Contexts and Cultural Practices of “Dumpster Diving”

<p>“Dumpster diving” is arguably the most common anglophone term used to describe a practice of direct, private recovery of useful goods from municipal waste receptacles. Common rough synonyms include “dumpstering” “diving,” “bin-diving,” and “skip-dipping.” The practice echoes older forms of gleaning, recycling, and waste reclamation but appears to have proliferated across the globe, particularly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and particularly (but not exclusively) in industrialized, capitalist economies. Manifestations of Dumpster diving vary widely around the world, representing diverse norms, contexts, and communities, from those experiencing food insecurity, marginalization, and stigma to those practicing a form of anticapitalist protest. They therefore represent a broad spectrum of subjects, symbolisms, and structural conditions. Yet across these differences, Dumpster divers largely share an experience or recognition of the failure of the economic system in general, and waste management infrastructure in particular, to appropriately value goods and people or meet the latter’s material, cultural, or political needs. A broad and heterogenous literature on the topic has been generated by both researchers and practitioners of Dumpster diving. To parse this literature and the phenomenon it captures, it is helpful to organize our thinking in terms of two fundamental facets: the Dumpster (its political, cultural, and economic context) and the dive (the shared practices, motivations, communal values, social movements, and minor economies involved in this particular mode of waste recovery). Both must be understood together as reflections of larger material and social ecosystems. Diverse species of the practice and its practitioners occupy varied niches according to the larger ecology of industrialized and capitalist regimes of waste and value, which tend toward overproduction and the manufacture of scarcity through the disposal of useful surpluses. As such, the literature on Dumpster diving and its growth in the late 20th and early 21st century may be read as a much larger story of the evolution of contemporary food systems, commodity chains, and consumer economies.</p>