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Dumpster Diving?
Dumpster Diving?
Courtesy of Michael Snyder of Economic Collapse
Have you ever thought about getting your food out of a trash can? Don't laugh. Dumpster diving has become a hot new trend in America. In fact, dumpster divers even have a trendy new name. They call themselves "freegans", and as the economy crumbles their numbers are multiplying. Many freegans consider dumpster diving to be a great way to save money on groceries. Others do it because they want to live more simply. Freegans that are concerned about the environment view dumpster diving as a great way to "recycle" and other politically-minded freegans consider dumpster diving to be a form of political protest. But whatever you want to call it, the reality is that thousands upon thousands of Americans will break out their boots, rubber gloves and flashlights and will be jumping into dumpsters looking for food once again tonight.
So is this actually legal?
In some areas, dumpster diving is considered to be legal. In other areas, dumpster divers are technically breaking trespassing laws. Although in most areas the police have so many other problems that they aren't really concerned about cracking down on dumpster divers.
One of the biggest issues facing dumpster divers is safety. Crawling around in back alleys and side streets in the middle of the night is not exactly the safest thing to do. But the lure of large amounts of free food is enough to keep some people coming back over and over again.
During the recent economic downturn, the popularity of dumpster diving has exploded. Today, there are dumpster diving meetup groups, dumpster diving Facebook groups, and even entire organizations such as Food Not Bombs that openly encourage their members to go dumpster diving.
If your family was going hungry, would you go dumpster diving?
You might be surprised at who is doing it. Dumpster diving is not just for the homeless and the unemployed anymore. A lot of people that have decent jobs have picked up on the trend.
Just check out the following example from a recent MSNBC article....
A programmer by day, Todd takes to the streets of North Carolina by night, digging through Dumpsters at drug stores and grocery stores all around his rural neighborhood.
"You would be simply amazed at what businesses throw out," he said. "I've only had to buy two loaves of bread all year. ... Last week I had a trunk full of cereal, cookies, chips and ramen noodles."
Todd slinks in and out of smelly places with low-light flashlights to evade rent-a-cops who will shoo him away. Most nights, his 14-year-old son comes along.
Dumpster diving has become such a prominent trend that even big television news networks are doing stories about it....
The truth is that dumpster diving is just another sign of the times.
Food prices continue to rise and this is putting incredible stress on the budgets of average American families. We just saw another huge rise in food prices during the month of August. Just check out the following data from a recent article posted on The Economic Policy Journal....
The index for finished consumer foods jumped 1.1 percent (13.2 percent annualized) in August, the third straight rise. Over thirty percent of the August advance can be traced to meat prices, which climbed 2.4 percent (28.8 percent annualized). Higher prices for processed poultry and eggs for fresh use also were major factors in the increase in the finished foods index.
If you are married and have a couple of children it can cost a lot of money to feed them every single month. It is not hard to understand the allure of dumpster diving for people that are having a hard time making ends meet.
Other Americans are choosing to dumpster dive because they believe that it helps them live a simpler lifestyle. There is a growing movement of people in America that are rejecting all of the "consumerism" that we see all around us.
Today, the average U.S. household has 13 different credit cards. We are constantly being bombarded with ads that tell us that we need more stuff in order to be happy.
Well, a lot of people have decided that is a lot of bunk and they are doing whatever they can to simplify.
Other dumpster divers are absolutely horrified by how much food is wasted in America.
It has been estimated that 263,013,699 pounds of food is thrown out in the United States every single day.
Can you imagine?
We are probably the most wasteful nation on the planet. With the number of hungry people in the world, it is absolutely criminal how much food that we waste.
So in that sense, it is probably a good thing that dumpster divers are saving some of that food from the landfills and are finding positive uses for it.
But what is going to happen when the economy gets even worse and we start seeing fights over the food that has been left in dumpsters?
In my recent special report about poverty in America, I noted that 46.2 million Americans are now living in poverty. For now, the U.S. government is helping feed over 45 million Americans through the food stamp program, but what is going to happen once the social safety net starts to break?
