How to dumpster dive?

[44kgk1lkf6u]

Someone please explain how dumpster diving works.  For example, does one need to search every dumpster in the city after work, or does one just come across things?  People on Youtube find so many things.  I just read on this forum about a find.  Yet no one I know managed to find a single thing from a dumpster that is worth talking about.

[indeterminate]

It depends witch country you are in
In many places around the world it is illegal to throw electrical/electronic goods into a rubbish bin.

[44kgk1lkf6u]

I live in America.  People throw away electronics anyway regardless of rules.  But they are always mundane things like hair dryers.  People from American Youtube channels that I regularly visit somehow manage to find things like RF amplifiers and optical network analyzers.

[seedkey]

Don't believe everything you see. Some great finds are for making sure channel gets lots of views

[Konkedout]

One recent poster got a beautiful piece of equipment via what he originally termed "dumpster diving".   But in fact it was a wrong piece of equipment ordered for which the receiving company had no use.   The poster knew someone in the company who asked him if he was interested in this thing...  No real dumpster involved.

When I lived in Minnesota USA many years ago, I built a couple of recumbent bicycles.  (I hacksawed and brazed the frames.)    We had (in addition to garbage collection) junk collection every week or two.  I drove around looking for junk bicycles which people were discarding.  I used those for portions of the frame as well as some other components.  Again...no real dumpster involved.

"Dumpster diving" is a figure of speech.  I guess it is accurate sometimes but maybe less than half the time??

[jerryk]

I think the term "dumpster find" is more of a metaphor meaning that whatever they found was heading to a trash bin of sorts. If you are looking for this type of stuff you can either be just plain lucky or put out feelers in places that may have the propensity to dispose of this type of stuff.  Some examples of how I "dive" is in the near future I'm heading over to our local landfill disposals "hazardous materials" section looking for dead Dewalt lithium batteries to rebuild.  I periodically run an add in our local Craigslist Aviation section looking for defective Aircraft LiFePo4 batteries to rebuild.  I also introduced myself to a couple of battery distributors in our local area and said I would be glad to take any broken stuff they had heading to the "dumpster".  This last method turned out to be a gold mine of endless projects from chargers, power inverters, and the entire line of NOCO stuff that, like all electronics, sometimes just fails.  I have since become friends with the owner of one of these distributors and have been able to repay him through repair work on his project.  All of this has added to the flavor of this great hobby.

Good luck and happy "diving" (figuratively speaking).

Jerry

Edit to add: Looks like @Kondedout covered quite adequately some of this while I was writing.

[wilfred]

I live in America.  People throw away electronics anyway regardless of rules.  But they are always mundane things like hair dryers.  People from American Youtube channels that I regularly visit somehow manage to find things like RF amplifiers and optical network analyzers.

I imagine that sort of stuff is more widely available in America. But don't knock mundane things, if you can fix it and use it or parts of it then grab it. People in Australia are just the same.

[I wanted a rude username]

For literal dumpster diving, the most important thing is to find a juicy source, like a business park (Dave's model) or shopping centre. You don't want to be wading through random residential dumpsters full of food waste and plasma screens.

There's an amusing book about this (self-?)published about 10 to 15 years ago ... guy writes about his experience shoplifting and dumpster diving shopping centres in various parts of the US ... the shopping centre dumpsters would often have returned products and were a goldmine for him until the shopping centres started putting in trash compactors (sorry I can't find the name of the book). I would expect office parks in the US are still good for this ... and the more high-tech the business, the better.

[Haenk]

In the 70s/80s (even going back to the 50s) there were scheduled "large item collections" in every town, like once or twice a year.
That was a great time to find all sorts of stuff, there were literally piles of old stuff in front of each house - that was the time before ebay - people cleared out old furniture, TV/Hifi, sometimes from pre-war left in the attic or stored away by the grandparents. As there were no city recycling centers, that was pretty much the only way to get rid of this.
Long gone are the times; unfortunately, it is not allowed to take away stuff from the electronic waste containers (as the town is earning money with this type of waste). Needless to say, I sometimes nick a smaller item

[Gregg]

When I worked in data centers, most of the time the dumpsters were behind locked gates. The mess left by divers was the main cause for locking up the dumpsters. The really juicy stuff was only available to employees and internal dumpster diving was frowned upon.  Occasionally a trusted outsider was allowed to dive.  Cardboard was a big reason to allow an outside party to collect stuff because of the sheer volume going into the dumpster was reduced. 
At one site I remember a middle aged couple with a beat up truck were allowed to take the cardboard and basically anything they could find in the dumpster; the rule was that they had to leave the dumpster enclosure neater than they found it.  Employees soon were stacking cardboard outside the dumpster to enable the recycling; a true win-win.
It used to be that copper wire was saved and the proceeds went to the employee party fund until the company decided that copper was a precious metal and should be credited back to the company with the usual corporate overhead of rules that took more employee time than it was worth.  So the wire just was thrown into the dumpster and anybody’s guess where it went after that; no more free pizza days for the break room.

