Much of the personal data the voter breach exposed was already free for the taking bit. He tells me this a little after 2 am on the morning of July 7 as we cruise the trash receptacles behind the stores of a shopping center just off the Capital of Texas Highway in Austin. He is also founder of Assero Security, a startup that he says has recently been offered seed money by not one but two separate investors. Nevertheless, the year-old Malone does spend a good many of his off-hours digging through the trash.

And the fact is, he earns a sizable amount of money from this activity—more per hour than he makes at his Slait job. Malone stops his Chevy Avalanche next to the dumpster in back of an Office Depot. He heaves himself up onto the metal rim to lean inside and begins digging through a top layer of cardboard and packing materials. Much of it needs a little love, he says, but a lot of it, like this Uniden system, is in perfect condition.

Malone started dumpster diving nine years ago, when he was working at a lower-level corporate security job. But he also discovered something else. One night while doing his research, he decided to poke around in neighboring trash bins, including the dumpster at OfficeMax.

Before long, he went back out to see what else he could find. On a hunch he checked the dumpster behind the Emerson Electric warehouse in an industrial park near his home, where he discovered several discarded motors that would provide enough power to move a mini chopper along at 40 to 50 miles per hour.

Then, out of curiosity, he turned his attention to the dumpsters at Home Depot, Harbor Freight, Big Lots, Sears, Best Buy, and a few others. He was astounded at what he found: At first, Malone mainly used his discoveries for various hobby projects.

Along with his mini choppers, he built an electric skateboard, a set of plasma speakers, several 3-D projectors, and a computer that ran while submerged in mineral oil.

Even so, his garage soon overflowed, and Malone decided he should make some space by staging a weekend yard sale.

Amount of e-waste the US produces per person per year. That sale provided several revelations. The biggest was what sold with the drive-by public. But all those small sales added up: At the time, Malone explains, he was working for a company called Vintage IT and making only about half of his current salary, so he appreciated the opportunity to augment his income.

He began to organize his approach, making daily checks of the various malls and business parks closest to his home to ascertain what days and times dumpsters were most likely filled with desirable items. Within a few weeks he knew exactly when the trash was collected at every store and business on his route so he could time his visits for when the dumpsters were fullest. He also learned to look for stores that were changing locations or—better yet—going out of business.

Store remodels were also good targets. As we drive by a shopping center just off the Mopac Expressway, Malone remembers the weeks when the Circuit City that once anchored this mall was closing.

I got a boom box there that was bigger than I am. And what was great was that you could sell it at retail, because it was all still in the boxes. Within moments he has pulled his truck alongside the yarder and used the truck bed to climb in. Wading through the cardboard and bubble wrap, Malone quickly finds three slightly used dress-form mannequins that he is sure can be sold to an owner of one of the pop-up clothing stores that have become popular in Austin.

When Malone is finished there are two large stacks of laminated MDF boards and plate-glass panels from discarded store displays in the back of the truck. He can use the boards at a workshop that he maintains in a small business park a couple of minutes from his North Austin home. The prevailing law comes from a Supreme Court ruling in California v.

Free dumpster diving Essays and Papers

Green-wood, which held that when a person throws something out in a public space, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Most of that stuff is fair game. Trespassing, however, is a different story. I usually give them something, and it makes them really happy. Malone encourages divers to follow what he calls the Move Along Rule: So how did we get that way?

The search for an answer leads at least as far back as The United States had come out of World War II as the only major power that was both richer and more powerful than it had been going in. Prosperity was becoming a kind of secular religion, and its visionary torchbearer was J.

He was also, however, the high priest of planned obsolescence. It must be further nurtured even though it is contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity—the law of thrift. And the pace of obsolescence only increased with the rise of the digital age. Moore so famously predicted, the integrated circuits that drove the next generation of innovation were doubling in power every 18 months. This rapid rate of improvement meant that consumer technology quickly became outdated—unable to perform the same functions as the latest gadgets and machines.

By , according to an extensive Columbia University and BioCycle study, the US had become a country that every day produced an estimated 7.

Malone sees himself as a kind of bridge between not only the philosophies of abundance and sustainability but also the haves and have-nots.

It helps his cause that Malone is not only mechanically gifted but loves to learn new things. For instance, he acquired much of what he knows about scooter repair from the mechanics at a company called Austin Motor Sport, which hired him to set up its computer system.

It turned out that the customer drove a garbage truck; people on his route were throwing these scooters away. Replacement batteries tended to cost almost as much as an entire scooter, so most people junked them.

But Malone knew how to power the scooters for next to nothing. He had previously recovered a hundred emergency exit lights discarded at a construction site where an office building was being renovated. Each of those lights housed a volt battery, one that could be repurposed to power an electric scooter. Malone is not alone in his pursuits.

Indeed, he has discovered an entire community of trash collectors in the Austin area. Take his friend Coulter Luce.

Dumpster-Diving 6 Strategies for Success

It was Luce who taught Malone to see beyond commercial dumpsters and look around the apartment complexes surrounding the University of Texas campus, especially at the end of the academic year. Frequently, Luce says, kids just leave all their stuff behind. Malone called Luce in after stumbling upon a huge find in the parking lot of Discount Electronics, a local Austin chain. The store was clearing out its warehouse and had hauled everything to the parking lot of its main store on Anderson Lane.

He was still loading them when Luce showed up and walked right past the computers to the photo paper and toner. As for the 40 Dell computers, Malone still considers them a missed opportunity. Instead he rushed to sell the broken computers, which meant he mostly ended up giving them away. Luce, meanwhile, made a killing on the consumables he had collected. Luce also pioneered a unique method for targeting storage units. When people move their stuff out of storage, he figured, they make a lot of decisions about what to cull.

People who have gone through a divorce or are coming to collect the possessions of a deceased loved one inevitably toss an amazing array of valuable items. At Discount Electronics, he collects an assortment of circuit boards, wafers, and tiny screw-down connectors that can be fitted into dozens of electronic devices. Later, in the dumpster at yet another Office Depot, Malone finds a brand-new office chair with a claim slip indicating that some parts are missing. For Malone, Luce, and the community of scavengers they are a part of, one big threat looms: Big-box stores like Walmart have praised compactors for reducing the volume of trash they send to landfills, but to Malone and other dumpster divers the machines are utterly evil, creating far more waste than they eliminate.

How to Dumpster Dive (with Pictures) - wikiHow

While researching his book, Humes obtained what was one of the last interviews with William Rathje, the late University of Arizona garbage researcher. During that conversation, the archaeologist said that US overconsumption reminded him of the ancient civilizations he had studied, in which the moment that extravagance began to outstrip resources always seemed to signal the descent into contraction and decline.

In Garbology , Humes urged a break with that historical pattern and an all-out commitment to cutting waste. But in his conversation with Rathje, the university researcher noted one big problem with this idea: Malone warned me that starting out on the Sunday of the July 4 holiday weekend would likely mean a relatively scant selection of discarded merchandise.

Nevertheless, he still expected to back up his claim that he can make a quarter-million dollars a year from trash. At the end of our second night together which runs well into the early morning hours , Malone assembles his take and begins preparing a spreadsheet that includes both retail costs and probable sale prices.

The big scores are six Dell R servers, a single Dell server, a Cisco Catalyst Series switch, and a Cisco Catalyst Series switch.

He looks up each item to ascertain the retail price, guessing conservatively that he can sell the gear for half of that amount.

That startling figure leads to a thought: RANDALL SULLIVAN randysul aol. But ads help us keep the lights on. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. All of us at WIRED appreciate your support!

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