When college students leave for summer break, some local residents scavenge through campus dumpsters, finding treasures among students’ discarded items. Clothes, household items, food, appliances and more – often worth considerable amounts of money – are often found to resell, donate or keep. And while some campuses have organized programs to keep goods out of landfills, many others offer treasures for the finding.
Lena Geller, a staff writer for INDY Week, found about 70 items when Duke University (NC) students left for the summer. She researched their worth, finding the items originally retailed for $6,600 total, reported The New York Times. “It feels wrong for this much stuff to have been thrown out,” Geller wrote.
Tik Tok posts about college dumpster diving offer how-to tutorials. Megan Godinez at MeganTheDDMvp has close to a half million followers. “The whole point of this is to get the stuff out of the landfill and have someone who can use it have it,” she told the Times.
Read more about this end-of-the-academic-year phenomenon here.