The number of good jobs in America continues to decline, and thousands more Americans fall into poverty every single day. Things have gotten so bad that other countries are actually making videos that make fun of our poverty.
This country is rapidly losing confidence in our leaders and hopelessness is spreading like wildfire. Today it was revealed that Barack Obama's disapproval rating has now set a new high of 55%. Not only that, 62% of the American people disapprove of the way that he is handling the economy. It turns out that they don't really think much of the Obama jobs plan after all.
Unfortunately, even though our economy is rapidly falling apart and most of our leaders are either deeply corrupt or completely incompetent, most Americans are still way too apathetic. If you can believe it, the American people spend a whopping 53 million minutes a month on Facebook.
Hopefully we can get more Americans to wake up. Hopefully we can get them to understand that they need to get active, that they need to prepare and that they need to get their priorities in order.
Right now, dumpster diving is cute and fun and an interesting way to save money, but in the future there will be millions of Americans digging around in trash cans if we don't get this economy turned around.
This country is rapidly changing, and not for the better.
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THE END! It has been fun guys and girls. We enter the dark ages again, nothing will be sacred. Hope owning gold has given you comfort over the years, too bad owning it now will just make you the biggest target in the realms. This is it, by week end we will all know that not only is the economy sick, but that there is no economy at all. Not one of us will live long enough to see a better day, but you can comfort yourself in knowing you were alive to see the greatest that man could do. Now go get yourself a bowl of meth and a tat, a few beers that are commercial pee and a last glance at what it used to mean to be a man. See you on the other side.
Just saw a news blurb about a tent city in new jersey. Apparently it is growing and is probably nearby some walmart or sams club distribution center (where the best dumpstering will be). They are all worried about the coming winter and how the tent city is unprepared for the winter. Hopefully the winter will be mild and the residents will be a bit more prepared for the winter than the liberal hand wringers give them credit for.
Call me a hard-ass (just don't call me a lard-ass) but I'm starting to get sick & tired of these penny-pinching scavengers, diving into my abode & stealing all kinds of sh!t even before I awake (about midday) from my usual grog-induced catatonic slumber. Had a Chrismas Cake (expiry date Jan 2007) stolen last week (so much for the pre-holiday spirit! ) and 2 6-packs of female panty-liners that I was planning on using as ear-muffs, whilst continuing my lonely one-man protest/vigil outside of 85 Broad on those upcoming cold & unforgiving NYC winter nights.(That's one thing Garfinkel got right - freeze the gonads off a gorilla!). Only yesterday my prized Zenith TV Console went missing. I wouldnt mind but it didnt even get a picture - I'd knocked out the tube years ago and was using it, on special occasions, as a drinks cabinet. (Similar to the classic '70s model pictured here - but with a dark cherrywood veneer and, as I say, without the tube)
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=zenith+cabinet+model&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&rlz=1I7GGLD_en&tbm=isch&tbnid=OENPiAutDVBwNM:&imgrefurl=http://www.inetgiant.com/addetails/zenith-tv-radio-console-cabinet-willow-glen-cambrian/13254718&docid=VH1FddfGc6C0bM&w=739&h=477&ei=lWZ0TozaEsSw8QOix5inBg&zoom=1&biw=1243&bih=567&iact=rc&dur=547&page=2&tbnh=127&tbnw=197&start=23&ndsp=12&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:23&tx=73&ty=49
Surely there must be a local landfill within bumming-a-ride distance - where these less fortunates can rummage & forage with the rodents to their hearts-content. To avoid disappointmnet & get 1st pickings, my only advice would be to get there a good hour or so before the main drop-off (usually about 10:00am, at least on Staten Island) and well before 11:30am as the seagulls tend to swoop in around 12:00 for their midday snack, devouring anything edible - including, no doubt, some unsuspecting recycling-agents (whose exposed bent-over butt-cracks must look like some extra-large & inviting tacos morsels from a height of 300ft) - we'll just never know....
