A north London mother says she has saved “hundreds of pounds” in six months by taking clothes, scooters and household items from the bins outside her local supermarket, the BBC reported.
Darryl Baker, 39, a freelance journalist, first noticed piles of clothing dumped beside the recycling bins. She asked staff if she could take some and was given permission.
She says her two children now have entire new wardrobes, with more put away for years ahead. Brands she found include Ralph Lauren, Nike and The North Face. She also found an Ikea picture frame and children’s scooters.
Some of the haul goes to relatives, some to charity and some is sold. A men’s Barbour jacket recently fetched £30.
Shampoo, baked beans and a £600 dress
Ms Baker is one of a growing band of so-called dumpster divers, who search commercial bins for usable goods. Their reasons include saving money, donating to charity and anger at waste.
Charlotte Bayford, 44, a sales assistant in Essex, times her searches for when students at Essex University go home for the summer and leave unwanted belongings behind. That includes part-used toiletries. She says she has not bought shampoo for eight years.
She also eats sealed food she finds, including tins of baked beans. She gives much of what she finds to charity and sells some of the more valuable items.
Millie Diamond, a 36-year-old London stylist, posts her bin searches on TikTok. She looks for fabric and clothing to refashion and sell. She began after finding vintage clothes in a bin outside a closed business, and she values one dress she found at £600.
In Texas, Jeff Ferrell, 72, a retired sociology professor who has written books on the subject, says he has searched bins for more than 50 years. He told the BBC he still goes out every day by bicycle.
He says he sells scrap metal for about $150 (£110) every two weeks. His wife sells other finds on eBay. He puts the yearly value of what he finds at “tens of thousands of dollars”, though that figure is his own estimate.
What does the law say?
There is no single UK law that bans or permits the practice. Sunjay Versani of Duncan Lewis Solicitors told the BBC that prosecution is unlikely where goods have genuinely been discarded, but that it depends on the circumstances.
“If in doubt, the safest approach is to ask the owner or business for permission,” he said.
Waste industry figures take a stricter line. Experts at JWS Waste told the Hobbs Independent that items in a skip stay the property of whoever hired it until the waste contractor collects them. They warned that unsupervised skip diving is rarely safe and often unlawful.
Money advice site MoneyMagpie says there is no blanket offence called dumpster diving, and that laws and local circumstances can differ across the UK. It advises against taking food with a broken seal or an uncertain storage history. It also says nobody should ever climb into a compactor or baler.
Professor Ferrell says many US cities have outlawed bin searching, including New York, Cleveland and Wichita. Divers there can also face trespass charges. In Fort Worth, where he lives, items can only be taken from bins on public land.
Ms Baker, for her part, says she has enough clothing set aside to last her children for years.
Sources: Hobbs Independent, MoneyMagpie, BBC News
This story was compiled by the MDW Newsdesk with AI-assisted tools, using the reporting credited above.