[44kgk1lkf6u]

Don't believe everything you see. Some great finds are for making sure channel gets lots of views

I see.  One guy said that he tended to find Keysight stuff whenever he did their give aways.  This must be why.

[Psi]

It's mostly about doing your research and knowing what dumpsters to look in and at what time good things are likely to be thrown out.
For example when it's getting closer to the end of the tax year companies are more likely to be buying new equipment, so are more likely to be throwing out the old stuff.

And usually the business doesn't want you looking in their dumpster so some careful planning is involved.

[golden_labels]

There are also some reasons not yet listed above, that make organizations less likely to leave valuable equipment in dumpster for anybody to fetch. Less likely compared to the past. Namely: records, bookkeeping, taxes.

Records. Unlike you, who may freely decide about your own stuff, the management in organizations controls property owned by somebody/something else. That property can’t just disappear. There must be a record, that shows to whom and in what circumstances the property was passed. If a waste management company picks up the equipment in bulk, the entire process is very simple and streamlined. The same can’t be said about a random person obtaining the items.

Bookkeeping. In finances the same thing may be a loss or not depending on the context. Already deprecated⁽¹⁾ equipment, that is officially marked as waste and passed to a waste company, is not a loss. It’s already worth $0 or less. But the same equipment, if not marked as waste but considered potentially useful to anybody, has a positive value. If it leaves the organisation without producing sufficient profit, it’s a loss. All praise the books.

Taxes. Marking unneeded items as waste, getting some single entity to pick them up, and getting a stamp on protocols makes taxes trivial. Not doing so puts the organization at risk of messing up taxes.

Of course all this may be dealt with (depending on your location). But that requires effort. I hope you may see how avoiding that effort leads to discarded equipment basically being piped to some external company.

⁽¹⁾ In accounting sense.

[Psi]

Yeah, it's sad that often working and useful equipment gets destroyed because the company feels they have no other easy/convenient and legal option.  And sometimes just out of spite to stop others getting any use out of it. *Cough* Apple *Cough*.

It's one thing I would change if I had the power to do so.

[Doctorandus_P]

It's not much use to go though ever dumpster you find. Municipal waste would be mostly empty packaging, dirty diapers and such, while dumpster diving in industrial locations would get you more (broken) industrial stuff. Dumpster diving around office buildings would get you discarded office equipment (as Dave has shown in many of his video's).

Dave also did a few videos about a big containers full off discarded lab equipment, but such are rare and hard to find. He usually gets a tip of when and where that happened for the video's he made.

[mikeselectricstuff]

As said earlier it depends a lot on where you are. IN UK/EU, WEEE regs mean it costs businesses money to dispose of electrical junk, and if you get on good terms with smaller companies they can be happy to let you scavenge their "Weee-bin"
Larger companies are probably more worried about liability etc.
Copper and to a lesser extent aluminium scrap has value, so were there is a lot of this, dumpsters are treated as being full of valuable assets that they will get money from, and locked up.

In my experience the best situation is something like a refurb/demolition in a commercial or industrial property - the people in charge are the ones doing the building work, have no clue about what is being dumped, and are more than happy to let you clear costly space in their waste containers.

I don't actively search, but never walk past a roadside dumpster ( we call them "skips" here in UK) without taking a look.
Very locally I've found a small  office phone exchange unit, a dental camera, and video printer used at a dental practice  - all fully working & flipped on ebay.

Definitely business/commercial/industrial - rare to find anything decent in a residential area, except consumer electronics someone can't be botheerd to fix.

 

[themadhippy]

As said earlier it depends a lot on where you are. IN UK

its technically illegal to take stuff from a skip, no good asking the person who threw it in the skip as it no longer belongs to them,its  the property of the skip owner.

it's sad that often working and useful equipment gets destroyed because the company feels they have no other easy/convenient and legal option

There also concerned about getting sued when the bit of  kit they've chucked away injures you and you try and sue said company,this was the mentality of  2 previous employers,brought to them by there caring insurance companys.

[mikeselectricstuff]

its technically illegal to take stuff from a skip, no good asking the person who threw it in the skip as it no longer belongs to them,its  the property of the skip owner.

That would depend on the terms of the contract the hirer has with the skip company.
In the case of a 1-off skip hire, the hirer is paying for the use of the container, and the removal/disposal on collection day.  What happens before that is none of the skip company's business.

Both parties will usually be more than happy for some space to be cleared as they are paying for the disposal.

Terms and conditions from a random skip company, no mention of ownership of contents: https://www.skiphireuk.co.uk/terms-conditions/

May be different for things like council collections, or containers provided for scrap recovery etc., but it would still need to be explicitly stated in the contract that the contents belong to the waste company.

