One man's trash is another's gold

Sometimes at night, Anthony Ateek has a hankering for a bag of chips. So he heads over to the Lay's Potato Chip distribution plant and digs bags of the snacks out of a dumpster.

"That's such a horrible waste of product for no reason," the Florida college student says.

Mr. Ateek is not a bum. And he's not a vagrant looking for last night's pizza crusts. He's a dumpster diver, and proud of it.

He once found a guitar amplifier that just needed a wire soldered, a 17-piece set of drinking glasses, and a fireproof safe with the keys included. He also "dives" for food: loaves of bread mostly, and he'll sometimes get drinks from the Pepsi distributor. What he and his friends don't need, they donate to charity.

To the uninitiated, dumpster diving looks like a survival technique for those on society's margins, where manners and cleanliness don't matter. But a quiet crowd of middle-class Americans are also "diving" and benefiting from others' trash.

Most divers will tell you they do it for two reasons: It's a treasure hunt for big kids, and second - maybe more important - they are disgusted by Americans' wastefulness.

Dan (who didn't want his last name used) is one of them. A father of four in Indianapolis who works in the computer industry, Dan regularly dives a route that includes some 20 to 30 dumpsters. He's been at it for seven years. Occasionally, he squeezes in a few dives during lunch.

On the day this reporter called, he had done extremely well. On his lunch hour, he found still-cold cartons of Tropicana orange juice (the expiration date was that day). Other days, he visits dumpsters at Wal-Mart or a national drugstore chain (the latter has been particularly hot lately, especially since he's figured out the dumping schedule). He's taken home coveralls and shampoo, hairbrushes and a clock radio. All items were new.

Dan scouts dumpsters like an NFL coach scouts linebackers, making multiple visits (10 or 11 in the course of a month) to see if they are worth his time. Often the new items are on top and you don't have to dig, he says. "There's kind of a sixth sense about it.

"My kids were so fired up when I came home with these squirt guns," Dan says of the top-of-the-line Super Soaker squirt guns that retail for $30 to 40.

A few days before his son's birthday, he found a dumpster full of Hallmark cards, party hats, and "three giant boxes full of party invitations. Everything was sealed and unopened."

Even though he's digging in dumpsters, he doesn't waste his time on junk. "I go. I sift through. Look at the top. Maybe look through a bag or two, then I'm outta there."

"People have this idea of [dumpster divers] as scraping coffee grounds off of half-eaten bologna sandwiches," says Mary Wisner, a dumpster diver and former country club member who lives near Charlotte, N.C. "It's not as yucky as people think."

In fact, it's clean enough for her to pick out food. "There was a period of two years where everything I ate was expired."

Ms. Wisner says that even with a low "yuk factor," people squirm about diving because "we've become so far removed from the source of our food. We have these really low squeamish levels."

Dumpster diving is a bit of a misnomer. Wisner has only entered a dumpster three times in her life. Once for a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Another time for a microwave oven, and most recently for 72 bottles of unused dish-washing liquid. (She had just run out, as a matter of fact. Now's she's buying it for the first time since 1998.)

But you have to be careful and respect local ordinances, Wisner warns. Towns and cities may or may not have laws governing diving. "It's a borderline activity," she says. "If they post No Trespassing signs, don't go there."

While most divers respect the law and see diving as a form of recycling, they don't respect the people that throw away useable products. "It's really sickening to me," says Dan. "All this stuff could be given to a mission or a food pantry."

He pauses, looking for the right words. "That just makes me livid. Americans overall are very wasteful. It wouldn't take much of an effort to go find people who can use this stuff."

According to the US Department of Agriculture, up to one-fifth of America's food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills. A July 1997 USDA study showed that 96 billion pounds out of 356 billion pounds of food produced for human consumption in the US is lost at the retail and food-service levels. The value of the lost food was estimated at around $31 billion each year.

Dan speculates that stores feel that "it's cheaper to throw it away than try to ship it to somebody." Wisner thinks store managers are just too lazy to donate food and are afraid of lawsuits.

John Hoffman has written a book, "The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving" (Loompanics, 1993), which has become a cult classic among the diving set.

Raised on a farm in Minnesota, Hoffman learned to dumpster dive from his Norwegian father (who was "tougher than John Wayne") and Czechoslovakian mother. "This actually was always very normal to me," he says. "I grew up in a down-homey, survivalist kind of way."

That's for sure. His mom cleaned wild game for extra money, and the family even had a road-kill permit. But, because of his parents' diving habits, they dressed and ate superbly.

Mr. Hoffman got the bug for scrounging early. He once filled the back seat of his car with rolls of toilet paper he found at college. Another time he helped himself to 144 long-stemmed red roses from a florist's dumpster on Valentine's Day.

What does he say to people who recoil at the thought of poking around in refuse?

"Revulsion," he says, "is relative."

"It's not like I gas up the car and say 'Now we shall dumpster dive,' " Hoffman says. "Dumpster diving does not have to be a deliberate act. Dumpster diving tends to be very serendipitous."

Serendipity is something Chad Richmond can tell you all about.

He once "dove" a dumpster at a discount food store, one he always thought would yield nothing. Instead, he hit the mother lode: 47 cases of bottled water (1,128 bottles). He's also come away with cases of Pepsi, $1,800 worth of scented candles, and bags of dog and cat food.

Once, after a power outage, when stores unloaded their freezers, he found a dumpster full of blocks of frozen food, everything from pizzas to TV dinners.

It irks him when stores place a donation bin by the front door, and they're pitching edible food out in back.

He wants to ask them: "Don't you feel bad for throwing things away that people can use?"

What it comes down to, Richmond says, is that people are lazy and "there is a little bit of 'I paid for this stuff, I can do whatever I want with it.' It doesn't make sense at all. Even if you don't want it, somebody out there must have a use for it."

Mark (who didn't want his last name used) lives near Austin, Texas, and may be the king of dumpster divers.

He was a casual diver for years, finding clothes, dog food, microwaves - pretty routine stuff. But then he started finding computer equipment - high-end items that big corporations had chucked. He realized he was onto something.

He started selling 250-400 items per week on the online-auction site eBay. He's now turned the activity into a full-time business and has a network of 50 buyers. He dives from 4 a.m. until around 8 a.m. three days a week.

Mark recently found a bunch of Windows 2000 servers (1,000 to be exact) that usually retail for $800 dollars per unit. He thinks the company may have gone out of business before the servers were received, but he doesn't know for sure. He sold them for $90,000. He also found 23 units of IBM website-building software that retails for $10,000 per unit.

"Software makes up 90 percent of my cash earnings, but only 15 percent of my volume," Mark says.

Virtually all of the computer products he finds are packaged and unopened. The dumpsters he dives are clean, with only cardboard, packing peanuts, and bubble wrap.

Until recently, he was making $24,000 to $36,000 a year. Now that he's diving software, his earnings have gone up considerably.

"Most people are conditioned to think digging in trash is wrong ... something bad is going to happen to you," Mark says. That's too bad, because diving is "like Christmas everyday."