Author; Rebecca Dart

This section portrays where, as in media or scholarly articles, this controversy develops. As you can see in the Google trends graph below there have been some spikes in freeganism, these came after three 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.  The economic crisis in the United States also falls in 2004, perhaps leading to the interest in sustainable living and ways to survive in the downturn of the economy and loss of jobs. This is a possible conclusion and one that would show in worldwide search results as the United States is the country with one of the highest interests in this topic in the world. 

The first figure below shows the interest of various search terms over time as reported on Google Trends search from 2004 to the present. The second one is the from the Google Ngram viewer. This searches google books and displays the results of how the terms have displayed over time. I this case I searched dumpster diving, dumpster diver and freegan, from 1980 to 2008. The results from these two graphs show an increased interest in these ideas after 2007. 

The most amount of information I could find and the most up to date information was in the media. Scholarly articles were limited. This is perhaps due to the fact that media (such as online newspapers) are more easily updated and are not peer reviewed so take less time to research and publish. This also gives us an indication of the interest in this topic, that it potentially is relevant to the general population and this is where most get their information. Most likely do not have access to scholarly information.