A little treasure hunt, a little Archeology, a little Anthropology.

Jenny scavenges. I lend a hand.

I’ve tried potato chips taken (still packaged) from a Trader Joe’s dumpster. I’ve hauled faded chairs out of alleys and chipped window frames out of garages, and in the middle of a college school night, I ransacked a Goodwill dumpster, amazed at the junk people were dismissing, but I’ve never given a hard study to what goes into the practice of scavenging and am glad to say I can do that now and say it’s job-related.

On September 1, Jenny Murphy, who is leading garbage collection for the Garbage Wall, invited me to go to her first official dig. Before picking a dumpster, Jenny called around town to different thrift stores, asking for permission. Only one gave it, but we won’t say which, in case you dear readers decide to pillage all at once—the staff there might not like that.

According to Jenny, someone at the thrift store had said, “You can come after four, when the diggers show up.” “Diggers” is what the staff calls their regular dumpster divers. There was a digger present when we arrived. Thin and smoking a pipe, with Bob Dylan hair, he rummaged in one can as we did the other. He didn’t say a word to us, but I wanted to believe there was solidarity as a fellow recycler, a rebel against society’s need for newness. Jenny thought he might just have wanted us off his turf, which makes sense. He was there first.

We plunked bit by bit into Jenny’s plastic blue bin and were presented with obvious questions: how long did it take someone to suck all those Altoids? We found things a thrift store isn’t likely to sell (e.g. a porcelain clown with its head broken off), which made me wonder what went through people’s heads when they dropped off their donation. Could they not bear throwing their castoffs away themselves? How could so much waste be prevented? What would Altoids look like in bulk?

After the digger left in his 90s sports car packed to the brim, a couple in their 50s drove up, both saying not quite in unison as they stepped out of their car, “Finding yourself some treasures?” The woman lugged a box into the store, and Jenny and I struck up a conversation with the husband Brian, who calls himself a “salvage expert” and talked about his recycling experience.

“I hate to see things thrown away,” Brian said, “It’s a loss of resources.”
 

Brian talks about bulk trash at Princeton.

After Brian and his wife left, Jenny topped off the bin and put it in the back of her truck. The mission was successful, and since then Jenny has collected a couple truck loads of stuff for our Assistant Facilities Manager, who will be building the Wall.