How dumpster diving went from taboo to trendy: ‘It’s a treasure hunt’

When Annemarie Cox drives around San Diego, she scans the urban landscape for one thing that the rest of the population likely ignores: dumpsters. Where other people see trash, she sees possibilities – quirky secondhand clothes, collectible antiques, even family heirlooms and photographs that have been casually discarded.

On one recent Tuesday in southern California, the mid-morning sun already beating down, Cox’s usual quest was under way. She paid a visit to one of her favorite local dumpsters, first resting her forearms comfortably on the sides and then reaching barehanded towards whatever was at the bottom. Other than a broken TV atop a huge stack of cardboard boxes, there wasn’t much to find this time around.

But Cox wasn’t worried. She had already found a whole treasure trove of other items in this very same bin, including the feathered hat she was currently wearing, a plastic bag of brand-new T-shirts and a collection of decorative, hand-painted Easter eggs from Austria.

“I dumpster dive to save the world from drowning in trash,” Cox said. “A bit sappy, but my friends and family understand my passion.”

Catching a glimpse of Cox in her natural habitat – hovered over the lip of an overflowing dumpster – might make some onlookers typecast her in a certain way. But the 60-year-old defies stereotypes: she holds a bachelor’s degree in archeology and works as a marketing manager in southern California. She also peers into a trash can almost every day of the week, and shares photos of her finds to the Facebook group Dumpster Diving San Diego, which boasts several thousand members.

I dumpster dive to save the world from drowning in trash

Annemarie Cox, dumpster diver

Cox and the other San Diego divers aren’t alone. Dumpster diving, once a firmly taboo act, is approaching the mainstream. Videos of people jumping into the bins behind stores and apartment buildings, and later showing off their trash hauls, have become a wildly popular corner of social media.

On TikTok alone, tens of thousands of #dumpsterdiving posts have racked up billions of views. A varied cohort of people – from Annemarie Cox, to a 32-year-old YouTuber in Texas, to a self-described “freegan” who leads trash tours in New York City – now devote their lives to dumpster diving.

The reasons behind the unexpected boom are manifold. As many Americans worry about the rising cost of living, some look to the trash to find food and cut down on expensive grocery bills. Others love the prospect of scoring heaps of clothing and furniture to donate or sell.

But often, the prevailing motivation is simple: to ensure that less trash ends up rotting in landfills. The US has an ever-growing trash problem, generating more than 292m tons of municipal solid waste in 2018 , or nearly 5lbs for each person each day, according to the most recent statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly half of that trash went to a landfill. Food waste is particularly egregious, with an estimated 30-40% of the country’s food supply thrown away.

Going dumpster diving is one creative way to stop that cycle of waste, Cox said.

“When you throw something away, what is ‘away’?” she said. “It’s away from you, but it’s towards someone else.”

‘Shocking amount of waste’

Related: ‘I open the bins and think I’m in for a treat’: the Australian dumpster divers who find treasure in the trash

Kitchen appliances and laundry detergent. Boxes of unopened hand sanitizer. Mountains of never-used Christmas and Halloween decorations. Laundry hampers filled with folded, freshly washed clothes. iPhones. A Western Union telegram from 1964 (“Come a week later,” it read, “I’m sick. -Mom”). Even a signed letter from former president George Bush to a local school.

Those are just a few of the things that Kelly Sparks, better known as @breafkast on YouTube, has found in the dumpsters of northern Texas, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) to the east of where Cox salvages trash in California.

“Dumpster diving,” she said, “is the epitome of a treasure hunt.”

Sparks started diving more than a decade ago, first by exploring the Trader Joe’s dumpsters in Los Angeles, where Cox’s now husband and fellow YouTube collaborator went to college. In the span of nine months, the only grocery item that Sparks bought from a store was soy sauce.

“It was overwhelming, the amount of food that was in their dumpster,” Sparks said. “We would dumpster dive every night. We got so hooked on it.”

Sparks created her YouTube channel six months before the pandemic, initially thinking that her dad, who loved to hear about her dumpster finds, might be her only fan. “I really didn’t expect other people to be interested in it,” she said.

Instead, the page took off. Sparks now has nearly a quarter-million subscribers on YouTube, and also created a Facebook group for other dumpster diving enthusiasts, which quickly took on a life of its own; it now has about 15,000 members.

People are fascinated by dumpster diving videos, Sparks hypothesized, because of the “shocking amount of waste” they depict.

“A lot of my viewers are international,” she said. “And I see comments from people saying, ‘We don’t see anything like this at all in the UK.’ Or ‘Here in Germany, our recycling programs are so good, why do we see bottled water in your dumpsters?’”

Sparks and her husband have since graduated beyond Trader Joe’s dumpsters to the trash behind other retail stores and apartment complexes. They wear gloves and closed-toed shoes, and come prepared with “grabbers” (think a plastic claw on the end of a stick) and a small rake that they use to sift through the garbage.

Their biggest yearly event (akin to the “Christmas of dumpster diving”, Sparks said) is when college students move out of their dorms in the spring, and usually only have a day or two to leave campus. Sparks has scored big at schools across Texas – finding towers of working mini fridges and microwaves, stacks of plastic shelves and a huge host of other dorm necessities.

The couple donates about 80% of what they find dumpster diving, either to a community pantry in their area, a nearby thrift store that benefits a women’s shelter or the local animal shelter.

Sparks said what she hopes is the main takeaway from her channel is that “there are other ways to get rid of your stuff”.

“You don’t have to throw it all away,” she added.

Finding fresh food in the trash

Like Sparks in Texas and Cox in California, Janet Kalish is used to finding items in perfect condition in the trash in New York City. For Kalish, the search is primarily about food; it’s not uncommon for her to find a rainbow of produce (from fresh broccoli to squash to shallots), canned beans and soup, pasta and salad dressing in the trash cans that line the city’s streets.

Kalish is one of several volunteers who run a “freeganism” group and host monthly “trash tours” in the city. “Freegans”, as defined by Kalish, generally avoid participating in the conventional economy and buy as little as possible.

Roughly a dozen people attended one such trash tour in June, rooting methodically through garbage cans to salvage food that otherwise would have been thrown away. While Kalish doesn’t directly ask attendees why they decided to take a tour, many talk about the high cost of groceries. And newcomers are often surprised to see how easy it is to find unspoiled food, she said.

“People don’t expect to find so much really high-quality, good, nutritious, viable food that’s in such good shape,” Kalish said.

Stores discard food for many reasons, she said, beyond items merely going bad or being spoiled. The “best-by” or “use-by” dates on food typically only signify how long a product will be at peak quality , not the date that food spoils. Still, retailers might throw away things with “expired” labels.

“I think people assume that the system is working, and that things are done ‘properly’, and that things go to waste because they’re a waste,” Kalish said. “People assume that if it’s in the garbage, there’s a good reason for it to be there.”

For Cox, the dumpster diver from California, the upside is that after decades of saving things from the trash, there seems to be more cultural awareness around waste and about reusing secondhand things. Shopping at a thrift store in the 1970s and 80s, for example, was not something to brag about, she said. But now that shame and stigma has vanished.

In the same way, perhaps a few decades from now it won’t be strange to see someone hopping into a dumpster, she said.

Because the idea of perfectly good items sitting in the trash – while it might make for a fun treasure hunt in the short term – “brings sadness to my heart”.

“There’s no planet B,” she said.