The New York Times

Turning Trash Into Gold: A New Urban Alchemy

By CAROLE BRADEN
Published: March 24, 2005

After a classroom presentation comes field research: student scavengers scour for salvageable materials and home accessories.

"It is the sort of bright, bitterly cold afternoon when exposed fingers and faces instantly stiffen, but the turnout is good at a community workshop and toolshed in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. Eighteen hearty New Yorkers sit on red wooden benches, surrounded by homemade sawhorses and aging power tools.

They are here to attend Dumpster Diving 301, a course on fishing for free home-improvement materials—things like scratched doors and mismatched kitchen cupboards—from construction waste bins. Yes, in a surprising twist on continuing education these students have paid $20 to learn how to pick through trash.

It is no revelation that one person's junk can be another's jewel. The art of combing garbage is the subject of two recent movies by the French director Agnes Varda, and Mother Earth News ran how-to's aimed at hippies as early as 1970.

But few would have predicted the evolution of this scrappy practice into something bordering on chic. "Mongo: Adventures in Trash" (Bloomsbury, 2004) by Ted Botha offers New Yorkcentric tips from a book dealer who builds inventory by culling sidewalks and from a suburbanite who cruises Manhattan on bulk-garbage days, struggling with her desire to take home every orphan chair and lamp.

One Web site, dumpsterworld.com, provides a forum on hunting grounds and tactics, and dumpsterdiving.meetup.com lists 171 groups of trash pickers around the globe, 52 formed in the last year. The largest, NYC Dumpster Diving Aficionados, invites newbies along for monthly forays. Naturally, the practice has splintered into specialties. The students in the Gowanus seminar, sponsored by an "art combine" called the Madagascar Institute (www.madagascarinstitute.com), were do-it-yourselfers trying to cut construction costs by sorting through nail- and-grime-ridden rejectamenta..."

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