Collateralized dumpster obligations, bitchez
Having been homeless 7 times in the last 30 years, I have a little experience, out in the real world. I've seen a wide variety of circumstances. In some places, the dumpster areas around supermarkets are posted and/or fenced off, and they do prosecute for criminal trespass. This was especially true of businesses that replaced dumpsters with compactors. They didn't want the liabilities that go with the risk of anyone getting crushed. I've seen very strange cases in which homeowners prosecuted people for attempting to take away furniture, TVs, radios and appliances that had been put out for collection. Today, some cities have ordinances prohibiting "dump picking" and any form of scavenging. Back in the 80's, I lived in an area that practiced police harassment for activities associated with homeless people.
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/the-spirit-of-dr-moreau/
Having experienced being homeless so many times, I found myself being an open and vocal advocate for the homeless. I see a contrast between the response of private organizations anf that of municipal authorities. I have other posts on the subject. I see where public policy is going in dealing with people in marginal circumstances,
WADR if the good neighborhoods didn't have ordinances against the destitute----intentionally contrived or accidental---picking over the garbage and trash, those neighborhoods would soon be filled with many many more seeking the best trash (there is even a sense of value, discriminating taste, and elitism among the homeless apparently) Soon my nice neighborhood would resemble what I escaped from when I was poor.
Sorry for your plight but i wouldn't want you and yours around any more than I want a peddler of whatever product, a pollster of any party, a politician seeking my state or national vote (local is cool) or a survey taker of any stripe.
I moved to great neighborhood to escape the visual evidence of what could happen to me if I didn't produce, excel, or otherwise bust my butt or get very lucky to get ahead.
Stick to the neighborhoods that are lower on the totem pole.
WADR
It's almost a tradition in the college town I live in to dumpster dive (well most of it is by or around the dumpster) at the end of may and then again at the end of july...So many college kids move out or move somewhere else in town at these times...They correspond to the leases the students sign every year... CraigsList is pretty popular as well...
I will admit it's not the easy pickin' it used to be 5 years ago...Even 3 years ago!
No, the Chinese waste far more food than Americans do. It is routine, expected, desired and a sign of affluence and abundance to leave as much as one-half of all the food at a restaurant meal uneaten.
Obviously Leraconteur has no idea what real life is like in China. Stop reading bullshit and start experiencing reality.
What do you think the help is eating and why the pork is so succulent?
I used to rent a climate controlled storage room for business. The complex had a dumpster and the very first week renting there I made $610 off items I removed and sold on eBay. It was profitable beyond any reason. I once found a functioning computer controlled engraving machine. Another time a nice table top CNC milling machine. One time I found the dumpster full of copper pipe. Another time it was full of new football shoulder pads. Once it was full of various computer boards that did not function, but the gold scrap off them was worthwhile.
That all came to a screeching halt in 2007 and nobody threw anything away after that of any value. The nature of the economy changed abruptly.
Interesting observation.
The amount of cash we find along the freeway dropped sharply after 2008, also "cool stuff", along with base metals.
"Cool stuff" has included a 7 diamond platinum ring, an 18 diamond white gold ring, and a $20 gold piece in past years...
Appropriate to use the royal we, King of the Road.
Waaaaaaa, what a bunch of whiny brats. Poverty and hunger in a country where over half the people are clinically obese? Please. Go visit central and east Africa or western China. That's poverty.
I haven't seen any poor people in my city.
What I see is people who are talking on cell phones at the bus stop with new $300.00 sneakers, corn rows with colorful beads on the little girls, standing in the pouring rain without an umbrella.
What I see is three generations of folks white and black and hispanic primarily who have found a way to game our system of welfare to live like a family making at least get-by money in the form of 'free' food, public transportaion, even chauffer driven drug addicts leeching off of the people who pay taxes, and make less money than the so-calle poor get for doing absolutely nothing or getting paid on the side to avoid taxes.
They are like Wall Street bankers without the pied a terre in SoHo, or St. Germain, or Geneva.
