Rosie Grayton: They leave their cars running. So, they are pulling up to the dumpster, they're popping open the lid, they're looking inside. If they see something good, they'll pull it out. And if they don't, they are back in the car and they move on. I'm Rosie Grayton and you're listening to the Wirecutter show.

Rosie Grayton: Hey, it's Rosie. My guest today is Anne Marie Conty. She's a deputy editor and my colleague here at Wirecutter. Anne Marie just wrote a piece all about something I think probably most people wouldn't consider doing, but that some folks do for a living. Dumpster diving. The article is called "Why Do Stores Throw Away So Many Perfectly Good Products?" I went dumpster diving to find out. The piece is a continuation of Anne Marie's reporting on waste in consumer goods. At the end of last year, she wrote a very popular article all about how she bought a nearly 500-lb mystery pallet of returned items from Amazon. Then she investigated what was inside, all in an effort to better understand the impact of returns at a large scale. Turns out a lot of those goods end up being resold on the secondary market for pennies on the dollar, also known as liquidation. The dumpster diving story is asking a similar question. What happens to unwanted items that have been on store shelves, but this time they end up in the trash. Anne Marie flew to Texas, walked the streets of New York to investigate how much is being thrown away, whether the quote trash is actually trash, and why it isn't being sold, recycled, or donated at scale. We're going to get into it after the break and hear all about what Anne Marie found in the dumpsters. We'll be right back.

Rosie Grayton: Welcome back. Today, my guest is Wirecutter's deputy editor Anne Marie Conte. Anne Marie, welcome back.

Anne Marie Conty: Hello. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here with my favorite favorite people at Wirecutter. Don't tell anyone.

Anne Marie Conty: I've been looking forward to this conversation for a variety of reasons. First, because I really love getting to hear about all of your adventures, but also because you and I we talked about how this article is in some ways or it feels like a continuation of the conversation you and I had back in January about your piece titled We Bought a 450-lb mystery pallet packed with returned goods from Amazon and beyond. Here's what we found inside. That was a banger.

Rosie Grayton: [clears throat and laughter] It was so fun. That was a banger.

Anne Marie Conty: It was so fun and the audience, um, you know, really reacted very positively to it and it was something that I think surprised so many people and surprised me as I was reporting it.

Rosie Grayton: If folks who didn't get a chance to listen to that episode, it's worth checking out. Obviously worth reading your piece as well. I want to know what you see as the connective tissue between that story and this story. Both things are hidden from most people. I think that a lot of people when they're going about their day and they're shopping and they're returning something, they don't think about what happens to it after it leaves their hands. And they don't think about the stuff that's on the store shelves. What happens to it if it doesn't get sold? And so both of those topics are ways to explore this secondary market. What happens to the goods after they sort of leave your sight is something that I'm fascinated by. This idea of the secondary market being the great beyond.

Anne Marie Conty: Yes. [laughter] For products. One of my sources called it the wild west and I think that's also something as a journalist that's really interesting to me. How is this relatively unregulated, unmodulated, constantly evolving product handling logistics piece? How does it exist? What is happening now and how does it affect our readers and our planet and our wallets? Yeah, we're going to get into a lot of that.

Rosie Grayton: All right, so walk me through this reporting. What did you do and why?

Anne Marie Conty: I started by shadowing dumpster diver influencers. So, these are people who are on the internet every day. They're posting to social media and they are showcasing exactly what they're finding in these dumpsters. Apparently, Dallas-Fort Worth is a hotbed of dumpster diving influencer culture and there are several people out there who are friends and have gotten to know each other and so I flew out to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and shadowed two dumpster divers there. And then I also want to understand what it was like in New York City because that's an entirely different animal. So, I also shadowed she calls herself the trash walker because New York does not have dumpsters in the same way that the strip mall heaven that is Dallas-Fort Worth. Um and so those were two very different experiences for me and then I took the products that we found and we did environmental life cycle assessments of them. We tried to understand if they actually had resale value, and then I tried to dig into why these companies were continuing to throw away products despite the fact that these influencers are shaming them on a daily basis and saying, "Look at everything we found. Look at all of this stuff." And why this practice continues. And there have been cases where companies have responded and said, "Okay, we are not going to do this anymore. This is you're right." And there are others that, you know, we reached out to every company that I mentioned in the article. And most of them sort of just had a very generic statement about how they support the environment. And so, I think that that's really interesting to me, too, about the reactions of these companies and the companies that are trying to control the waste. And others that sort of just assume that it's part of their business model and continue on.

Rosie Grayton: So, what what did you do? Were you really flailing in the air, head down in a dumpster? What did you do? What did you find out?

