Dumpster Diving for Fun and Profit

The recent post on dumpster diving over at The Bizarro World Debt Elimination Freak Show got me thinking about my old dumpster diving days in time past. In the summer of 2002 I was back home for the summer from grad school at Syracuse University. I needed to save some money because I was to be moving to my present town in the fall and I would need some cash for a security deposit and first month's rent on an apartment in a way overpriced location. I looked around at local jobs, but nothing sounded like much fun at the time. My mom made the suggestion that I do some work for her fiancé, Robert Walker, who was basically a local jack-of-all-trades handyman. He agreed pay me $10.00/hr., and the two of us would be able to crank out quite a bit of work together.

One of Robert's long-time hobbies/passions was and is dumpster diving. So whenever we were short on work, we would make the rounds to all the construction sites, shopping centers, etc., raiding the dumpsters for anything that was remotely sell-able. Most of the time we were looking for scrap metal, especially aluminum and copper, which we could then drive over to the Alcoa (AA) scrap yard and sell for the going rate on scrap metals. Pure copper or aluminum caught the highest rate, but "dirty" copper or aluminum was also able to be sold on the cheap.

One of our regular stops was at the local "Big-Box-store" dumpster. This particular Big-Box was having a peculiar problem: Their forklift driver had a habit of punching holes in some of the boxed items they sold. Rather than sell a damaged product, Big-Box would just toss it in the dumpster and leave it ripe for the picking. One particular product that we found pretty regularly was a certain model of Rubbermaid snap-together outdoor storage shed; the kind that goes for a few hundred dollars a pop. (Ahhh, the memories!) The forklift driver was punching a hole in the box and damaging the doors of the shed. Whenever we found one of these sheds in the dumpster, we would make off with it like bandits, run it back to Robert's garage, assemble it, replace the missing door with gray-painted plywood, and put it out on the street with a for sale sign.

The whole process probably took under two hours, and we would be able to net somewhere between $150 and $200 for each shed we recovered. $75–$100 for each of us per shed was not a bad deal for two hours of work. By the end of summer we had the storage shed assembly down to a science and we were able to shave another half hour off that assembly time. We probably found, assembled and sold somewhere between seven and ten identical sheds all with the same missing door over the course of that summer.

The next summer a similar situation arose. My then-girlfriend and now-wife and I had become engaged, and I needed to save money for our honeymoon. We were to be married in August in her hometown in Florida and then we were to drive across country for our honeymoon and to get her moved out to California while I worked on my Ph.D. Same thing: I needed the cash, but a regular job didn't sound like much fun at all; so Robert and I were back to our old tricks of odd-job work and construction, with a healthy dose of dumpster diving when the work wasn't forthcoming.

So all-in-all I have two summers of professional dumpster diving experience under my belt. As long as we avoided the dumpsters with heavy-food content (yuck!) and stuck to those dumpsters that tended to yield sell-able materials (construction sites, stores, etc.), we were able to make pretty decent money while avoiding the ick-factor that is usually associated with dumpster-diving.

I wonder what my students would think if they knew that their college professor moonlights as a professional dumpster diver! Lesson in short: when you need the cash, you can't be proud. Swallow your pride, find a good dumpster, and dive right in! I had a better time dumpster diving than I have had at practically every job I've had before or since. I have always had relatively fun jobs (coffeeshop barista, RadioShack salesperson, college professor, etc.), but running around in a pickup truck all day with a toolbox and a bed full of scrap metal was more existentially freeing than any of them!