There’s a revolution going on and it’s happening in your very own trash. Instead of loitering at the mall, kids are spending their evenings kicking happily into Staples’ dumpsters and rooting through printer boxes and discarded CD racks. What sends so many sensible, otherwise normal kids into the stinky depths of your city’s trash? The secret they’ve discovered and now exploit isn’t an elusive one … only the fact that the priced goods lining racks and shelves within the store can be found easily, for free, behind the store. The amount and quality of goods any store will throw away is mind blowing. Returned goods unable to be resold end up in the dumpster, as do scratched electronics, overflow, opened packages … everything is left behind to be plundered in the dark by those willing to take advantage of the effluent of our culture’s disgusting excess. Where there are armies of people starving in our very own country, and hundreds of millions more abroad, we are so privileged as to be able to reap whole feasts from our trash. Would you believe me if I told you how many returned Palm Pilots were thrown out behind a Circuit City in Charlottesville, Va.? Our country can’t even store all of its useless, expensive gadgets. From our own excess, and subsequent waste of it, the dumpster-diving revolution has taken over and is invading trash receptacles everywhere.
Save for the hasty dives, an accidental jab into some employee’s pizza box, dumpstering can be a clean experience. There are the times, in a panicked jump at the flash of a car taking the short cut around the mall, I’ve ended up face-first in a suspiciously smelling corner. Clothes are transitory anyway. There are piles of them behind any given thrift store, lying there begging you to try out a new fashion statement. All of us strive for the ultimate find, those instances passed around among divers. My friend found $750 cash in a notebook. Another friend built an entire computer from dumpstered parts, and after that a bicycle. Personally, I’ll never forget the Dumpster O’ Plenty up Rio Road at home, the never-failing cradle of joy plundered in the wee hours of New Years 2001.
It was my turn in the hole; my friend AJ says there’s nothing sexier than a girl digging through department store trash. First it was only the hopeful, “Oohh, wouldn’t it be unreal if we found the scooters that came in all these boxes?” Deeper, deeper, styrofoam, dead batteries and something metal, heavy, “Jesus Christ it IS a scooter!” In an excited whooping leap Joey landed beside me, pulling up the brand new, thrown away Christmas scooter! Then came another, another, and even another scooter—four of them, unused and still wrapped! We scooted out of the parking lot with ease, tugging our other loot in one of Safeway’s convenient shopping carts.
While the increasingly popular pastime of dumpster diving seems like the ploy of suburban kids out for free stuff, the fact remains that America trashes its excess. We live in a society so cluttered with things, that people and businesses have no choice but to throw them out. Boxes and boxes of cereal, crates of oranges, books, televisions, bikes, clothing … We don’t even have room for it all. The irony, though, is that it is illegal to take someone else’s trash. It is a federal offense to take the piles of BMG CDs tossed behind the post office. Just this summer my friend’s band had to cancel their tour due to the fact that the drummer ended up in jail as a result of late-night Trader Joe’s diving. The present reality, in which people’s kitchens can be filled and homes furnished solely on the finds of nightly dumpster diving trips, is ridiculous. You can question the morality of breaking this law, of disregarding the restrictions set out for us to follow, but I would then question the morality of letting 150 perfectly good bagels rot each night behind every bagel shop in D.C. I hear Pizza Hut puts rat poison on its discarded pizzas to deter bums from taking them after hours. Toys ‘R Us installs security cameras around its dumpsters and locks the lids shut. Even Whole Foods, your neighborhood cause-friendly grocery store, labels its dumpsters “cardboard only” in an attempt to deceive potential divers. The logic behind the selfish guarding of trash fails me and frustrates me to no end. I say break the dumpster locks, raid the back of Blockbuster, take back the surpluses of our hyper-consumption society. I’m not going to sit back and passively watch businesses throw away what hundreds of millions around the world would beg for. It’s trash, dammit, and I’ll take whatever I please.
