A couple have started documenting the secretive world of British dumpster-divers – even using a video camera they found in a bin to launch their own YouTube channel
The UK’s best dumpster divers have found an unused aquarium and a brand-new hamster cage amongst other incredible discoveries.
The pair behind the Couple of Dumpsters YouTube channel took fellow YouTuber Joe Fish on one of their bin-raiding missions and almost immediately produced an incredible haul from a refuse bin arounds the back of a pet shop.
One of the dumpster-diving couple pointed out that, apart from being terribly wasteful: “It’s illegal to throw electric stuff in the bin.”
The pair also came across an electric fly-zapping tennis racquet, that might come in handy around food bins, as well as a collection of apparently untouched cookery books. In another nearby bin they find dozens of bags of crisps, with a retail value of around £20 or £30.
Among the other extraordinary consumer electronics finds they showed Joe included an X-Box 360 and a huge library of games. They explain that much of what they find gets cleaned up and repaired, if necessary, before being donated or sold for charity.
Coming across a bin packed with games console controllers, hard drives and various cables, an amazed Joe said “It’s eye-opening.” One game, for example, retails for £27.99 but had been thrown away completely intact. Some of the items still had price tags on them.
Fishing out a new-looking computer keyboard, Joe said: “I don’t even want to put it oh the floor, but they sling it straight in the bins!”
Even working fridges, freezers and washing-machines can be found dumped at the rear of some shops, waiting to be sent to landfill. The couple say they even have a flat-screen TV at home that was thrown out for having just one minor flaw.
They revealed: “There are a lot of bins that we find that are worth a lot of money, but we keep them secret. They’re all on our channel, but we keep those locations very secret.”
Joe says that there’s a thriving – but secretive – community of dumpster divers: “Whilst researching this alternative lifestyle for the documentary, I read a report that stated the hashtag #dumpsterdiving has received over 4.3 Billion Views on one social media platform alone, bringing to light just how quickly and popular this growing trend is!”
Sadly, a lot of items that have been thrown out by retailers are deliberately smashed or defaced with spray paint before being thrown in the bin.
“They break it all up and put it in and it’s most likely just ex-display and they just thought, “Oh yeah, we’ll chuck that in the bin,” the couple said.
Another member of the dumpster-diving community actually recorded toy shop staff deliberately destroying ex-demonstration items before throwing them into a bin. While many companies claim to regularly donate unsaleable stock to charity, “it’s lies,” the dumpster-divers insist.
So many items, especially consumer electronics, are thrown away because they have minor faults that can easily be fixed with the help of a YouTube tutorial, but most retailers won’t bother to take the time to repair them and instead dump them into beans that have become viral Aladdin’s Caves for the dumpster divers.
And every single thing they retrieve from a bin is one less item going to landfill: “A lot of people don’t like what we’re doing,” they say, “but we’re saving the planet,”
