Dumpster diving is a relatively new term for an old practise. It was once called gleaning, the practise of cleaning up after the harvest, usually done by the women of the community. This practise is now taken am upswing in popularity, but instead of cleaning the fields “freegans, as they are now called are cleaning out dumpsters. This practise is usually considered an anti-consumerism movement. 

Lars Eighner was an influential author in the early days, he wrote "On Dumpster Diving"

There are entire websites dedicate to freeganism. There are various websites devoted to the freegan lifestyle, the most popular ones being freegan.info based in New York or freegan.ca for Canada. 

As you can see in the google trends graph below there have been some spikes in freeganism, these came after 3 major news articles in summer 2007. "Rubbish is Happiness for Freegan Scavengers", The Scotsman, "My one Month Living as a Freegan", Newsweek and "The Freegan Life", the Star.  Search results range over categories from finance to food and drink to lifestyle and retrieve results from various countries, though the United States, United Kingdom, France and Canada are the most popular. There are even such open source websites, like trashwiki.org, that allow individuals to find "You can find precise descriptions of how to get rid of your trash in a sustainable manner, how to sensibly recuperate trash, how to share and get stuff for free, and much much more". There are bakeries, grocery stores and drugstores to name a few examples of listings. There are various types of dumpster divers. A vas majority of people who dumpster dive are looking for food, but not always. Beauty products, furniture, clothing and games are some such categories of finds that individuals go looking for. There has been interest in this topic both in scholarly articles as well as in news and media outlets. there seems to be more in the media as peer reviewed article take longer to be published. They have uncommon/common terminology used. May issues brought to light are the ideas about legality of dumpster diving and the ownership of the discarded "waste". An article that explore such issues is "....." by......

Definitions of Terms:

• Dumpster Diving - the practice of searching dumpsters to find discarded items that are still useful, can be recycled, and have value.


• Dumpster - a large trash receptacle designed to be hoisted and emptied into a truck.


• Food Rescue - also called food recovery, is the practice of safely retrieving edible food that would otherwise go to waste, and distributing it to those in need. The recovered food is edible, but often not saleable.


• Freegan - a person who rejects consumerism and seeks to help the environment by reducing waste, especially by retrieving and using discarded food and other goods, a blend of free and vegan, though the person does not have to be began or a vegetarian (there are still some controversies on the definition of a freegan (see PAPER CITE)