Dumpster Diving FAQ (2004)

As late teenagers a few friends and I dumpster dived a circuit of retail stores and got some good and interesting odds and ends: fishing reels, acrylic displays, partial set of wine glasses, various tools, a small aquarium…<p>I worked in a grocery store so didn’t have the need or gumption to dive for food (I was usually the driver…but all aspects were fun), except for one spot: the town Krispy Kreme. Sneaking around back was so much better than waiting in line, and often there was a fresh looking box nestled on top of pillows of old donuts in garbage bags.<p>Sneaking them into the cheap movie theater was the next challenge.<p>One day, my parents were having a party and we were playing video games in my room. My aunt burst in, indignantly shouting at us for eating out of a dumpster…we laughed and hatched a plan: sneak out my window so they thought we were still playing games, zip to town, grab some donuts and offer them to the party. Except one problem: when we got there the dumpster was bone dry. The cleanest we had ever seen it. Puzzled for a minute I suck it up and went to the drive through to buy a box of donuts at long last. But then I took the sharpie in my glove box and largely scrawled yesterday’s date. We snuck back in the window, popped back into the party, proceeded to display the “expired” box of donuts, and I pulled one and took a big bite. My aunt was exasperated! We passed the box around and it was fun to see which of my parents’ friends were willing to taste the “dumpster donuts”.

I would never do it, but I lived with a guy a number of years ago, and he would religiously dumpster-dive to the point where he never did regular grocery shopping.<p>I rarely ate the fresh food he&#x27;d bring back, especially because the guy loved seafood, but he would often come back with boxes and boxes of perfectly fine food, drink &amp; random things for around the house like cutlery, tools, whatever. Boxed &amp; Canned food, cereals, etc.<p>He once cycled home with what I can only describe as a pallet of Coca Cola.

My family always hit the construction dumpsters. You can get a lot of decent pine lumber that gets tossed because it was cut wrong or stained with mud&#x2F;ptty&#x2F;etc. They throw a lot out because time is mor valuable to them then the wood. Even short end peices are useful for burning or turning into charcoal. Pretty rare that you get decent lengths for building though. Usually 6 feet and below are fairly common, with the rare 7-10 foot boards, and nigh unheard of 11+. And the builders are usually happy about it too, since they pay to have it emptied so everything you take is a bit less they have to pay, and no skin off their nose.<p>We have built a number of animal houses and even a few sheds around our land with the salvaged wood. Saved us a lot of money.

Pre-pandemic, I used to go dumpster-diving with an acquaintance. This guy had a garage _full_ of stuff that he salvaged from dumpsters. Clothing, furniture, bicycles, phones, laptops, non-expired canned&#x2F;boxed food, you name it. It was something of a hobby for him, he used what he could and gave away the rest to friends, family, or donations.<p>One of the best times&#x2F;places to go is university housing during move-out week. Lots of perfectly good stuff that people just didn&#x27;t want to take with them for whatever reason<p>We always tried to be respectful of the property owners, never left a mess. Very rarely, someone will come along and tell us to go away. We always apologized and did so.

I used to live somewhere where there was a grocery store that was positioned between a lower socioeconomic community and a higher one. It mostly served the lower one, but stocked specialty goods (think organic). I used to hit the dumpster every day after work, and found lots of good stuff in there. I too found a couple gallons of olive oil once. At one point my girlfriend and I went all February living off of nothing but dumpster dived food (except I think we bought some almond milk) and I remember eating fine (this was a year out of college so fine is relative). The takeaway I had was that there is all kinds of food that gets thrown out which is perfectly fine to eat. I never ate disgusting rotting food like one would picture coming out of a dumpster - everything was packaged and pretty much equivalent to what you&#x27;d take off the shelves. Also that not all dumpsters are created equal.

If you still go to the office then dumpster diving at your recycle&#x2F;e-waste bin&#x2F;room is a must! You can’t believe the stuff you can find in such bins, not only new and perfectly usable things but also old hardware of all kinds. Restoring these than become great weekend projects.<p>One danger that wasn’t mentioned in the article and other comments is that you can get <i>hooked</i> and turn into a thrash collector. Institute a policy of getting rid of stuff you haven’t touched for N months.

I guess it&#x27;s really a layoff season in tech.

&gt; Even better are dumpsters for college dorms or other student housing at the end of the term when everyone&#x27;s moving out. Rich kids will throw away items worth hundreds of dollars.<p>Here in Boston, &quot;Allston Christmas&quot; has become a well-known term. It refers to the events of every June here, when people cruise the student-heavy neighborhood of Allston looking for good stuff thrown out by students moving out. (If you do this, remember that you need to be prepared to deal with bedbugs.)

My parents are (well, were, then they got too old) dumpster divers. They live in a university town and at the end of the year the students all throw away lots of stuff. Some of it&#x27;s a good haul- just pick up a box of jars of olives- and other times it&#x27;s crap. My parents often try to keep the perishable stuff which often is clearly past its prime, and I have to go through and organize what is close to a hoarder&#x27;s paradise in the basement on a regular basis.<p>I have mixed feelings- obviously they&#x27;re identifying stuff that would just be waste, but it frequently ends up just sitting around forever because who needs a case of olive oil when you&#x27;re 75? There is also an entire closet which is filled with hydroflasks. Often the whole area smells like beer, because they collect lots of cans (I used to give them a hard time about this but they were making a few thousand dollars a year...)

I remember sitting in my dad&#x27;s car with my brother a few times when he went dumpster diving behind banks and offices and government buildings. He always found some papers and a few times we got stuff. I remember vividly getting some cool raised stickers. At the time, I didn&#x27;t really understand what was going on. Now that I am older I sometimes really wonder what was going on...

