I saw some people doing it in Basel but on small street bins and usually old people who I thought were just looking into the bin out of curiosity.

It is now getting very popular in Montreal among an ecolo activist underground group which seems to get more and more adepts.

Barcelona also has people going through the bins to collect and sell. Mostly are the poor immigrants.

Girona, one of the biggest city in Cataluna will put locks on the supermarkets bins to stop people to search for food which apparently turns quite often into fights.

So between ecolo activists, money saving and plain surviving, it get more and more popular.

What do you think? Would you do it? As a life style?

There was a documentary on BBC not so long ago about people who raid the waste containers at the back of supermarkets. It was shocking what was thrown out and you could safely do your weekly shop on what they chucked out. There was meat still in date, dairy products and a shedload of veg that looked "weird" and wouldn't sell because it didn't look "perfect".

There were people who almost exclusively sustained themselves on this stuff. The supermarkets were beginning to clamp down on it and lock their bins , which is totally scandalous seeing as they are just going to landfill or incinerate the contents.

Here as we live so near the French border, they have stopped the 'large item' regular pick-ups, when you could put furniture, sports equipment, etc, to be collected by the waste disposal people. On those days, gangs of people came from across the border at the crack of dawn and fighting ensued regularly about who would take the best items. There were a couple of nasty scuffles, and now all large items have to be taken to an official recycling area (fenced) or you have to pay them to collect. A shame.

Totally agree Sandgrounder- food waste on such a scale is scandalous, in so many ways.

If I had no other choice, yes, I would do it.

Now there's a real waste of food and it's shocking !!!

The really sad thing is only a fraction of veg even make it to the supermarket at all because most falls under the supermarket's "aesthetic standards".

I lived in one of the main veg growing areas of the UK and was friends with some of the local pickers and sorters. I didn't buy veg for months because of the amount of freebies I got from the stuff that was rejected. This wasn't freaky looking stuff - just carrots that were slightly too big, slightly bent asparagus, over-purple broccoli or potatoes with slight nobbles.

It tasted fantastic too, as I normally ate it within hours of it coming out of the ground

A local supermarket used to leave the food out for the local homeless people, but were then told to lock it away in case they were sued by somebody who fell ill from eating it.

It's probably the case that there's no real grounds for litigation at all, but the company lawyers didn't want to run any risks.

I wouldn't do it myself because we don't need it, but I assume if we had no money, I would do it.

But as a life style? No, I prefer to leave it to those who can't afford to buy food.

In Detroit we call it dumpster diving. But yes, here in Valencia its huge. All the Gypsies sit around the major garbage dumbs waiting to see what gets brought in.

They then clean the stuff up and sell it at the Sunday morning flee markets for incredibly cheap prices.

Its not a bad way to keep the Gypsy's here from robbing people. Its a better alternative and helps lessen the waste.

It was either the same programme, or one similar, that they then had a couple or so top chefs cook it up gourmet-style, and feed passers-by at a street market.

A couple of problems with the UK supermarket set-up, are:

- a vicious circle has been created by the supermarkets, themselves, which then becomes consumer driven, where fresh produce has to be seen to be "perfect", in size, shape and colour, and is especially grown for this (i.e. cucumbers grown in straight glass tubes). Anything not measuring up is rejected.

- for security (anti staff "theft"), nothing that cannot be sold to the public (damaged, out of date, substandard), can also, not be given away to staff or anyone else for free. A small charge has to be made, so a receipt can be given and shown if required.
Unfortunately it is usually less time consuming, and more cost effective, just to bin this stuff in a skip.

Wasteful and crazy, and totally wrong - but is the result of consumers demanding more for less, and supermarkets looking to cut costs and maximise profits.

Even though I don't go around taking stuff out of bins*, if somebody's left something interesting and potentially useful on the street with a note of "Gratis" or the like on it then I'll have it.

What it do find is shocking is perfectly serviceable kit going into the "elektroschrott" bin at work. Stuff like routers, switches, wireless access points, older laptops, desktops, monitors. Even some damaged stuff is useable in the right circumstances.

