Posted on 12/10/2022 3:52:29 PM PST by nickcarraway
People have hunted for discarded goods in dumpsters and trash cans for decades. But in the last few years, it's developed a massive following on TikTok, with dozens of people chronicling their dumpster diving excursions, proudly posting their hauls, and raising awareness about the excessive, unnecessary waste from some businesses.
The yield for these dives seems especially bountiful around holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, where stores have specific seasonal stock they can't sell after the fact.
In the last week, creators have uploaded dozens of new videos of dives and hauls under the hashtag "#DumpsterDiving," which has amassed nearly three billion views on the platform.
Tiffany She'ree, a popular dumpster diving influencer with over 2.7 million followers under the handle "dumpsterdivingmama," posted a TikTok on Thursday showing her claiming a massive heap of Christmas-themed soaps outside a World Market store. Earlier in the week, she went through a Party City dumpster and found a smattering of Thanksgiving goodies: a turkey gobbler costume, an apple orchard welcome sign, hay bales, wine bags, pumpkin decor, and tea lights. A few weeks after Halloween, she found a myriad of costumes and a giant pillar of decorative skulls.
The range of items that TikTok dumpster divers have found is stunning, and some hunters have even hauled home expensive products like LEGO Star Wars kits, Apple AirPods, and Gucci ties. One forager said she discovered over $1,600 in items from a Spirit Halloween dumpster.
Some of the biggest dumpster diving influencers are very explicit about their mission to curb waste and raise awareness about the misuse of leftover, unsold store items.
Salty Stella, a TikToker with over 1.2 million followers, shared a video last week of how upset she was after discovering piles of food—KIND snack bars, soups, juice, sodas—in one dumpster.
"You wanna see some shit?" she said at the start of the video. "Look at all the ramen I'm collecting. You wanna tell me ramen goes bad?"
Anna Sacks, a TikToker from New York City with over 400,000 followers, is known as "The Trashwalker." She frequently shares videos of the binned goods she's found. Her hauls run the gamut from designer ties and puffy North Face coats to a potty training kit and medical insulin supplies.
In her videos, Sacks frequently draws attention to wasteful city tendencies and proposes alternatives like donating or recycling instead of discarding items. Her Twitter bio describes her effort as trying to "divert as much as possible from landfill/incineration, create systemic change & raise consciousness." She has called for "donate not dump legislation" for hygiene products that could be used to help people in shelters.
"Corporations don't want people to see the overproduction, the wastefulness, the lack of donation," Sacks told The New York Times in an interview in November. "To change behavior, it's important to expose the wastefulness."
/seinfeld
PeterPrinciple: Remember, it is the liberals that won’t let the grocery stores and restaurants give out free food. It has to go through the dumpster first.
The Emerson Act of 1996 was signed in under federal law and allows stores and restaurants to give away free food to food banks, shelters etc and protected from legal liability as long as they are not knowingly negligent such as dumping rotten meat.
Stores and restaurants claim the logistics of setting up the food giveways, transportation, storage until pickup and paperwork is costlier and take the tax write off instead so it ends up in the dumpster.
I was being a bit glib- it’s not a Coinstar per se. The small, locally owned bank by me has a change machine and doesn’t require you to be a customer
Scrambler Bob: For some really good stuff, hit a University Campus when school lets out for the Summer. I’m talking the ritzy Ivy League type of school.
Another great place are the high end apartment complexes at the end of the month when people are moving out and they find their U-Haul is too small. Most of the stuff is high quality and well taken care of.
My mother was hospitalized for several months before passing.
After Mom passed away, Dad was finally ready to sell the home. He was with my sister, then hospice, before passing. My dad had battled terminal cancer for years. The treatments extended his life by over two decades but were quite expensive and he had a visiting nurse coming weekly.
Thanks. I found a Coinstar at our local grocery store and I can donate the money to a charity or get a store card to Home Depot or Lowes without a fee or service charge.
What a blessing, for your sister, to be able to have him at her home.
She converted her finished basement into a full 2 bedroom apartment with a living room, huge flat screen TV, eat-in-kitchen, a 5-star bathroom with a walk-in shower and a bench, handicapped doors, handicapped bars, emergency exit, and stair lift. Took about 4 months to complete. She put about $30k into it for Dad. He loved it.
He preferred to spend time on the main floor with my sister and her family but had a gorgeous retreat when he wanted to rest.
Sadly, he wasn’t there for long. He got his affairs in order, made his final plans, and six months after mom passed he went into the hospital. They transferred him to hospice and he passed shortly thereafter.
Among his papers was a letter I had written him many years before, thanking him for being such an amazing father.
You are correct. My sister considered herself blessed that his final days were happy ones and she got to spend them with him.
Sounds like they’re hoarders to me.
“Trader Joe’s is particularly generous to food pantries.”
THX! Have to check that out. Currently unemployed.
...and 95% to 100% of these videos are staged...
I wouldn’t say it’s a blanket liberal problem on the food giveaways. It’s red tape in general, and is reasonably non-partisan in nature.
Where I work, it took us forever to get our corporate people to even think about giving away outdated food, due to potential liability if the recipient got food poisoning or some such thing.
Once they finally let us do it, our store manager worked a deal with a local food bank to pick up our spoiled food products on a weekly basis. I speak from experience since the task of weeding out the spoiled food and preparing it for the food bank has been one of my many tasks for the past month or so. A little frustrating since a lot of the produce that is “past its prime” is still in good shape.
Luckly, I have a friend who volunteers at a food pantry.
She brings me the foods that people don’t seem to take.
I now have about a dozen cans of Beefaroni! (Ate that like crazy in college)
Remembering the Carter years when gas prices skyrocketed. My Dad’s friend was a trucker and I remember him telling my Dad “Buy food now! It’s gonna skyrocket.”
When Biden stopped our energy flow, I stocked up MAJOR ON STEROIDS. Packed 2 freezers.
The last 6 months I’ve been spending about $10 a month. (My weakness are tomatoes and milk.)
Luckily start work the week after next!!
I’ll break the rules for Christmas dinner but I’m gonna try to stick to the $10 a month rule for a while.
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