Back in the 80s when I was in college I worked for one of my neighbors mowing lawns a few days&#x2F;week for a few hours in the morning (I had afternoon&#x2F;evening classes at the time). He and his wife were in their 60s and seemed to sort of adopt my roommate and myself as sort of surrogate grandsons. They&#x27;d bring us food all the time, it really helped with our food budget. One day after we had finished our mowing work the guy pulled up behind a Safeway and said &quot;Why don&#x27;t you get in that dumpster and see if there&#x27;s any food in there?&quot;. I gave him a questioning look. Then he said &quot;Where do you think all that food we give you guys comes from?&quot;. The reality of it dawned on me and after my shock subsided I climbed up into the dumpster. And after that we regularly stopped off at dumpsters looking for stuff after our mowing.<p>Fast forward a few months. We found a bag full of about 20lbs of Reese&#x27;s Peanut Butter cups that had just gone off date (but of course, were fine). My roommate and I ate them for about a week until we were getting sick of them and then he said &quot;Let&#x27;s take these to class and distribute them&quot;. Seemed like a good idea so we did. One of the guys in the class said &quot;Hey, where did you guys get all of these Reese&#x27;s Peanut Butter cups?&quot;. And my roommate said &quot;they&#x27;re from the dumpster&quot; The look on that guy&#x27;s face. Probably the same look I had on my face when I learned where all the food the neighbors gave us was coming from.

This and some other essays from Ran Prieur had a huge impact on me when I first read them. The idea of &quot;dropping out&quot; of the rat race is nothing new, but his writing and his take on it was strangely persuasive. If I remember correctly, I&#x27;ve seen him comment here on HN that some of his essays should be categorized as fiction and others taken with a grain of salt. I don&#x27;t mind at all, to me, the reading itself was so impactful that the question of whether he really did dumpster diving or not became irrelevant.

I&#x27;ve been dumpster diving several times. Dumpsters with food tend to be awful - they smell, have flies, mold, and grease everywhere. If you want free food, just go to a programmer meetup and eat their free pizza.

I once worked at a place where the owner would come by and dive our own dumpsters once a week, then he&#x27;d come in and chastise us if we&#x27;d thrown away something like a broken stapler he thought could be repaired. It was weird though because we rarely got the item back repaired. He still bought us new staplers.

&gt; In any case, do not act guilty. Act like what you&#x27;re doing is perfectly normal and legal.<p>Solid advice for all aspects of life.

I wonder how this reads to Germans who have what amounts to a national holiday of tossing things out before tax time. I recall the first time seeing what appeared to be brand new furniture and electronics sitting on the side walk; it was quite a surprise. Can anyone from Germany comment?

Many years ago, I witnessed a local university professor stop his brand new Cadillac next to a dumpster, get out and start foraging through it. I went up and asked if he lost something, his reply: Nope, just shopping. I find all sorts of things in these downtown dumpsters.

Over here the grocery stores keep their trash behind lock and key; I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it gets disposed of in a secure fashion.<p>Of course, on the other hand, they donate a lot of things to food banks as well. And before that it gets a discount sticker.<p>This practice got pretty bad in the UK though, with people lining up and waiting for someone to apply the stickers before buying products - harassing the staff and other customers in the process.

The dominant grocery store chain around here experimented with boxed meal kits for a while (since discontinued). These of course have expiry dates. I would buy them only on their last pre-expiry day, when they were marked down 50%. They were fun, and at that markdown, worth it for the ingredients alone.<p>But they would often get left in the fridge for up to 4 more days, and they were still 100% OK. So it really galled me to see them shovel a whole bunch of just expired ones into a garbage bag. Wait!! I&#x27;d happily pay the 50% price for those (especially the super yummy Thai Basil Beef!) even one day later! No, sorry, into the garbage they go. Never been a grocery store dumpster diver, but that wouldn&#x27;t go around here anyway, if those weren&#x27;t securely closed, the raccoons (and worse) would have a field day and boy do they make a mess.

I thought this was going to be about dumpster diving for hardware, not food.

Everything I learned about mainframes I learned from dumpster diving at SUNY New Paltz and an IBM (submarine?) facility nearby.

In the same vein, my local grocery store cuts open the bags of small oranges and sells the nearly-off fruits three for a dollar. Same chain grocery store in the town over has a speed rack it wheels out with nearly-off fruits and vegetables. Same store, but slightly different policies. I think my store is more working class, and the other is more affluent. Go figure.<p>Years ago there was a grocery store in Berkeley, CA which sold lots of near expiration foods, and other odds and ends—like small pieces of end cut cheeses, or products that seemed to be not popular or just failed. An example of the last was a cornmeal crust pizza shell. But something about the packaging was wrong and all of the crusts were broke in two. Haha. But it was all cheap and still wholesome to eat.

&gt; where &quot;diving&quot; comes from<p>I&#x27;ve heard about <i>container diving in Sweden</i> long time ago, you had to jump in swimsuit only into container full of clothes and come out fully dressed.<p>No need to <i>dive</i> in Spain - you can simply ask &quot;<i>¿Tienes algo para reciclar?</i>&quot; (and recycling is ecologic).

I skip dived a bunch of switches, patch cables, patch panels, a couple of semidecent servers, and a bloody great DLT tape backup unit from a company that was closing offices near where I lived.<p>They were the core network of a small startup tech company I started working for around that time, for at least two or three years.<p>I only got rid of the 10&#x2F;100MB D-Link switch a couple of years ago, it used to live behind my TV to break out connections to the hifi amp, telly, and games consoles.

Probably all left over &#x2F; slightly out of date &#x2F; cosmetically damaged food should go to food banks (by law?) - to reduce waste as well as to help low income people.

&gt; Fruit mold is toxic but bread mold is safe.<p>Bread mold might not kill you, but _safe_ sounds like a stretch.