[CaptDon]

Most 'big' companies are required by the original equipment manufacturers to destroy 'obsolete' equipment or at least trade or return said gear back to the O.E.M. for refurbishment or destruction. Tektronix was doing this. Their old gear was built so well that it had a nearly infinite life with proper care. So the 'lower cost' market was flooded with top notch used gear which kept getting handed down. This killed the part of the marketplace for lower cost new gear and was considered detrimental. Theft is so prominent that it is hard to keep an employee from saying "This R&S analyzer is obsolete so I would like to take it home". Even though it was only one year old and cost over $40K. The guy at the gate doesn't know or understand what is going out the gate so the company says "Nothing goes out the gate unless crushed or destroyed, and then only to approved scrappers". Big companies are finally learning that their surplus test gear has value and used equipment purchasers are knocking on the doors. Great lab managers will make some gear available to their lab employees for sign-out use at home. This is a great thing for ham radio hobbyists and so forth. It also speaks well of the employees interest in experimenting and continuing education, even if self taught!! We had a super cool lab manager who stacked up all the seldom needed gear that was taking up too much lab space and simply said "Take what you want, I removed it from out lab inventory as damaged or lost". I gave a TEK TDS420 to a guy here on EEVBLOG and I aquired a repairable TDS644B!!

[golden_labels]

As said earlier it depends a lot on where you are. IN UK

its technically illegal to take stuff from a skip, no good asking the person who threw it in the skip as it no longer belongs to them,its  the property of the skip owner.

Is this the case in UK?

I’m asking, because a similar problem existed in Poland for a long time. An item was always somebody’s property, even if in a dumpster. That was the case for so long, I never realized the law has changed. Now you may consider an item to not be anybody’s property and become the new owner, if the circumstances indicate an owner abandoned the item⁽¹⁾ (doesn’t apply to bees). Perhaps something similar did happen in UK.

⁽¹⁾ For those in Poland interested in the subject: Art. 180 and 181 KC.

[themadhippy]

That would depend on the terms of the contract the hirer has with the skip company.

nothing to do with the contract between hirer and skip company,its how you interpret the theft act 1968

[G0HZU]

Most 'big' companies are required by the original equipment manufacturers to destroy 'obsolete' equipment or at least trade or return said gear back to the O.E.M. for refurbishment or destruction. Tektronix was doing this.

I haven't heard that one before. That definitely doesn't apply where I work and I've done rather well out of the dumpster/skip at work over the years. I've salvaged a few nice bits of broken (BER) Tek gear here that Tek quoted ridiculous amounts to repair. Think in terms of an initial quote cost of up to £15k just for Tek look at the faulty item. I think Tek do this if you don't have a current service contract with them. So I was allowed to have the faulty Tek gear for free. Tek definitely didn't demand to have it returned to them and it was no use to the company I work for.

Keysight are fairly similar. They often quote about £10k as an initial estimate to repair something like a spectrum or network analyser. They don't demand to keep it either. They just attach a sticker saying "return unrepaired" and then they send it back to the company I work for and the company writes it off as BER.

[Analog Kid]

In the 70s/80s (even going back to the 50s) there were scheduled "large item collections" in every town, like once or twice a year.
That was a great time to find all sorts of stuff, there were literally piles of old stuff in front of each house - that was the time before ebay - people cleared out old furniture, TV/Hifi, sometimes from pre-war left in the attic or stored away by the grandparents. As there were no city recycling centers, that was pretty much the only way to get rid of this.
Long gone are the times; unfortunately, it is not allowed to take away stuff from the electronic waste containers (as the town is earning money with this type of waste). Needless to say, I sometimes nick a smaller item

This practice (called "bulky trash pickup") was still going on in the 2000s in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area; I'd go up and down streets on those days and pick up all kinds of useful stuff.

It has since been discontinued; more's the pity.

[mikeselectricstuff]

That would depend on the terms of the contract the hirer has with the skip company.

nothing to do with the contract between hirer and skip company,its how you interpret the theft act 1968

It surely hinges on when transfer of ownership occurs - is it when something is put in the skip, or when it s removed by the skip company? Is there any case law on this?
The hirer is hiring a container and a disposal service - hard to see how it could be interpreted that that anything put in the container prior to remova becomes the skip company's property unless their terms state that.
 
 

[Analog Kid]

That would depend on the terms of the contract the hirer has with the skip company.

nothing to do with the contract between hirer and skip company,its how you interpret the theft act 1968

It surely hinges on when transfer of ownership occurs - is it when something is put in the skip, or when it s removed by the skip company? Is there any case law on this?
The hirer is hiring a container and a disposal service - hard to see how it could be interpreted that that anything put in the container prior to remova becomes the skip company's property unless their terms state that.

Very difficult for me to be the least bit sympathetic to a trash hauler's proprietary interest in their, well, trash:
it's not as if they (most of them, from what I know) give much of a shit for the stuff they pick up.
Into the "landfill" it goes, unless someone spots a particularly valuable item and they're able to segregate it from the ... trash before they hit the transfer station.

Unless it's a company that actually recovers stuff, like 1-800-GOT-JUNK.