I was curious as to how many other arfcommers dumpster dive or will admit to doing it.



I have been for years on and off.

For instance, we have 5 colleges here and after graduation and fall semester you would not believe the things these kids toss away all because they do not want to load it up and take it home.



a partial list



ironing boards, Microwaves, TVs, dvd players, cleaning supplies



but the most ridiculous item I ever found was silver bullion, 6 ounces.  Some kid must have been a chemistry major, because I found two or three text books, I sold for $30 each, a scale, two scientific calculators with USB ports and as I was digging, I noticed something shiny in a Ziplock bag slide down the side. I reached down till my armpits were jammed on the lip of the dumpster and was able to grab it and I was amazed, pure silver!



Lets here your stories and maybe we can talk about who here has taken a walk on the wild side of DD and eaten food you found, not rotten cooked food, but packaged things like crackers and snacks

Ill admit ive done it and gotten some pretty decent stuff.

I always did it at night however...ninja style. Im resourceful, its pefectly good stuff, and im sure as hell not poor. I just didnt want anyone to see me

BeltFedLeadHead would have a fucking heart attack if he saw this thread.

IBBB

In Before Bed Bugs...

you don't have to DD to get bed bugs, just stay at the Holiday Inn!



 

Is this your house?


But seriously.. as kids me and my brother did a lot of dumpster diving. We found some good shit, too.

I kinda miss Taxman.

I dont really go out of my way to dumpster dive but I check out the ones at my apartment complex whenever I go past them. I've actually found some pretty cool stuff. I found a bunch of gun stuff about a year ago (cleaning kits, ar-15 grip, gun cases,oil and 5.56 AMMO!) that was probably my best score.

No, but if I had a pick-up truck I'd do some curbside collecting.

No, I an no horder



I take what I think is valuable and that I can reasonably use

The rest of it goes into my storage building and we have about 3 big blowout garage sales and use the money for vacation.





 

I was just teasing you Yeah, some people throw out really nice stuff. My friend April runs her own little moving business. A lot of the times people throw furniture away. She cleans it and turns it around for a nice $.

Just because someone else throws it out, doesn't make it "garbage". They just don't want it and have no better place to put it. Some people have no idea what they are throwing away.

I know what you mean, a friend of mine was an apartment manager in Austin TX, near UT and he rented a 40 foot storage unit to put all the stuff in that they left and once a month or so, had a sale right out of storage unit.

nice free money!



 

Found a table top pac man machine when I was about 12, damn I wish I would have kept that...

When I worked construction the dumpsters always had something useful in them. I worked on a Sam's club project once and they threw away all kinds of stuff.

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what gets me is that some of the people who are supposed to be "earth friendly" and "green" throw the most usable stuff away.

Check out curbs and dumpsters in housing near a large college/university at the end of the spring semester. I have gotten several working TVs, microwaves, and speaker sets this way. Most of the kids didn't pay for this stuff mom and dad did.

My buddy does this and brags about all the valuable stuff he finds.  I helped him move and it was fun pulling all these items out of his storage closet to the new place.  

You should see the stuff they throw away on military bases

I did it when I was a kid, we had several auto dealers and auto repair shops near my neighborhood.

I kept my bicycles painted with thrown out cans of spray paint. Found tools, tires, paint, floor mats, old Playboys, old calenders with pin up girls on them. Lots of cool shit for a kid. We decorated our tree forts with that shit.

I got a Dyson vaccuum out of a dumpster last year. Hardly used, just had to clean it out a bit This girl in my apt complex threw it out while moving. Worked fine, and I still use it.

Dumpster divers come out in full force around August 30th in the college towns. Its nuts, you can literally have people waiting in line for their turn in a dumpster.

coc

I don't think you'll be around here long.

wow. Nice one.

Do I really want to jump in this thread...?

Let me think about it and I'll get back to you...

Now-a-days it seems like playing Russian roullette with all the stuff floating around like bed bugs etc...

-Just my 2 cents

My friend always raids the barracks dumpsters after the joes clear them for deployment. One score he found a like new flat screen TV and a badass nitro RC truck worth a few hundred.

 

Relevant info before I get into what I found...

I was a civilian contractor working in Kuwait from mid-2005 until mid-2006...I set up and was running a recycling program for the U.S. Army on 4 of their camps in the northern part of Kuwait...Camps Virginia, Victory, Buehring and Navistar...I had a crew of 18 guys from India working for me split between the camps.

