Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scave

Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring dumpsters, scanning the streets and the . In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and even unproductive (any experienced scavenger knows well that salvaging is neither).
Table of contents

Vol 12, Issue 4, The ethics and politics of imperceptibility Infiltrating citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability. Tips on citation download. Amenta, E, Young, M Making an impact. How Social Movements Matter. University of Minnesota Press , 22 — Aronowitz, S The Politics of Identity. Communication Studies 61 3: Google Scholar , Crossref. Journal of Consumer Behaviour 8: Black, R Eating garbage: Socially marginal food provisioning practices.

Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice. Berghahn , — Carlsson, C Nowtopia: Social Movement Studies 5 3: Cerulo, K Identity construction: New issues, new directions. Annual Review of Sociology Clark, D The raw and the rotten: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Dewan, S Extravagance has its limits as belt-tightening trickles up.

Douglas, M Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Dryzek, J The Politics of the Earth: Duneier, M Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Eder, K The rise of counter-culture movements against modernity: Nature as a new field of class struggle.

Edwards, F, Mercer, D Gleaning from gluttony: An Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste. Australian Geographer 38 3: Eikenberry, N, Smith, C Attitudes, beliefs, and prevalence of dumpster diving as a means to obtain food by Midwestern, low-income, urban dwellers. Agriculture and Human Values Ferrell, J Empire of Scrounge: New York University Press. Bicycle couriers, subculture, and enjoyment.

The Intention

Sociological Review 55 2: Foweraker, J Theorizing Social Movements. Fraser, N Recognition or redistribution? The Journal of Political Philosophy 3 2: Gamson, J Silence, death, and the invisible enemy: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis. University of California Press , 35 — Goldstein, D The Spectacular City.

Graeber, D Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Graeber, D Direct Action: State University of New York Press. Gross, J Capitalism and its discontents: Back-to-the-lander and freegan foodways in rural Oregon. Food and Foodways 17 2: Haenfler, R Collective identity in the straight edge movement: How diffuse movements foster commitment, encourage individualized participation, and promote cultural change.

Sociological Quarterly 45 4: Halpern, J The freegan establishment. The New York Times.

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Jacobs, M Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America. From Ideology to Identity. Temple University Press , 3 — Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. Kaldor, M Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Kanter, R Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life.

Kauffman, L The anti-politics of identity. Kaufman, L Nudging recycling from less waste to none. Kurutz, S Not buying it. The New York Times , available at: Langman, L From virtual public spheres to global justice: A critical theory of internetworked social movements. Sociological Theory 23 1: Culture, Identity, and Social Fragmentation. University Press of America.


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Leland, J With advocates help, squatters call foreclosures home. Lipinski, J A commune grows in Brooklyn. Loveman, M High risk collective action: Defending human rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. American Journal of Sociology 2: It is not confined to dumpsters specifically, and may cover standard household waste containers, curb sides, landfills or small dumps. Different terms are used to refer to different forms of this activity.

For picking materials from the curbside trash collection, curb shopping , trash picking or street scavenging are sometimes used. When picking the leftover food from traditional or industrial farming left in the fields one is gleaning. It is viewed as an effective modern foraging technique.

People may often dumpster dive for useful items such as clothing, furniture, food, and similar items in good working condition. The term "dumpster diving" emerged in the s, combining "diving" with " dumpster ", a large commercial trash bin. Alternative names for the practice include bin-diving, [13] containering, [14] D-mart, [15] dumpstering, [16] totting, [1] and skipping. The term "binner" is often used to describe individuals who collect recyclable materials for their deposit value. For example, in Vancouver , British Columbia, binners, or bottle collectors, search garbage cans and dumpsters for recyclable materials that can be redeemed for their deposit value.

The karung guni , Zabbaleen , the rag and bone man , waste picker , junk man or bin hoker are terms for people who make their living by sorting and trading trash. A similar process known as gleaning was practised in rural areas and some ancient agricultural societies, where the residue from farmers' fields was collected. Some dumpster divers, who self-identify as freegans , aim to reduce their ecological footprint by living from dumpster-dived-goods, [19] sometimes exclusively.