Quantum Nucleonics, that is income inequality for you. Half have plenty of money to get good and fat, the other half have nothing at all.
anony, I have. 1) Cell phone is not a sign of wealth any more. People have to have a phone if they have any chance of ever getting work, and people do not get landline phones any more (here, a landline costs considerably more than a cheap prepaid phone plan does.) 2) I don't see people here wearing $300 shoes. Well I do, but it's college students who get money from their parents, not the poor. 3) I do feel like some people game the welfare system. But the fact of the matter is the job market is downright poor, there are no jobs to be had even with excellent credentials (those people who are dropouts and such really have no chance.) Welfare at least keeps these people off the streets, as well as I think helping out the local economy -- insofar as if these people were homeless with no income whatsoever, they'd be spending $0 in stores instead of spending whatever welfare money they have.
Real poverty is when people do not have a new iGadget and have no texting on their cell phone service.
Our sanity and common sense were the first things to go in the societal dumpster.
I dumpster dove 20 years ago; a department store next to the liquor store I worked at would dump a case of detergent or shampoo or pretty much anything else if ONE bottle had broken open. They would claim the whole carton as defective and throw away the 5 or 11 perfectly good containers of product.
Less prevalent now but the bookstore in the mall would rip-off the front cover of books that didn't sell in a certain amount of time and throw them in the dumpster too; sometimes there were hundreds a day.
Insanity!
We have several 1920’s and 1930’s pieces of furniture that are worth a little money that we got from dumpsters or ahead of the trash man. We have done it for 40 years and have some good stuff from it. We used to go behind the local supermarket and collect bread and such and give it to the neighbors.
It is technically illegal to "gift" outdated food to anyone.
Yep, we "protect" our starving against stale food by making them starve.
This country is beyond bizarre.
And we wonder why the rest of the world laughs at us.
Well, Geithner wonders, most of us have it figured out.
Indeed, my lady.
Haven't seen you in a while. How you doin'?
So, the Bourgeois are now stealing food out of the mouths of the newly destitute? And in the name of "green"?
Hell i've literally been dumpster diving for 30+ years now. Not for food though. That would really suck. I just can't pass up a good pile of trash. I found a set of 4 brand new tires one time.
My dad found four brand new tires on the side of the road. Not wanting any more tires dumped illegally in the desert he was civic minded enough to take them home for proper disposal.
Disposed of them on his Pick-up.
Do a search on "man-hole cover thieves" or "copper wire thieves" if ya want to see how bad things are.
Had my catalytic converter ripped off last Friday.
Judging by your avatar, i figured you drive a horse 'n buggy - didn't know those contraptions had catalytic converters. I'm guessing it's methane-driven and that there's a flexible hose of some sort plugged straight into the horse's ass and then attached to the actual converter? Also, any special horse-diet required for that extra-rich flatulence? tia
Call me when they start throwing away voluptuous women and booze..
All the fixins for making your own sour mash and vodka is being thrown out of your local produce section. But even easier, once you start making your own wine from fruit it is pretty easy to drink for free.
Star Distributers, Dixwell Ave., New Haven Conn., back when. Forklift guys would "accidentally" break at least one pallet-load of India Pale Ale each nightshift. We'd drink about half, throw the others into dumpster. Maybe it's still there. Prolly not.
It makes me want to cry. What the hell has this country come to.
Dumpster Diving.......Soon to be at a university near you..
RESIDENT CHAIR OF DUMPSTER DIVING DD with Hons
WADR, what it's come to is a nation of people who want to cry, moan, complain and otherwise go on exactly as before instead of beginning to understand that if they want their contry back they have to do a hell of a lot more than cry.
A beginning would be in the next election to throw our EVERY single incumbent politician. And if the new one so much as sneezes in office, throw him out as well. They will eventually get the message that they are not omnipotent, they are accountable, and the will not spend a lifetime in self-service.
Yes, why is it we throw away tons of good food each year, but continue to recycle the same old rotting politicians at each election ???
People think these people are diving for half eaten sandwiches and digging through rotten garbage. That isn't the case at all. Because of insane regulations and ridiculous used by dates many stores and restaurants trough away perfectly good food.
The grocery store by my grandmother gives her about $1000 worth of bread and baked goods every two weeks that have "expired" which she takes to local shelters and churches. Of course we grab a couple things from her and she keeps a few. Otherwise all this food would just rot.
Do you know there is a one year expiration date on water?
In college we used to go to the local KFC at 10:00 to get free food. If we walked in the door at 9:59 we would have to pay full price for the food that would be thrown in the dumpster 10 minutes later. We would go to the back and the manager would hand us bags of chicken and sides. Free dinner for the whole fraternity.
Food that is not spoiled still in plastic wrap is not trash. It is true that in most areas it is illegal for a store to hand food to people, but perfectly legal to grab it out of the trash. I tried to give half a pizza to a homeless guy who asked me for food. A co actually tried to write me up for it. I said that it was crazy so I just walked to the nearest garbage can and put the pizza box on top. The homeless guy walked over and picked it up.
Our government and nearly all cops are completely worthless. If the entire Cleveland police force went away the crime and drug problem would be solved in about a week as the peple who are too scared of the cops to stand against crime would have nobody to stop them from blowing away the scum populaton.
It's just astonishing what people throw away, and how vain people are about not getting it if they have to go near "trash". Hell, my entire campus is all dumpster furnished, and it's good, expensive stuff that might have one cigarette burn or something in it. Recliners, fancy couches, shelves, benches, you name it. Computers, TV's -- which I strip for parts for my electronics stuff.
Depending on where you go, some dumpsters have some pretty amazing stuff in them. Go near a tech school and get monochromators, vacuum systems and parts, test equipment - all still working. The practice has saved my physics research (self funded) a ton of money.
When I was running my software consultancy, I hired a guy who had worked at McDonalds most of his life, yet had paid off his house (not in a cheap neighborhood either). He was a master dumpster diver, who did software as a hobby until I hired him. I paid him high six figures, but you know what? He still continued to get virtually all his food from dumpsters, and there wasn't a thing wrong with any of it. As noted above, things at or near code date go into some dumpsters and not with the stinky garbage.
People out in rural land know this well. And they are nice enough that if they're tossing out something good, they leave it outside the dumpster to make recycling it all the easier. There's no stigma really, and it works out well for all. We don't have official recycling, but many people collect their aluminum and other metal and leave it near the dumpsters all bagged up, so my wife's business can just pick it up, take it to the metals buyers, and make money. It's pretty cool.
Go to almost any university at the right time and really score. I'm not real far from Va Tech, and you wouldn't believe what the rich kids from No Va dump when it's time to go home for the year. Huge numbers of pretty new computers, stereos, furniture, music collections (!) -- anything that won't fit into the beemer daddie bought them to take home -- too much trouble.
It's insane how wasteful most are. Any trader should simply think of this as "buying low" and actually, you could probably make plenty money diving and then selling at flea markets or ebay. Vanity is pretty expensive.
As a kid growing up out in the Mojave Desert (still here, BTW) we would take our large trash (paper and such was burnt in a barrel) out to the dump. The old guy there would try to pull out the decent furniture and stuff for scavaging. Everything else was lit up and he spent most of the day raking shit into the fire. The dump geezer would set aside what he wanted and everything else was fair game.
We went there one day and roughly 12 libraries had dumped books. These libraries were over 100 miles away. They were county, city, schools, universities.... At the time, World Book Encyclopedias (for the younger generation, WBE was the internet on paper...we didn't have computers yet) were relatively expensive...we collected two complete sets.
My family has a general worship of books. We took tremendous outrage at the waste, and the fire in the immediate future. These were reference books on electronics, physics, mathematics, medicine, history, autobiographies...nearly any hard science had a pile.
We loaded about three tons of books into the 48 and brought them back home.
We gave a lot to the local school and the piss-poor community library/sheriff/post office building. We still have quite a few in the bookcases we made to house them.
We have an Encyclopedia Britannica in the attic. It was all set for the Salvation Army, but I couldn't let them go. You never know if/when the internet will fail and we return to analog. You know, revert to the mean and all that.
In between jobs, I sold encyclopedias door to door in the 80's. I was a true believer in the value then, and compared to DVDs or the web, I guess I still am.
I got my real education from the discard pile at the public library, taken home.
"Do you know there is a one year expiration date on water?"
