Top Tip: How fast fashion revitalised dumpster diving

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While dumpster diving might once have carried a negative stigma, the changing economics of retail, ecommerce and the cost of living have created a perfect storm for the practice's revival, writes Adam Maguire.

For all its ills, social media has at least played a positive role in the revival of some out-of-favour practices and past-times; from niche crafts to long-neglected recipes.

But it's also helping to rehabilitate certain activities – including some that would previously have been seen as the preserve of the most desperate.

Dumpster diving certainly fits that bill. While the practice of rooting through bins and skips would long have been - fairly or unfairly - with poverty, today it is experiencing something of a boom in popularity.

That is in part due to the cost-of-living crisis, which has made many people take significant steps to reduce their expenses. But that same pressure has also seen people search for ways to earn more money, and many have stumbled upon a community of dumpster diving influencers, who post regularly about their hauls and brag openly about their earnings.

One such influencer - 31-year-old Carter Stevens – claims to be making somewhere in the region of $140,000 a year from dumpster diving. Others talk about slightly more modest – but nonetheless impressive – earnings in the tens of thousands.

Of course this is social media we’re talking about – so followers might not quite be getting the most accurate impression of what’s involved.

Viewers may focus in on the bag of mint condition luxury handbags that a particular influencer found, but not see the 30 times before that find when they got nothing from their trawls through piles of rubbish and mess. Or they might not see the hours and hours of walking or driving around divers did in search of prospects.

But either way, it’s clear those influencers have helped to paint dumpster diving in a very different light than it might have enjoyed before.

In many cases they are facilitated by some fairly easy-going or vague laws. In certain states in the US, for example, what’s thrown away is essentially seen as fair game.

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