A student organization is trying to reduce waste in Madison by getting their hands dirty and scouring downtown Dumpsters for useful items worthy of donation.
Dumpster Diving Revolution is an organization led by UW senior Andy Bose, whose interest in reusing and recycling seems to come from a general awareness of human wastefulness.
“I just hate seeing things go to waste,” he said, “and a lot of times the things we pick up are in pretty good condition.”
Despite the group’s name, Bose said that actually digging through Dumpsters is only a small part of what they do. Their main event involves collecting items during move-out week at stations they set up outside apartment buildings so that movers can donate their unwanted things directly, eliminating the Dumpster as the inanimate middleman. Nearly everything they collect goes to Goodwill, and the collections weigh a generous amount.
“Last year we collected 5.5 tons to give to Goodwill, and that’s not including the furniture,” Bose said. “This year we’re shooting for 10 tons and setting up more locations.”
Madison Waste Watchers, a city program aiming to reduce waste, estimated that Madisonians sent an average of about 134 tons of trash per day to landfills last year. If a group of roughly 10 people can gather 10 tons of usable “trash” in just a few days, that is a considerable reduction in the total waste by a disproportionately small group of people.
Why do people throw all those valuable things away to begin with? Bose has seen some patterns.
“A lot of people who throw stuff out have to fly home after graduation, such as foreign exchange students, and maybe they’re trying to bring back as little as possible. Other times if one little thing goes wrong with a laptop, they will just throw it out,” he said. “And maybe I can’t fix it, but I’m willing to look at it and find someone who can.”
The items they collect are mostly clothes, he said, but also include computers, electronics, furniture, books, appliances and kitchenware, even food. The food from move-out day all goes to St. Vincent de Paul, but DDR continues to collect food every Wednesday throughout the year. For the weekly food donations, Bose and his group work with local grocery stores and nonprofits to distribute to nearly 200 individuals in Madison below the poverty line.
While plenty of movers surely feel satisfaction at gaining a new sofa or a lamp during “Hippie Christmas,” Bose appreciates the greater good his organization serves.
“It feels good to be helping people that can’t afford the things we give them, and people would just be throwing this stuff out anyway,” he said.
Dumpster Diving Revolution strives to help with more traditional means of recycling, too. During the football season, they handed out plastic recycling bags to reveling tailgaters to encourage them to recycle cans and bottles – it goes without saying that there is plenty to recycle. And the efforts toward recycling and sustainability don’t stop there, Bose said.
“This semester we’re still in talks about what exactly we will work on,” Bose said. “But we’ve talked with We Conserve, which is working on a project that will divert more food waste to composting.”
Bose mentioned a computer and electronics drive during which DDR partners up with Goodwill to collect semi-trucks full of “computers and electronics that people just never got around to getting rid of.”
The computer manufacturer Dell then breaks down the computers, recycling or safely disposing of hazardous components that could eventually contaminate ecosystems and water supplies if simply discarded in a landfill.
The group’s activities have expanded since its outset thanks to weekly meetings and efforts by those involved; you don’t just start that many eco-friendly initiatives and partnerships overnight. Now a senior at UW, Bose said he started the group unofficially with some friends during their first apartment move-in day in 2010.
Affectionately known as “Hippie Christmas,” the week of Aug. 15 brings unfathomable amounts of “trash” to the curbs. It’s when savvy movers are sure to find home furnishings or decorations discarded in overflowing dumpsters, the epitome of the “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage. In fact, Bose said he salvaged most of his own kitchen appliances and cookware, and even a laptop, from trash heaps.
To some it may seem unsanitary to be cooking with “trash.” But given the number of working-order items they find, some curbside piles aren’t likely to be any dirtier than a moving box, or a stack of dishes in the sink for that matter.
And Bose is not alone. All of the group’s members keep an eye out for useful treasures in their free time, he said, but during scheduled meetings and donation periods, everything goes to charity.
While the donations and drives are completely legitimate, the act of Dumpster diving is illegal in Madison, and Bose recalled at least one occasion where the law interfered. A police officer asked Bose and his cohorts to return everything they had gathered to the Dumpster, even the recyclables they had separated from the trash. But Bose keeps a positive attitude about the incident, noting that the officer was simply doing his job and actually voiced his approval of DDR’s work.
It is hard to fault someone for an outlawed action when it benefits so many. Bose indicated at least three levels of beneficiaries.
“It helps the community because we take care of a lot of trash that would other wise go into landfills, it helps poor people because they can get things they need for free or cheap and it helps us sometimes because we will keep the things we find in our free time,” Bose said. “Nobody really loses.”
To get involved with Dumpster Diving Revolution, search for the group’s name on Facebook or Twitter, or visit tinyurl.com/ddrmadison. The group will hold its semester kickoff meeting Feb. 8 at 7:15 p.m. and will also have a display at the Student Org Fair Wednesday.