Camp Victory, Kuwait was where some of the Soldiers and Marines would process through on there way back home...It closed sometime in late 2006 or early 2007...

My crew on Victory and I would start the rounds picking up cardboard from the DFAC's and PX at about 6:30am and finish about 9:30am or so...this left us with quite a bit of time before we'd do the afternoon pick-up. One of my guys pointed out that there were an awful lot of cardboard boxes leftover from bottled water in the trash dumpsters around camp. Since "dumpster diving" was prohibited, I explained the situation to the camp commander and he wrote me an Exception To Policy letter authorizing my crew and I to retrieve stuff out of the dumpsters on the condition that I be present to supervise my crew.

The good folks passing through Camp Victory were going home and evidently didn't care whether they took everything back with them or not...when we started retrieving the cardboard, we also started recovering an astonishing list of other items...I kept notes...

Here's a partial list from mid-September until mid-November 2005...

Everything in RED was promptly turned in to either the Ammunition Supply Point or Supply Office:

1K+ rounds of 5.56 ammo

1K+ rounds of 7.62 ammo

1K+ rounds of 9mm ammo

150+ M16/M4 Magazines

A set of M240G Handguards

12 sets of Interceptor Body Armor

1 NIW MICH Helmet

30+ sets of JLIST Suits, most NIW

Several maps with notes and markings on them (turned these over to the S-2 shop VERY quickly every time one was discovered...)

Several 40mm M203 Grenades

Several Thousands of Dollars worth of Humvee parts

Many sets of Wiley-X glasses, most NIW

Many, many sets of DCU uniforms complete with rank, insignia and nametapes

A couple of FRS radios in working condition

100+ Goose-Neck Optic mounts for the M16A2 Rifle

Countless (literally dozens & dozens...) pairs of Nike, Addidas, Reebok and New Balance athletic shoes, most of which were in New or As New condition...(my guys were allowed to keep all of them they found as a reward...they would take them back to their apartments in Jhara and share them with all the other residents...they quickly became the most popular guys in the building...)

Several personal CD players

Many DVD's & CD's in playable condition...including a copy of "Girls Gone Wild Co-Ed Edition"

Several "Boom Box" type stereos

A couple of small but functional TV's

This was just a partial listing...but I think you get the idea.

The most disturbing thing about all of this is that these dumpsters were picked up by a regular trash truck and dumped in an open landfill...where Hadji could pick through it and get things to turn back against our guys. When I heard about the unsucessful attack in A-stan where the bad guys were wearing U.S. uniforms, the dumpter situation I experienced was the first thing that popped into my mind....

I did lots of dumpster diving as a kid and even occasinaly now. I have everything from tv's that worked fine, bikes, vaccum cleaners, militarty flack jackets, howitzer fuse box ( is store ammo in) items new in box with reciepts, computer stuff, furniture, toys and lots of porn . Pretty much everything i found that wasnt  kept for use at the hosue was sold for $$$$. i made lots of money as a kid selling that stuff. Also storage units can be a treasue trove someone who worked for 3m threw out metric tons of 3m stuff label makers etc. I sold that stuff at garage sales for $2-$5 for YEARS computer parts taht were new i took to the computer store they gave me cash money.

Where do you think I got my fouton from?  


I'm convinced that nobody buys foutons.  They just magically appear on the curb and if you want one, you take it.  I already have one, so every time I see a new one, I call my friends and see who's next on the list.  I have yet to meet anyone who has actually paid for a fouton.

I was coming in to say something about the hoarding...

I run a scrap yard.

Everyday is like a giant dumpster dive.

You wouldn't believe the stuff people scrap.

I'm a pro at it.  I've found just about everything you can think of.   Everything from a shotgun (Stevens model 67, I still have it) to a dildo. (I didn't get near it.)   All home electronics.  Once it was a pile of about six pieces of partially cannibalized

McIntosh stereo equipment.  All McIntosh stereo equipment is 100 percent rebuildable and repairable and usually worth fixing.   i did fine on that deal.      So many stereos and speakers that I stopped even worrying about the speakers unless they

were in really good shape and actually worth fixing if they needed it.  I can refoam any speaker but won't get into refoaming the ones that are hard to sell.



I've spent plenty of time in the dumpsters behind certain interesting manufacturing plants.   It helps to make friends with influential people in those companies.  Then you may be given permission to scavenge at will.





Don't scavenge in the dumpsters behind any form of medical establishment.  