I try to repurpose this stuff as much as possible, and have permission to do so as long as I don't sell it. As a result I've equipped a couple of people (older) in my housing block with WiFi, a good friend of mine, who was down on their luck, with a fully functional, of old, laptop, my favorite bars with WiFi, and managed to convert a water damaged mac laptop into a basic server for myself. Even so I see a lot of stuff that for various reasons would be impractical for me to make use of, and it simply gets thrown away.

I'm all for getting the most out of old electronic equipment as the recycling of the stuff can be quite hazardous and damaging to the environment.


*what is the legality of that here anyway, in the UK it is classed as theft if what I've read is anything to go by

I recycled a lot of furniture this way and some of my best pieces are those found on the street. I have no problem with that either.

Years ago in London, by our family house, if we had a item we did not want, would leave in our front path, usually within a day it would go.

Have a friend in London who has been out of work for a long time, he told me he gets up 3 or 5am and goes walk about. He often finds fruit/veg left out by shops that is slightly going off, he takes home and cuts the bad bits off, but he does not search dumpsters. He also scaffenges furniture and electric items. Once he found a tall Xmas Trees with hundreds of lights, he got it working.

Always make sure anything with my name/address etc gets shredded, as one never knows who is scavenging the rubbish and for why?

In the UK, I once saw someone arrested (for theft) for the only reason that they took rubbish (off cuts of carpet) from a bin at the back of a shop.

My first job was at a supermarket. I was paid £2.52 an hour and I was happy with it.

Often perfectly good product with damaged, open or wet packaging was binned because of food safety regs the store had no control over.

If it could be sold, it was and some managers sailed a lot closer to the wind than they should have done.

There were huge wheeled bins kept locked outside. Once, the store manager was interviewed under caution by an EHO because they'd forgot (more than once) to lock 'em.

Eventually, they were brought indoors at night and kept by the front doors (as a barrier to the ram raiders wanting to rob the cigarettes or ATM) It was a charming area.

Life in a supermarket was one long paper trail of processes and forms and endless bureacracy.

It didn't stop people breaking into the bins anyway and they went through them, not for food, but to bring damaged stuff back and demand refunds.

When they dived into the bins, whatever they didn't want was thrown on the ground, making a real crappy rodent problem.

I'm no sycophant for supermarkets, they make big profit, mostly do jack sh** for the community and generally treat their smaller suppliers with contempt but the issues are never always as simples as you'd like to think.

i was just reading a book about a chef who would go through the trash bags and pick out all the veggie parts that the other cooks had thrown out saying that often, the leaves or other parts that get dumped have the most flavor.

i know of a few places in nyc where people would go to get the leftovers from bakeries and i volunteered for a while picking up bags of food from restaurants that would be sent out on a meals on wheels kind of thing.

i also remember seeing some markets that would bag up the produce that was too ripe and put it out for 50cents or something very cheap.

so much food is wasted by supermarkets and restaurants it's seems a shame that places would lock it up and prefer to waste it then give it away.

Last year I saw a special programme on UK tv about an organization that now collects these items from the supermarkets and they re-sell them at cheaper prices. It is a sort of coop or something where you had to be part of and volunteer at the store. I thought it was a great idea, it has been said many times here that food is thrown away unnecessarily and lots of people could benefit from it...I guess though regulating it must be a good way of organizing and avoiding confrontations etc.

My roomates and I went dumpster diving about 10 years ago. We didn't have a lot of cash but it was more for the adventure and curiosity. One found a desk which we hauled back to our condo, and a disco ball. Essential items.

I'd be way more hesitant now as I'm quite risk averse and some strange (and horrible) things have been found in dumpsters.

i have found some of my favorite pieces of furniture on the sidewalk and when we were back home a lot of people would get in their cars and cruise the neighborhood on sundays- knowing that monday morning the trucks would come to big up bigger furniture pieces.

just the other day a neighbor left a gorgeous dresser out and i was wishing we had a bit more space for it- if so i would have grabbed it in a heartbeat!

Canadians are weird, and I have two Canadian daughters to prove my point!

Anyway, around here there is no need, on big garbage day anything usable gets put to the side, and we sometimes end up taking more stuff home than we brought to toss out!

Tom

They are the best part of you, stop whining!

Yes, but they like poutine, probably a taste picked up bin-scavenging with their cousins in Montreal when they got tired of eating at PFK!

Tom

They have a refine taste, bless them!