by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
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When you're looking for specific goods, retail locations are great, but don't count out distribution centers. These are usually listed in the phone book. A juice distributor, for example, will throw out all its juices long before the expiration date, when there isn't time for them to be sent to retailers, sit on shelves until they're purchased, then sit on shelves until they're consumed before that deadline finally arrives?not that expiration dates usually indicate much about food safety, in my experience! Anyway, in this case you're consuming food even the most bourgeois would be hard-pressed to write off"as garbage. Dumpster D;V/ng ^ou can also look on packages of specific products for manufacturing locations, and try 220 dumpstering there.
Dumpstering at self-storage units is worth your time. By definition, everything in one of those dumpsters has been specifically chosen, moved, and stored by someone. Finally, they had to come to terms with the fact that in this world of over-abundance, they would never have space for these prized possessions, and toss them out. Here's a glimpse: entire drum sets, VCRs, food, furniture, lumber, dishes, small appliances galore . . .
How about.. . thrift shops!? Yes, very wasteful. They cut the cords off trashed appliances, same as we do in the aisles of Wal-Mart, but these can be replaced. University theater departments are another "seasonal" harvest: wood, props, cloth, costumes. Musical instrument repair shops?lord have mercy! Construction dumpsters are luscious, but look out for nails. Carpet installers have dumpsters full of cut-ofFs. Any apartment complex, especially at the end of the month, can be a one-stop shop for the revolution. Yes, you can dumpster computers. Don't count out public trash receptacles for a handy snack, especially soon after lunchtime in a downtowoi area.
When? Always! You have to be persistent with certain dumpsters, but it's worth it to visit When more than a dozen tim.es if lucky thirteen donates one hundred pounds of granola to your cause. Keep tabs on dumpsters that seem sporadic; you may find that they follow an odd but regular schedule. In the case of foodstuffs, when a new shipment arrives it means out vrith the old. When does the truck come?
Timing also concerns the hour of the day. I try to dive at off hours: nights and weekends. Early mornings on weekends are particularly safe if you can hack it. Still, if I'm just looking for a quick snack, I never hesitate to pop back and see what's cookin'?many are the times I've gone around back while my companions went in the front, and I've Dumpster DMng returned with the more impressive score. Also, if I'm walking across town, I try to take 227
You can get rare earth magnets, which
are extremely powerful, out of the
hard drives of the old computers now
entering the dumpsters of universities
and bourgeois apartment complexes;
the older the computer, the more
powerful the magnet.
Magnets can often be used to reset
counters such as those self-serve
copying corporations once used;
powerful ones can also damage
televisions, videotapes, and
computers.
the alleys rather than the streets, so I can play peek-a-boo as I go. If there's something special, I come back later. One more hint: during a hot summer, you won't want to give food a long time to ferment.
There are timing issues related to season as well. In some towns, different neighborhoods have different curbside pickup days, on which households can put out all their oversize trash. You could call the sanitation department, purporting to be from each neighborhood of the town in succession, to learn all the best days and locations for curbside trash-picking.
If you live in a college town, you are all set. College kids throw out more useful garbage than perhaps any other class of people on earth. The big potlatch is at the end of a school year. Come spring, campuses swarm with wastrels and scavengers of all kinds. What kind of consumer hinging and purging happens in your town?
