By Kathy Harlan
 A young man often dug through the trash bins of Austin, Texas, which were filled with throw-aways
from affluent students at the University of Texas.
As an experienced Dumpster-diver, he knew that
at the end of every semester he would find supplies,
equipment, food and clothing discarded by students who were leaving
and going home, either for the holidays or because they flunked out.
Lars Eighner was fortunate the fall semester of 1993. He dug out a
working computer discarded by someone whose social life was more
successful than his academic life. Using the abandoned machine, Eighner
wrote a book about his life scrounging from trash cans, the challenge
of living on the streets of Austin, and trying to
keep his dog, Lizbeth, with him.
The manuscript was noticed by an agent, and
in a short time Mr. Eighner was a best-selling
author of Travels With Lizbeth.
 A section of the book – Dumpster Diving
– can be found on the internet and is often
used in high school and college writing classes.
“Except for jeans, all my clothes came from
Dumpsters. Boom boxes, candles, bedding,
toilet paper, a virgin male love doll, medicine,
books, a typewriter, dishes, furnishing, and
change, sometimes amounting to many dollars
– I acquired many things from the Dumpsters,” he wrote.
A favorite tip is to dig up a used white orderly jacket, wear it to a
hospital just after meal time and eat to your heart’s content from often
ignored trays of healthy food lined up in the halls. And the best place
to scavenge warm, fresh food is from the bins outside pizza joints. Other
restaurants scrape and smash leftovers into piles or cans, whereas pizza is
often dumped whole into cardboard containers and into the bins.
Ten years later, another Texan took to the streets. Jeff Ferrell quit his
job as a tenured professor and returned to his home town of Fort Worth.
Temporarily without a job, he spent eight months living off the “bounty”
of the streets – for both research and survival. Early on, he discovered
an abandoned bicycle and rode it through the neighborhoods of the
super rich (where he found clothes with the tags still attached), working
class folks, industrial areas, middle class suburbs, and the inner city. He
discovered astounding amounts of junk, excess and waste, and began
cataloging the contents of his hauls. The measures of inequality are vividly reflected in the types of trash found in different neighborhoods.
The results of Ferrell’s odyssey are related in a fascinating book, The
Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash
Picking and Street Scavenging. The book is filled with unique characters
and colorful writing. But Ferrell’s greater point is that we are a nation of
over-consumers, and that while landfills are overflowing, our disposable
culture keeps encouraging us to buy more and then throw it away. And
what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
Both these books are fun and stimulating to read, but both make sharp
and vivid points about American society. High-tech millionaires, poor
college students, suburban housewives, and manufacturing companies
all have the same problem – what to do with the piles of trash they
generate daily. Most of these people are adding to the piles headed for
a landfill; while other people are digging through them for necessities –
and niceties – of life. What we do with our trash will have an impact on
our future – but most people sifting through throw-aways will not be as
fortunate as Lars Eighner or Jeff Ferrell.
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