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 being the most popular.

As seen in the Google trends search map below countries are highlighted in relation to the search results for the term 'dumpster diving' from 2004 to today. The United States is highest, with Canada following, then Australia and the United Kingdom. Are these search results surprising? Not especially. As the US deals with food security and issues related to the downturn in the economy individuals may be looking for alternative ways to obtain food. This correlated with the results from the results from Scopus and Web of Science; there were the highest number of papers from the US.

In literature there has been interest 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 explores such issues is “Do Freegans Commit Theft?” by S. Thomas or the section of freegan.info entitled “Dumpster Diving and the Law”. 

When searching freegan or dumpster diving or binning or bin diving I received 25 results on Scopus from 1986 to 2014. Five could be omitted as they were from borrowing the terms dumpster and bin for computer sciences, which leaves us with a total of twenty relevant resources one from 1986 and the rest from 1996 to 2014 (cross referenced with twenty-two on Web of Science, most showing the same resources). There were twenty different authors from varying countries, though seven were shown as from the United States. These results show that there is interests from many individuals with different backgrounds and fields.

These results, when I searched these terms (minus binning as this is usually a computer term) in the Google News search I received 195 results from 2006 to 2015. This shows the media and public interest in this topic.