The organization Same Day Dumpsters has written, "Traditionally, most people who resorted to dumpster-diving were forced to do so out of economic necessity, but this is not the case today. The wastefulness of consumer society and throw-away culture compels some individuals to rescue usable items for example, computers or smartphones , which are frequently discarded due to the extensive use of planned obsolescence in the technology industry from destruction [19] and divert them to those who can make use of the items.

A wide variety of things may be disposed while still repairable or in working condition, making salvage of them a source of potentially free items for personal use, or to sell for profit. Irregular, blemished or damaged items that are still otherwise functional are regularly thrown away.

Discarded food that might have slight imperfections, near its expiration date , or that is simply being replaced by newer stock is often tossed out despite being still edible. In the United Kingdom , cookery books have been written on the cooking and consumption of such foods, which has contributed to the popularity of skipping. Students have been known to partake in dumpster diving to obtain high tech items for technical projects, or simply to indulge their curiosity for unusual items.

Garbage picking serves as the main tool for garbologists , who study the sociology and archeology of trash in modern life. Private and government investigators may pick through garbage to obtain information for their inquiries.


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Illegal cigarette consumption may be deduced from discarded packages. Dumpster diving can be hazardous, due to potential exposure to biohazardous matter, broken glass, and overall unsanitary conditions that may exist in dumpsters. Arguments against garbage picking often focus on the health and cleanliness implications of people rummaging in trash. Divers can also be seriously injured or killed by garbage collection vehicles; in January , in La Jolla , Swiss-American man Alfonso de Bourbon was killed by a truck while dumpster diving.

In general a legal concept called abandonment of property covers this question of the subject of ownership of property that is disposed of. Discarded billing records may be used for identity theft. Since dumpsters are usually located on private premises, divers may occasionally get in trouble for trespassing while dumpster diving, though the law is enforced with varying degrees of rigor.


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Abandonment of property is another principle of law that applies to recovering materials via dumpster diving. Police searches of discarded waste as well as similar methods are also generally not considered violations; evidence seized in this manner has been permitted in many criminal trials. In the United States this has been affirmed by numerous courts including and up to the Supreme Court , in the decision California v.

The doctrine is not as well established in regards to civil litigation. Companies run by private investigators specializing in such techniques have emerged as a result of the need for discreet, undetected retrieval of documents and evidence for civil and criminal trials. Private investigators have also written books on "P. In , a Belgian dumpster diver and eco-activist nicknamed Ollie was detained for a month for removing food from a garbage can, and was accused of theft and burglary.

On February 25, , he was arrested for removing food from a garbage can at an AD Delhaize supermarket in Bruges. Ollie's trial evoked protests in Belgium against restrictions from taking discarded food items. In Ontario , Canada, the Trespass to Property Act —legislation dating back to the British North America Act of [30] —grants property owners and security guards the power to ban anyone from their premises, for any reason, permanently.

This is done by issuing a notice to the intruder, who will only be breaking the law upon return. The judge ruled the policeman's actions as legal although there was no warrant present, which led some to speculate the event as validation for any Canadian citizen to raid garbage disposals.

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Skipping in England and Wales may qualify as theft within the Theft Act [34] [ original research? In Germany, dumpster diving has been referred to as "containern", [35] and a waste container's contents are regarded as the property of the container's owner. Therefore, taking items from such a container is viewed as theft. Be that as it may, the police will routinely disregard the illegality of garbage picking seeing as the items found are generally of low value.

There has only been one known instance where people were to be prosecuted: In the United States, the California v. Greenwood case in the U. Supreme Court held that there is no common law expectation of privacy for discarded materials. In a Minnesota case involving the theft of customer lists from a garbage can, Tennant Company v.

Advance Machine Company N. The Castle Infinity videogame, after its shutdown in , was brought back from the dead by a fan rescuing its servers from the trash. Food Not Bombs is an anti-hunger organization that gets a significant amount of its food from dumpster diving from the dumpsters at small markets and corporate grocery stores in the US and UK. In October , in North London , three men were arrested and charged under the Vagrancy Act when they were caught taking discarded food: The charges were dropped on 29 January after much public criticism [53] as well as a request by Iceland's chief executive, Malcolm Walker.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the surname, see Binner surname.

Dumpster diving

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