to school at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Around the time of my junior year I got into dumpster diving. One of the buildings I had classes in was being emptied out in preparation for its demolition, and anything too old or broken to justify moving into storage was thrown out or left in the hallways for anyone to take. I started to pay attention to the dumpsters around the building, snatching up half-used spools of wire, boxes of electronic components, and on one occasion, a half-broken oscilloscope. The university was constantly clearing out buildings for new construction or renovation, and with every clearing out came a dumpster full of neat old junk. These academic dumpsters gave me hundreds of dollars of electronic components, parts drawers, lag equipment, and Dazor lamps during my time in the Lafayette area.
On one occassion, the building housing most of the English and foreign language departments was demolished (and never rebuilt). In the weeks leading up to the demolition, the faculty flooded the halls with books and furniture, telling anyone who walked through to take whatever they wanted. Scavengers like myself took hundreds of books, but thousands more were collected in vast crates and trucked away to be pulped.
The second niche I discovered at Purdue was the residential dumpsters at move-out time. Purdue is a strange school in that the majority of the students don't live there year-round. The population of West Lafayette goes up by 40,000 some every August with the start of the school year, and then in the spring everyone moves out and the town is deserted over the summer. With every move-out came a flood of trash. The dorms weren't that bad. To live in a dorm was to live spartanly. Everything one has only takes up a few square feet, and it's all typically packed into one's family van and taken back home over the summer. At move-out time the dormitory dumpsters were filled with anything too cheap or bulky to justify moving with, namely box fans and crumb-filled $80 Walmart futons.
The apartment dumpsters are a different story. With more square footage comes more possessions. At move-out time, dumpsters of apartment buildings near the university overflow with cheap imitations of home goods. Particle board furniture, plastic kitchenware, and flimsy lamps. Filling any available space around the dumpsters are the mattresses. I shudder to think of the number of mattresses thrown away every year in college towns across the US.
The apartment dumpsters of West Lafayette gave me many things over the years: furniture, mini-fridges, a pair of climbing shoes, but above all they gave me a sense that there's enough stuff in the world. If things were made better and there were better systems in place for the reuse and redistribution of used items, we could significantly cut down on emissions and slow the growth of landfills. Whether it's a plastic cup or a mattress that doesn't come with you when you move out, single-use products are a disease.
Not all of the blame can be placed on the consumer, of course. College is a strange time of life. It's designed to be a natural next step from high school, preparing young adults to take the step after that of entering the workforce. This in-between-ness, uncertainty about the future, and the transient nature of university housing all lead to buying and throwing away an $80 Walmart futon being a much easier thing to do than buying a good couch and moving it around with you (not to mention the cost of a good couch). College is the start of a new chapter in one's life, but it's not a chapter in which one typically starts investing in quality belongings.
A common solution to some of this waste is a thrift store. Instead of buying the $1 plastic plates from Target, buy a $1 porcelain plate from Goodwill. Instead of throwing your old stuff away, donate it. If you don't want to donate to a thrift store, put your clothes in a big donation bin for your local nonprofit that clothes for people in need. Problem solved! What thrift stores aren't up front about is how many of their donations get thrown away. Anyone who's spent time in a Goodwill parking lot can tell you that the rate at which goods are dropped off in the donation bins far outpaces the rate at which goods exit the store in the arms and carts of customers. Lots of things that get donated will wind up in the trash. Too often the donators will be too optimistic about what will sell at a thrift store (nobody wants your old pasta sauce jars or your crusty old sneakers) but the majority of thrift store waste is clothing. There are lots of reasons for this, but it mostly boils down to the rise of fast fashion. More clothes are donated than will ever sell, and clothing recycling is complicated by mixed-fiber garments, so much of it is thrown away.
I used to work in an industrial area next to a warehouse for a local organization that has a couple thrift stores in the area. This warehouse was larger than both stores combined, walls lined with huge industrial shelves full of thousands of pounds of donated clothing. This was sorted through and the good stuff was trucked off to the stores, and the rest was thrown away. They didn't have the time or manpower to look through everything thoroughly, so sometimes there was good stuff in that dumpster. It was a frequent stop for myself and for the homeless people in the area.
In 2025 I moved to a higher-income neighborhood in Chicago. It's a good place, but a thrift store desert. The north side is packed with thrift stores and buy/sell/trade clothing shops, but the south side doesn't have that. As such, people's unwanted stuff has nowhere to go but the alleys and dumpsters. My partner and I quickly adjusted to this, keeping our eyes peeled when we're out and about, taking detours down alleyways, and driving around known hotspots at the end of the month when people are moving out. This is the latest niche I've discovered: the city.
We are not the only dumpster divers. Leaving your unwanted couch on the curb for someone else to take is a country-wide pasttime, and I'm sure most people have a piece of furniture they got this way, especially in a major city. Then there's my class of scavenger, the habitual packrat sort. Above me in the food chain are the scrappers and the resellers. You'll see them driving the alleys with pickup trucks piled high with rusty bicycles, dusty dressers, and broken bedframes. I'm not sure where those trucks end up, but I'm sure it's some combination of flea markets and scrapyards. (I also suspect that I could flag them down and buy something directly off of their truck, but I haven't tried this yet.) Then of course there are the homeless, who look through the trash out of necessity.
Over the years I've developed an unwritten set of rules/guidelines for my dumpster diving, but I'll try to write them here.
That's all I really have to say on the matter, but here's a short list of some of our better finds: