Dumpster Diving Can Reduce Your Grocery Bill & Furnish Your House!

Although I’m not a full-time dumpster diver, I must admit, I have found quite a few prizes on the side of the road and in dumpsters.  Almost every place I’ve ever lived has been about 75% furnished from throw-a-ways.  I used to live near a grocery store that threw out produce regularly.  There’s nothing like getting free corn on the cob or onions, and it sure does help to whittle down the old grocery bill!  If you are willing or able to invest a lot of time into the dumpster diving hobby, you can turn it into a full time job.  There’s a couple of “teams” of dumpster divers that visit my apartment complex on a regular basis.  They have thrift stores that I’m assuming are 100% stocked with dumpster diving finds.  (If I had the capital to rent commercial property and start a business, I’d be doing the same thing.)

To find out more about the great American pastime of dumpster diving, you need not go any further than your local library or book store.  (As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, THRIFT STORES are my favorite book stores.  The books might not be organized by category, but if you’re patient, you’ll evenetually find the books you’re looking for!)  If you’re strapped for time though, you can also order these books online.  I’ve included titles and links for Amazon below.  I’ve also included a clickable link so that you can search from over 200 online booksellers for the best price!

Happy dumpster diving!

Art and Science of Dumpster Diving (1993)
by John Hoffman, Jim Broadstreet (Introduction) , Ace Backwords
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Dumpster Diving : The Advanced Course: How to Turn Other People’s Trash into Money, Publicity, and Power (2002)
by John Hoffman

It’s been 10 years since the publication of John Hoffman’s cult classic of urban scavenging, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving. Now the Garbage Guru is back with an advanced course in the unconventional economics of exploring the trash for fun and profit. Just some of the lessons you will learn include: the key secret to dealing with locked dumpsters; how to dive for information and use it to humiliate corporations, politicians and other evil-doers; the unusual profitability of diving for movie and celebrity castoffs; the BIG-bucks potential of industrial diving, including the top 10 most lucrative places to do it; how to sell your dumpster-dived wares through the flea market of the 21st century – eBay; how to parlay dumpster diving consciousness into finding cheap property, supporting radical causes, even landing political office; and much more!
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Dumpster Diving Saved My Life (2004)
by Leslie Fleming
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Empire of Scrounge : Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (2005)
by Jeff Ferrell

In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.

Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person’s garbage often becomes another’s bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today’s higly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before—and yet the urge to consume seems limitless.

In the end, while picking through the city’s trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people’s discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
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WEBSITES DEDICATED TO THE DUMPSTER DIVING HOBBY:

DUMPSTER DIVING FAQ: http://www.ranprieur.com/misc/dumpster.html

THE DUMPSTER LADY: http://members.aol.com/TheDumpsterLady/thedumpsterlady.htm

ON DUMPSTER DIVING: http://www1.broward.edu/~nplakcy/docs/dumpster_diving.htm

DUMPSTER DIVING: AN INTRODUCTION: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/29/215523/088