Caroline in the City
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| See anything appetizing in there? |
So, today is trash day - also known as the day Pine Street turns into one hot mess of overflowing garbage.
While high rise dwellers have the luxury of throwing their trash down a chute, never to be seen again, students living off-campus not only have to deal with trash fermenting outside their doorstep, but they must also fend off the dumpster divers of West Philadelphia.
Whatis.com defines dumpster diving as “looking for treasure in someone else’s trash.” These urban foragers find precious loot in what Penn students deem to be unusable. In fact, dumpster divers have been known to target universities, like Penn, that house wealthy and oftentimes wasteful individuals.
The New York Times ran a storythis past June describing the divers who loot through NYU’s trash after graduation. These individuals, who label themselves ‘freegans,’ live off consumer waste “in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism.” The freegans will even collect things like bruised produce and expired canned goods in order to conserve their own money and make up for other people’s wasteful habits.
Whether the dumpster divers that roam Penn’s off-campus housing can technically be considered freegans or not, they have been known to run off with items such as expired milk and empty shoe boxes.
In order to find such goodies, they rip open garbage bags and leave trash strewn all over the sidewalks. While dumpster diving is not exactly illegal unless it occurs on private property, Penn security should take more initiative into making sure these dumpster divers do not messy up the streets and taint the environment around student housing.
And students should be extra careful with things like receipts and old bills, for these items could end up in the wrong person’s hands.
Caroline in the City appears every Wednesday and Friday.
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September 28th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Wow, does this column reek of arrogance and snobbery.
September 30th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Some friends of mine here at Penn dumpster dive, though not to the level of ripping open garbage bags or anything. But, as you say, Penn is home to wealthy and wasteful individuals, and at the end of the year there is a ton of perfectly good and often expensive stuff just left behind. Why not take advantage?