Despite exhaustive efforts to advertise sustainability initiatives and energy conservation, the UC Berkeley student dormitories are still producing an insane amount of material waste. Waste, the garbage of lost possibility, is a performed label more than a substantive one: these discarded objects are prematurely aborted, often retaining salvageable qualities despite superficial imperfections. Banished to the oblivion of the Dumpster, these objects go to waste simply by being called waste.
But the mass disposal of these objects has its advantages: the so-called “Dumpster diving.” Known as the willful reclaiming of disposed objects, dumpster diving is a conservationist and creative practice of reuse — a direct challenge to consumer material culture. Scanning the Dumpsters in South Berkeley’s student housing areas, I found materials to furnish my entire future existence: dresser drawers, a wok, office supplies, a desk chair. My acquisitions were aligned with another’s abandon, mediated through a gigantic metal box.
These Dumpsters are not only holding tanks of possibility but also provide for new models of consumer profiling. Usually our consumption is monitored to develop and predict commercial trends, but I could sidestep that customer documentation by diving into that dumpster. Literally immersing myself in other people’s garbage put me in the position of the commercial taste-makers, auditing people’s waste to determine what they value or desire.
So instead of voting with the almighty dollar, I was abstaining through adoption, snagging up products for free with a little strategy and a lot of patience. The practice of Dumpster diving aims to subvert a person’s social, political and individual profiles based on consumerism and instead render that person’s status through rigorous reuse and community sharing. While dragging my freshly excavated dresser home, I realized I had become invisible to capitalistic marketing, and I started grinning uncontrollably.
When online purchasing becomes easier and more efficient, the consumer is never the only beneficiary: as markets become more accessible, so do we, as demographics. Notwithstanding surveillance through email or search engines, my identity as a purchaser of goods is constantly being developed in a feedback cycle of supposed needs and actual money spent. I navigate advertisements and coupons and come out the other end with my bags full of stuff, furnishing my consumer persona. But in the Dumpster, there is no surveillance, and I am not tracked — iberated from materiality!
Now it’s easy to talk up dumpster diving’s benefits, but as a practice, there are of course risks. For one, hygiene: diving for food requires more stringent strategies for collection. But the discerning diver who skims, and pays attention, has a good chance of staying out of the salmonella zone. Timing and packaging are of course also important determiners of safety, minimizing festering time and maximizing protection.
Strategies of waste reclamation are not without collateral damage. Not only is dumpster foraging an ultimately unsustainable mode of sustenance, but may also infringe upon the resources of people who live without homes,and rely on discarded food entirely. Regardless of legal precedent, diving may be considered stealing, whether out of the bin or from the hands of others.
So limiting the goals to non-foodstuffs simplifies matters and becomes a more discriminating practice. Digging through the incredible volume of perfectly usable materials, it’s hard not to be the dog-lover at the pound: you just want to take everything home. But I learned very quickly to defend against my hoarding instincts by only taking what I could immediately justify using. The urge to not waste can easily end up in gluttony, and it’s easy to end up with a whole lot of junk.
But where there’s lots of waste, there’s lots of choice. And standing in the orca-sized cavity of a Dumpster made visible a cross-section of a certain student consumerism, an amazingly dismissive one. These objects tossed into material oblivion were ripe for the picking, and I have outfitted my future apartment.
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“The urge to not waste can easily end up in gluttony, and it’s easy to end up with a whole lot of junk.”
You’re demonstrating that the people who discard things are less tainted with materialism and acquisitiveness than the scavengers who come after.
I always snag bunches of free, unwanted stuff as students move out at my college in the Pacific Northwest, so I’m not knocking the practice. Really though, “liberated from materiality?” While dumpster-diving may not involve monetary transactions, it does not liberate the diver from anything. Indeed, the practice is based upon the same desire as a trip to Wal-Mart: A craving to acquire new possessions at minimum cost. Furthermore, the “capitalistic markets” from which the author seems so eager to escape are the sources of the wealth necessary to afford an apartment to furnish with anything, including free furniture that college freshman didn’t want. There’s nothing wrong with collecting free items, but framing it as a momentary respite from the world economy is just false.
However, Julian, the fact is that such a relatively innane activity pushes you sideways, out of the standard worldview. Volunteering can also do this. I would also say it is more than a momentary respite from the world economy–it is a practice that if extended to all possible applications across and around the world, would totally subvert, even destroy, the dominant paradigm. Why are retail sales quotes as ‘news’ and as the guage on whether our economy is doing well? Why indeed. Our system is based on people buying and selling things. It’s how the system goes around. However other variants exist-and it’s no crime to investigate other options to see what’s best–in fact it might be more of a crime, and un-American, not to. In the US people have been conditioned to see anything that feels like somehow un-capitalist as an enemy, but originally America was much more like this. Have you heard of Thanksgiving? The foundation of the success of the Western world has been the guarantee of private property, the rule of law and individual rights, and the freedom to pursue individual endeavors. Not some weird slavish loyalty and pursuit of some semi-mythical ’market’ capitalism — which has only existed since the 70s/80s anyway.
You should consider something like this at Berkeley… http://www.trashtotreasure.psu.edu/
you tried really hard but in the end yer not a very good of exciting writer. you also seems to align dumpstering with some sort of political thing but yer afraid to say anything specific. may you shouldve made that an issue cause yer spewing out tons of “anti-capitalist” and “anti-consumerist” and “paranoid consumer/surveillance hater” but yet wont make a firm statement about politics or the real lack there-of there is in dumpstering. you try to generalize the story too much so it “appeals” to a wide constituency unfortunately kinda isolating yerself from yer own but sounding like a whiny little student whose just disillusioned with the world they grow up/grew up in.