For The Love Of Trash

Cory Doctorow profiles Darren Atkinson, a man who has made a living off dumpster diving for sixteen years:

..."there's plenty of nights when it's snowing so hard that you can barely see, nights that you might want to stay home instead of going out to work," he says. "But those are exactly the kind of nights where someone might just set something out beside the loading dock, instead of putting it into the compactor. Those are the nights where you make the big score. I've tried to apprentice people, but they never want to do it like I do, methodically, avoiding left turns and red lights, logging what you found in each dumpster and not wasting time on the ones that are never any good, going out when the weather stinks.

(Photo: Jason Samuels looks through a trash dumpster for edible food thrown out by an Au Bon Pain store, 12 January, 2006, in the Greenwich Village section of New York. Samuels was participating in a tour of the area by an informal group called 'freegans' who use alternative strategies for living, including 'urban foraging' or 'dumpster diving' which involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Freegan is a combination of 'free' and 'vegan', although many of the people are not strict vegetarians. By Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)