Ever consider that it's the manufacturer wanting to do it in order to avoid people getting stale crap? They just write it off the books as spoilage. It works FOR them.
I've wondered, however, whether it's a good thing to store water in any plastic container for very long. The real issue (and I'm sure the coporate types wouldn't want us to know) could very well be leaching of components in the plastics.
BIG rules almost always come from BIG companies, and I gurantee you they aren't stupid, they're meant to help Them profit.
Yes, the problem is the leaching. And they know that, of course. For polycarbonate bottles (another common water bottle material) the monomer Bisphenol-A is known to leach into the water, and not surprisingly, the rate increases at higher termperatures, and the concentrations increase over time.
The conclusions of the paper I referenced below had this to say about polyethylene terephthalate:
"The evidence suggests that PET bottles may yield endocrine disruptors under conditions of common use, particularly with prolonged storage and elevated temperature. Important questions for future research include the following: What substances in the water are responsible for the estrogenic effects observed in the bioassays—is it one or more of the phthalates, and/or antimony, and/or as yet unidentified substances? How do variations in the composition and manufacture of PET influence the leaching of these substances into the contents of the bottle? Would special measures—such as a special coating on the inner wall of the bottle (e.g., Pennarun et al. 2004), or transportation under controlled-temperature conditions—minimize the leaching of these substances into the contents? Because of the widespread use of PET plastic worldwide in containers for water, soda beverages, and condiments, the safety of PET under conditions of common use certainly merits further investigation."
Bad stuff, and known as such since the 60s, yet we still use it. Why? Because it's cheap, and we're (collectively) stupid and don't care. For even more fun, have a look at some of the studies done on styrene, key ingredient of our favorite coffee cup.
thank Jon Huntsman's daddy for ubiquitousness of polystyrene:
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/07/14/14greenwire-styrofoam-made-hunts...
Potable water is stored in food grade containers. Food grade containers are specified as being safe for food storage. People store their end of the world stash in food grade containers.
I store water in old food grade juice bottles. Its a cheap way to store a couple of weeks potable water in case of natural disaster or man made disater.
If the containers are clean, the water should remain potable. If in doubt use bleach or distillation to purify.
One of the largest silver jars ever made was for a rajah who needed to store his water from the Ganjes while attending a royal ceremony in England. It was as tall as a man and pure silver. If you can afford it, silver makes a fine water storage container. If not plastic will do in a pinch.
I don't drink bottled water except when traveling. I don't worry about chemicals leaching as much as I do crap flouride and other junk like flushed pharmeceuticals in the water, since a lot of bottled water is just bottled tap water. I distill my tap water at home, Its nice to know exactly what you are drinking.
http://www.worldisround.com/articles/344255/photo38.html
The problem is that many materials (in particular plastics) have been certified by the FDA as "food-grade," but over the last decade, serious concerns have been raised in the environmental health literature about plastics that have been assumed to be "safe" and that have been widely used in commerce for many decades.
Just last year, an article was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the official journal for the National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS). (http://ehsehplp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=i...)
It summarized studies showing that plastics of the type used for most water bottles, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), leach endocrine disrupting chemicals, that is, chemicals that behave like hormones or interfere with hormone action. Most of the chemicals leached by plastics are estrogen mimics, which might go a long way to explaining the 50% drop in sperm count among US males over the last 50 years. It may also help to explain strong demand for Viagra and Cialis.
For emergency water, sure, it's not a problem as a one time thing, but I wouldn't go so far as to say food-grade=safe. That's not what I'm seeing in the scientific literature. Google it: Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals.
It's crazy. They wan't to control everything and the worse it gets the more insane the idiots will be with rules that will just implode with each other. Boom.
Half the people commenting on here support the creation and extension of all those rules. It's what socialists do!
So, don't blame the local and state governments - blame those who vote for them and petition them for more rules.
You know that how? I have no clue how many people on here are of any political persuasion and I have lurked & posted for over a year.
It's wonderful to conjecture, but don't present it as fact. A simple, "in my opinion" at the beginning of a statement will lend context to your statement otherwise you come off as shall we say less than truthful.