At the third convenience store of the night, Anna Sacks, 31, a dumpster diver
who goes by @trashwalker on
TikTok, hit the jackpot. Half a dozen clear trash
bags sat along Second Avenue not far from her home on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side.
اضافة اعلان
Kneeling on the ground, Sacks untied the bags with a
gloved hand and, using her iPhone flashlight, pulled out her haul: Tresemmé
hair spray. Rimmel London Stay Glossy lip gloss. Two bags of Ghirardelli sea
salt caramels. Six bags of Cretors popcorn mix. Wet mop refills. A Febreze air
freshener. Toe warmers. A bottle of Motrin. All of it unopened, in the
packaging and far from the expiration date.
The total value was perhaps $75, but money was not
the point. Sacks, a former investment bank analyst, films her “trash walks”, as
she calls them, and posts the videos to expose what she sees as the
wastefulness of retailers who toss out returned, damaged, or otherwise unwanted
items instead of repurposing them.
Fed up with the profligate practice, dumpster divers
like Sacks have started posting videos of their hauls on TikTok in recent years
as a way of shaming corporations and raising awareness of the wasteful
behavior.
A search of #dumpsterdiving on TikTok brings up tens
of thousands of videos that collectively have billions of views. They include a
video by Tiffany Butler, known as Dumpster Diving Mama, who found several
handbags in the trash last year outside a Coach store in
Dallas, all of them
apparently slashed by employees. Sacks bought the bags and made a TikTok
calling out the fashion brand. After the video went viral and sparked outrage
(and was picked up by Diet Prada), Coach said it would stop “destroying
in-store returns of damaged, defective, worn, and otherwise unsalable goods”,
and instead try to reuse them.
Most of the dumpster activists target mass retailers
like CVS, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods and Party City. Luxury fashion brands tend to keep
a tighter control over their excess inventory and sometimes pay to have unsold
items burned.
At a time when corporations tout their commitment to
the environment, the sight of $500 handbags or even $6 Ghirardelli chocolates
discarded in a dumpster can be a bad look.
Michael O’Heaney, executive director of The Story of
Stuff Project, an environmental group in Berkeley,
California, that raises
awareness about waste through storytelling, called the eco-minded dumpster
divers “metal detectors for flaws in the system”.
“What they’re finding in the trash are a fascinating
lens into our waste economy,” said O’Heaney, whose organization recently filmed
a trash walk with Sacks.
Activists like Sacks would prefer to see retailers
donate items to charitable organizations and others in need. “We should be
incentivizing corporations ideally to produce less in general,” Sacks said, but
if that is not possible, they should “donate or sell it through, or store it
for the next year, rather than destroy it”.
Many retailers say that they do, in fact, donate
unsold goods, but some merchandise still needs to be sent to landfills.
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