At the third Duane Reade Pharmacy of the night, Anna Sacks, 31, whose TikTok handle is @thetrashwalker, hit the jackpot. Half a dozen garbage bags were lying on the street a short distance from her New York City home.
Sacks opened the bags with a gloved hand and took out his loot: Tresemmé hairspray. Rimmel London Stay Glossy Lip Gloss. Two bags of Ghirardelli sea salt caramels. Six bags of Cretors popcorn mix. A Febreze air freshener. A bottle of Motrin.
All unopened, in its original packaging and far from the expiration date. The total value was maybe $75, but the money was not the point. Sacks, a former investment bank analyst, records her “trash runs,” as she calls them, and posts the videos to expose what she sees as wasteful retailing.
Dumpster scavengers like Sacks have started posting videos of their loot on TikTok as a way to shame corporations. A search for #dumpsterdiving on TikTok turns up tens of thousands of videos that collectively have billions of views.
A video posted last month by Liz Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of two in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who calls herself Salty Stella, shows a dumpster at a HomeGoods store filled with Halloween-themed dishes. and Christmas decorations. “The only reason these things got thrown away is because Halloween is over,” Wilson told her 1.2 million TikTok followers.
At a time when corporations tout their commitment to the environment, seeing a $30 shampoo or $6 chocolates in a dumpster can be a bad image.
“Corporations don’t want people to see overproduction, waste, under-donation,” said Sacks, who has 400,000 supporters. “To change behavior, it’s important to expose waste.”
Michael O’Heaney, executive director of The Story of Stuff Project, a group in Berkeley, Calif., that raises awareness about litter through storytelling, called eco-minded scavengers “metal detectors for bugs.” in the system”.
Wilson assembles “Stella’s Kits” of feminine hygiene items and distributes them to homeless shelters. Although she also posts on YouTube and Instagram, she said her videos get the most reactions on TikTok. “Every day, I get the same reaction: ‘Oh my God. Why do stores do that?’”
Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, in NY, said the practice is based on the calculation that “the fastest way for a retailer to get rid of something, usually of low value, is to mark it up.” out of your stock and throw it away.”
The activists would prefer that the items go to charities. Many companies, including TJX, the parent company of TJ Maxx and HomeGoods, and Walgreens, which owns Duane Reade, claim they do in fact donate unsold products, but some still need to be sent to landfills.
“I could go to a dumpster today and get a bunch of stuff, and come back to the same dumpster 24 hours later and find new stuff,” Wilson said.
By: STEVEN KURUTZ
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6497153, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-16 16:30:06
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