The Dumpster Diver

The Dumpster Diver
Author: Janet S. Wong
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2007
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780763623807

Once a month--every week in the summer--Steve the electrician dons special gear and, with the help of youngsters who live in his building, dives into a dumpster seeking useful objects that they can transform into imaginative new ones.

The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving

The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving
Author: John Hoffman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 152
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Home economics
ISBN: 9781559500883

This is probably the most important section in the while catalog. With the times a'changin' as they are, we all need to better prepared for the uncertain changes ahead. The books in this section will give you a head start. A twisted guide to hardcore garbage-picking... sprinkled with bizarre asides, irreverent tone and political tirades appreciated by the hyper-cynical Generation X crowd". -- The Orlando Sentinel This book will show you how to get just about anything you want or need -- food, clothing, furniture, building materials, entertainment, luxury goods, tools, toys -- you name it -- Absolutely Free! Take a guided tour of America's back alleys where amazing wealth is carelessly discarded. Hoffman will show you where to find the good stuff, how to rescue it and how to use it.

Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course

Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course
Author: John Hoffman
Publisher: Paladin Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781581603699

It's been 10 years since the publication of John Hoffman's cult classic of urban scavenging, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving. Now the Garbage Guru is back with an advanced course in the unconventional economics of exploring the trash for fun and profit. Just some of the lessons you will learn include: the key secret to dealing with locked dumpsters; how to dive for information and use it to humiliate corporations, politicians and other evil-doers; the unusual profitability of diving for movie and celebrity castoffs; the BIG-bucks potential of industrial diving, including the top 10 most lucrative places to do it; how to sell your dumpster-dived wares through the flea market of the 21st century - eBay; how to parlay dumpster diving consciousness into finding cheap property, supporting radical causes, even landing political office; and much more!

Empire of Scrounge

Empire of Scrounge
Author: Jeff Ferrell
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2006
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814727387

Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption.

The Dumpster Diver

The Dumpster Diver
Author: Janet S. Wong
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2007
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0763623806

Once a month--every week in the summer--Steve the electrician dons special gear and, with the help of youngsters who live in his building, dives into a dumpster seeking useful objects that they can transform into imaginative new ones.

Travels with Lizbeth

Travels with Lizbeth
Author: Lars Eighner
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2013-12-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 146683644X

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets that has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years “When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand.” Containing the widely anthologized essay “On Dumpster Diving,” Travels with Lizbeth is a beautifully written account of one man’s experience of homelessness, a story of physical survival, and the triumph of the artistic spirit in the face of enormous adversity. In his unique voice—dry, disciplined, poignant, comic—Eighner celebrates the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounts their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and hitchhiking along the highways to Southern California and back. “Lars Eighner is the Thoreau of the Dumpsters. Comparisons to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Hamsun’s Hunger leap to mind. A classic of down-and-out literature.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis “Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul...A literate and exceedingly humane document.”—The New York Times

Freegans

Freegans
Author: Alex V. Barnard
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2016-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452945411

If capitalism is such an efficient system, why does 40 percent of all U.S. food production go to waste—while one in six people in the nation face hunger? This startling truth has stirred increasing interest and action of late, but none so radical as that of the freegans, who live on what capitalism throws away—including food culled from supermarket dumpsters. Freegans is a close look at the people in this movement, offering a broader perspective on ethical consumption and the changing nature of capitalism. Freegans object to the overconsumption and environmental degradation on which they claim our economic order depends, and they register that dissent by opting out of it, recovering, redistributing, and consuming wasted goods, from dumpster-dived food to cast-off clothes and furniture. Through several years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with freegans in New York City, Alex Barnard has created a portrait of freegans that leads to questions about ethical consumption—like buying organic, fair trade, or vegan—and the search for effective forms of action in an era of political disillusionment. Barnard’s analysis of this pressing concern reveals how waste is integrally bound up with our food system. At the same time, by showing that markets do not seamlessly translate preferences expressed at the cash register into changes in production, Freegans exposes the limits of consumer activism.

Gone Tomorrow

Gone Tomorrow
Author: Heather Rogers
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1595585729

“A galvanizing exposé” of America’s trash problem from plastic in the ocean to “wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators” (Booklist, starred review). Eat a take-out meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper, and you’re soon faced with a bewildering amount of garbage. The United States is the planet’s number-one producer of trash. Each American throws out 4.5 pounds daily. But garbage is also a global problem. Today, the Pacific Ocean contains six times more plastic waste than zooplankton. How did we end up with this much rubbish, and where does it all go? Journalist and filmmaker Heather Rogers answers these questions by taking readers on a grisly and fascinating tour through the underworld of garbage. Gone Tomorrow excavates the history of rubbish handling from the nineteenth century to the present, pinpointing the roots of today’s waste-addicted society. With a “lively authorial voice,” Rogers draws connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our throwaway lifestyle (New York Press). She also investigates the politics of recycling and the export of trash to poor countries, while offering a potent argument for change. “A clear-thinking and peppery writer, Rogers presents a galvanizing exposé of how we became the planet’s trash monsters. . . . [Gone Tomorrow] details everything that is wrong with today’s wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators. . . . Rogers exhibits black-belt precision.” —Booklist, starred review

Dumpster, for God's Sake

Dumpster, for God's Sake
Author: Ben Stoltzfus
Publisher: 39 West Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1946358169

Loviers City believes that cleanliness leads to Godliness. But order quickly descends into chaos when a sighting of the Virgin occurs. Soon, thousands arrive to visit the spot where She appeared. But the pilgrims leave their mark, discarding refuse and besmirching Loviers City’s All-America vision. Suspense mounts as Rudy Squazza, the red-bearded ringleader of the homeless, and Jasmine, a rich teenager working on a high school project, fall in love. He is a dumpster diver and the victim of police brutality. She dresses in black leather, rides a red Ducati Supersport 750, and is known as the “Angel from Hell.” Equal parts sociological lore and screwball comedy, Dumpster, for God’s Sake bends reality into fiction in a uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human. With compelling prose, canny insight, and artful empathy, Ben Stoltzfus brilliantly examines group behavior in a timely tale of collective zeal and righteous intent that explores a city’s urgent quest for soul.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2006-05-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429989076

Cory Doctorow's miraculous novel of family history, Internet connectivity, and magical secrets Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off. Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls. Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge. Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan's past won't leave him alone—and Davey isn't the only one gunning for him and his friends. Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.