CJ

Buddy of mine used to work for Lawrence Livermore Labs...  They had a list of 'approved' tools that they were supposed to have at their workstations.  Well, come audit time they simply threw everything out and ordered the "approved tools".  There was a lot of dumpster diving after work...

Then there was the lab manager who had a custom beryllium copper ladle made for the chili cookoff...to go along with the custom designed natural gas jets for the pot.

Your tax dollars at work.

I used to raid the dumpster at my local Blockbuster Video when I was much younger. Lots of cool posters and the occasional stand-up.

My prized score at the time? Stand-up display for the 1991 Punisher movie (Dolph Lundregn)

I was walking my dog once when some guys were hauling their deceased fathers 'junk' to the curb.

In my old apartment complex....almost daily and at the end of the month.

I started beore Dempsey invented the dumpster.

I used to. I have a mess of bedrails that I'm going to make a space shuttle with.

Danny

I'm going to need a good door gunner, send me your resume.

we have brush collection days 2x a yr in SATX.  Me and the yuong'un drive around and check out the piles.  I had just bought 2 ridge vents and of course I find 2 the next day.   the bought ones were returned and i got my $20 back.  Found a coleman stove and various sundries.  Love me some DDing.

Wow, nice drawing.  You are getting better each day!  

I actually developed a persona called "Salvageclaus" when after my wife would see me and my buddy dragging home bags of our finds and handing them out to children.



I have pictures...

last thing i took was a office chair. they tossed 2 one had a missing wheel and one was fucked up took a wheel off the broken one.



also gave a computer I got out of someones trash to a friends dad 04ish dell nothing to write home about but it kicked his 500mhz P3's ass all that was wrong was the HDD was bad replaced it for 30 bucks.





my old man has gotten tables chairs and the like and sold them at yard sales.

all the time.   I actually posted a thread on this subject a year or two ago.   I live in a college town and used to make it an event during move out weeks.

Shittons of cleaning supplies, brooms, mops, chemicals, etc.

Tons of furnature.  my shop has half a dozen modifiied computer desks as workbenches.  Have a decent enough coffee table, a dozen or so wooden chairs (some needed minor refinishing and/or repair, most not), lots of folding chairs, etc....a lazyboy chair that my roommate wanted...was clean and I cleaned it again...I'm not a fan of grabbing anything upholstered or mattresses...that's an invitation into someone else's filth.

Tools, tool boxes.  Who in their right mind throws away tools or jumper cables still new in the wrapper?

Working Televisions...at one point, we had 6 working TV's in an apartment with two guys.  Eventually gave most of them away to friends who needed them.  I'm still using the 29 inch one that someone threw away 3 or 4 years ago.  Picked up a kenwood stereo reciever that doesn't power up...I haven't pulled it apart yet, but I'm pretty sure it's a blown cap.  No biggie if I can't fix it because if I can't....I didn't pay for it anyways and it goes right back in the trash.  lol.

A charcoal weber grille...was used, but christ...it was usable and those things are like 90 bucks.  Gave it to a neighbor (I already have two gas grills).

Glasses, plates (and not crappy cheap ones either), vases, planters, scrap lumber, storage containers, music CD's, DVD's,  etc.

Our self propelled honda lawnmower that runs beautifully was a dumpster dive find by my wife's dad.  The only thing it needed?  to have the handlebar tac welded in one place...about 10 seconds of work for him.

The list goes on and on and on...

It's really amazing how wasteful our society has become, which in turn means I can save my hard earned money for other things like my ammo fort!

I do mine at work



I have picked out a drop light like this one but has a larger reel for a longer cord







20 feet of grade 100 chain, new but no hooks.





other knobs and thumbscrews from other worklight stands.

Recently pulled 40 canning jars out dumpster.

I mostly dumpster dive for food, horrifyingly enough.  In my freezer I've got five gallons of milk, ten pound of cheese, nine of sausage, two cartons of ice cream, and fifty pounds of meat.  i've been doing it for three years and haven't gotten sick yet.  Just have to be choosy and smart, ie don't grab any fresh stuff (especially meat or milk) that's not right on top.  I'll pass on it if it's not cool to the touch, as well (obviously winter is the best time for this sort of thing).  Also, fresh meat has to be cooked completely (lots of stewing and braising happening in my kitchen).

When I drove a delivery truck for a seafood company I was able to hit my prime spots nearly ever work day and at least a third of my total calories came from salvage.