Tis the season for mega DUMPSTER DIVING!!!! Everyone’s moving out and purging their unwanted items. It's honestly ridiculous how much stuff we throw away! By dumpster-diving, we're keeping usable items from ending up in a landfill.
First off, check the dorm garbage rooms.
By going straight to the dorm garbage rooms, you by-pass the actual “getting in a dumpster” part of dumpster diving. If your campus has a high-rise that seems to be occupied entirely by freshman, go there first! Freshman are more likely than anyone to have worried parents sending them off with cash and copious junk. Go to the top floor of the building and check each garbage room as you go down the different floors.
You can either stick to large items surrounding the garbages- honestly, sometimes this is the best way to go. I’ve found great furniture, CLEAN humidifiers, designer boots and bags, refrigerators, a Keurig and k-cups, mini vacuum cleaners, high-quality luggage and more without even touching the actual trash.
Though you can find some really great things, the most common finds are usually sealed left over junk food- your typical ramen and macaroni and cheese, old box fans, gross garbage cans, and printers. Even if you have no need for these items, if your campus is collecting various donations for local charities, you can always move them to the pick-up bins. Saves the earth and helps the community, win-win!
If the first few trash rooms are a bust, keep going! If you hit seven trash rooms and two of them have great stuff, hey that's a great day!
For whatever reason, I’m the type of person who loves free stuff- even if it means upending someone’s old chicken wings and sticking my entire arm into the garbage bin. If you're interested in taking it to the Next Level, this is for you..
The best dorm garbages to go through are the ones that are predominatly full of little individual bags of trash. My favorite way to go through these is to empty the bags one at a time into a different garbage can and take a peep at their contents. The bags seem to roughly consist of all one thing- dorm garbage, clothing, valentinesday candy, home décor, school supplies and whatnot. Sometimes you can get lucky and find an entire bag of nice, clean infinity scarves or something else equally specific.
But what about the STIGMA?
I’ve noticed that people on college campuses are pretty desensitized to seeing people pick through the trash. While it can be nerve-wracking to dig through the trash, most people will never say anything. I pretty much get the same responses everytime. The "nice" response: "good for you!/ Can I join you?/ I love dumpster-diving, did you find anything good?" or the "what are you doing" look. People get really embarrassed when they think they are being perceived as nosey. If someone looks at me while I’m trash picking and I look back at them, 99 percent of the time they get embarrassed and look away.
Make sure you leave your hunting grounds as clean as when you found them! The custodial workers already have a massive job ahead of them getting rid of everyone's move-out trash, we don't need to make it any harder. Keeping it clean also keeps campuses from cracking down on divers they percieve as disruptive.
Once you have your treasures, take them home and wash them! I give everything a pass with sanitizing wipes or a run through the washing machine.
In the end, I don’t keep much of what I find. A lot of it goes to friends and family, and even more of it goes to the donation bins on campus.
