As long-time dumpster divers and urban scavengers, we’ve gotten to know quite a lot about the objects Torontonians use up, break, dismantle, wear out, grow bored with or simply replace. On garbage night, we watch you shove the material accomplishments of your lives into bags and bins that you trundle to curb-side and dump under the cover of darkness before slinking guiltily back inside. Because we’re out there at curb-side every garbage night, we’ve gained a unique perspective on the ebbs and flows of Toronto’s cultures of consumption and waste.

We’ve concluded that it’s possible to discern shifts in cultural values, decorating fashions, vacancy rates and economic fortunes long before demographers and the popular press acknowledge them. We’ve come to understand how a complex, nearly invisible economy of salvage connects scavengers, recyclers, scrap haulers, curb-surfers, antique dealers and consumers. We’ve learned that it’s possible to furnish a home, landscape a garden, clothe yourself and supplement your income by salvaging the objects other people throw away. We’ve also come to believe that adopting a philosophy of salvage might help us save the earth by challenging rampant overconsumption, affirming conservation and reuse, encouraging a closer connection between want and need, and restoring urban processes more in tune with natural regenerative capacities.

Many Torontonians characterize garbage as filthy and even evil and view those who handle it as untouchable or contagious. When we troll the city on garbage night, we encounter judgment, rebuke and much more tellingly, efforts to pretend we aren’t even there. Like sin-eaters, we absolve the guilty by absorbing their transgressions, but the price of our subsistence is ostracism.
In Empire of Scrounge, sociologist Jeff Ferrell describes the “empire of scrounge” as “a far-flung, mostly urban underground populated by … illicit dumpster divers, homeless trash pickers, independent scrap metal haulers, activist recyclers, alternative home builders, and outsider artists.” Our own experiences here in Toronto suggest that scavengers are just as likely to be professionals, professors, entrepreneurs and writers. Yet, in behaviour underscoring a telling class dimension to scavenging, it appears that Torontonians who identify with the middle class will admit to dumpster diving provided their finds do not ever suggest need.

This practice of reducing scavenging to another form of shopping is a terrible pity given the many direct connections between overconsumption, waste and environmental degradation. Moreover, if admitted to in ways that transgress the smug confines of middle class norms, acts of salvage can do much to encourage a rethinking not only of consumptive practices but of such class distinctions themselves. It is our view, further, that broader acceptance of scavenging would open up environmental discourse beyond the middle class by acknowledging that the things poor and homeless people do as a matter of need can serve as both a moral lesson and a model for the rest of us.

Torontonians who salvage chesterfields, bike parts, books or wine bottles from the garbage might be surprised to learn that retrieving objects from the garbage is prohibited. The city actively targets dumpster divers and encourages residents witnessing scavenging incidents to call the city’s Waste Enforcement Unit. In some American cities, residents witnessing scavenging are encouraged to call 911!

Not only do city policies outlawing scavenging fail to distinguish between a parent hauling a slightly rusted tricycle out of a neighbour’s trash for her toddler and wholesale hijacking of the recyclable waste stream, we find the city’s stand against scavenging both ecologically and socially unsustainable. First, while the city claimed it would lose millions of dollars to the LCBO’s new bottle deposit return program, such a program is far more effective than blue box collection because more bottles are recovered whole and can be refilled or recycled into higher-grade materials than broken glass. To us, the city’s objection comes across as an environmentally counterproductive cash grab whose principal targets are small-scale scavengers, often homeless or living well below the poverty line, who are already limited by provincial regulation to returning 120 bottles at a time for which they will receive no more than $24.

Second, it has been our observation during years of urban scavenging that the city’s interest in “high value” recyclables like aluminum is limited by its odd blindness to anything that doesn’t come in a tidy package or fit neatly into a blue box. Aluminum cans and appliances are collected because they are easy to collect, but the vast bulk of aluminum would never be recycled if it were not for independent scrap haulers hauling away lawn furniture, siding, old windows and storm doors. Currently, our local scrap yard pays between 30 cents and $1 per pound of aluminum, making such rounds a tempting proposition. This form of scavenging should be applauded because it diverts tonnes of material that otherwise would end up in a landfill.

Third and most pointedly, we question Toronto’s blanket prohibition of scavenging because those it “outlaws” are often already in socially and economically precarious positions, including the poor and homeless, elderly, disabled and others excluded from Toronto’s conventional relations of production and consumption. For many Torontonians, scavenging is an important subsistence strategy.

The closer it seems we get to buffalo-jumping environmental catastrophes, the more we fancy the natural and resent the artificial products of culture. Yet, distinguishing the two remains nebulously elusive. In a critique of several decades of western environmentalism, cultural theorist Gay Hawkins argues that we will not resolve our troubled relationship with waste as long as our environmental discourse rigidly separates nature from culture. Citing philosopher Bruno Latour’s playful analysis of the ways western culture “purifies” ontological categories by eliminating objects — such as garbage — that call their separation into question, Hawkins suggests it is precisely the “material recalcitrance of trash, its lingering presence, its refusal to go away” that points us toward ecological restoration and even spiritual redemption. She adds, “this is where the ethical force of trash lies, in its ability to provoke and excite: to pose questions that challenge us to live differently.”

And how might we live differently? We need to get over our fear that garbage is a contagion requiring solutions that are invariably engineered, mechanical, and (above all) hands-off. At the same time, instead of ostracizing and outlawing scavengers, we would do well to admire their integrity. Without romanticizing poverty, it is possible to appreciate the intricate connections between scavenging and an ecological ethic rooted in an awareness that the resources available to sustain us are limited, something scavengers know better than anyone else.

Historian Susan Strasser observes in Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash that “what is rubbish to some is useful or valuable to others, and the ones who perceive value are nearly always the ones with less money.” At a time when our wants have produced a nearly insurmountable surplus of waste, Sasser’s comment is especially telling because it suggests that acts of salvage can reframe our notions of value. How might they do so? In part, by reminding us that our waste may be the truest mirror of our own character. Similarly, where we have disparaged scavengers because they remain separate from the conventional relations of production and consumption, we might instead learn to appreciate the ways scavengers connect us to a more sustainable set of relations where what is consumed does not exceed what is available, and where all that is available is considered valuable.

We would do well to take the natural world as a model, beginning with the truism that in nature nothing is wasted. Then, we might judge the objects we consume and dispose against the knowledge that while not everything unnatural is wasted, certainly everything wasted is unnatural. In short, scavenging makes Toronto not only more sustainable but a lot more interesting. And now, as you return to your own city wanderings, we hope you’ll be a little more open to picking useful objects out of the trash.


THIS PIECE IS ADAPTED FROM A LONGER ESSAY INCLUDED IN GREENTOPIA, WHICH LAUNCHES THIS NOV 11 AT THE GLADSTONE HOTEL. 2pm. $5. See books, page 53.

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