Anne Marie Conty: It turns out I don't have the upper body strength for that, number one. [laughter] But, our legal team was very careful to you know, as a journalist, I can experience these things, I can witness these things. I did not The things that we took out of the dumpster do not belong to me and do not belong to Wirecutter. Those were things that were found by the people that I was shadowing, and those items go back to them. Okay. So, that was something that was very important to us. In the course of my reporting, I was witnessing this. Yes, sometimes I did try to get a closer look, and I was in a little bit, but for me to interact with those products, it was very much something that belonged to the three women that I was following.

Anne Marie Conty: And do you want to hear a little bit about the legality of dumpster diving? Are you interested in this?

Rosie Grayton: [laughter] I am If if only because it seems like it potentially could be a little bit gray, a little shady.

Anne Marie Conty: It is gray. But in general, unless there's a specific ordinance against it, so there are certain municipalities or towns that say that you may not remove trash from a waste bin, if you are not walking past a no trespassing sign, or you are not cutting a lock, or going through something that is locked, then it's pretty permissible because it no longer belongs to the person who has thrown it in the dumpster. And it might technically belong to the waste management company, but even that's a bit of a gray area. And so, in general, it's not illegal. And in the places where it is illegal, potentially there's a fine connected to it.

Rosie Grayton: And as a journalist, I can actually witness something that is illegal. You just can't participate.

Anne Marie Conty: Can't participate in it. But in this case, it was all sort of above board, you know, we didn't do anything that was illegal.

Rosie Grayton: Talk a little bit about the folks you worked with. The folks that you shadowed. You mentioned the trash walker. I know the trash walker was in New York. Yes. What about the folks in Texas?

Anne Marie Conty: So, the two women in Texas who I followed are Tiffany Roach, and she goes by Dumpster Diving Mama, and Ella Rose, and she goes by Glamour D Dive. Both of them have been dumpster diving for nine years, like almost a decade. And they met each other just by crossing paths on the circuit, you know? Like they kind of have their own territories. Dallas-Fort Worth is very widespread. And so, they generally operate in separate circles, and then sometimes will cross paths. So, I didn't realize that all three of these dumpster divers were fully connected until I was thinking about the story of these Coach bags in 2021. So, Ella Rose, Glamour D Dive, found a stash of slashed Coach bags behind a Coach outlet. So, these are leather bags. These are the bags that have the like classic canvas Coach logoing, and they have literally been cut through by an employee so that they can't be usable anymore. The zippers are broken. It was over a dozen bags and shoes. Ostensibly in otherwise fine shape. Yes, right. And so, and often that's what happens. Something will have a smudge on it or might have like a little bit of a tear, and that's when they get tossed. So, Glamour Dee Dive found a stash, and then the next day, I believe, Tiffany Roach, who goes by Dumpster Diving Mama, she found a stash. And so, Tiffany posted this video where she was like, I can't believe this. This is crazy. Anna Sacks, the Trash Walker, saw that video over in New York and said, I will buy all of these destroyed Coach bags. And so, she did. Tiffany sent them to her, and Anna is the one who posted the video that went viral and caused Coach to say, okay. The official statement was, we will no longer do this practice, which is to be fully clear, this so many companies do this. This is not an anomaly. Coach was not alone in this. But Coach was the one that said, we're not going to do this anymore, and we are going to cycle this into our circularity program. So, if somebody returns a bag that Coach deems unsellable for whatever reason, it can get remade or it can get refurbished and resold so that it doesn't end up in the dumpster. Wow. Yeah, and so that that to me was a really interesting tale, and it really connected all three of the divers who I was following.

Rosie Grayton: So, you go to Texas with Aubrey from our video team. love Aubrey. What is a typical day in this reporting trip? What are you doing when you wake up? What are you seeing? What are you smelling? How do you meet Tiffany and Ella? Paint me a picture.

Anne Marie Conty: I think Aubrey and I were both initially very surprised at how quick this process is. Aubrey and I were in our rental car. We were following Tiffany in her car. Ella had a separate car because they often don't dumpster dive together. For the sake of the story and to really show me around, they had crossed their territories for our sake. Dumpster diving is competitive and not everybody's an influencer, right? So, we had this woman that was like five steps ahead of us. And so, twice she got there first. It's her claim. We saw her pulling the bags out and then she was gone. And it was like, well, that was the stuff that we wanted. [laughter] But, it was so fast-moving. Like, Aubrey could barely get her camera out by the time we got out of the car. You They leave their cars running. So, they are pulling up to the dumpster. They're popping open the lid. They're looking inside. If they see something good, they'll pull it out. And if they don't, they are back in the car and they move on. And they know internally in their heads exactly which dumpsters they're going to go to. And so, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, maybe we'll go to this shopping complex next." Or maybe we'll, you know, we haven't hit this place. And the thing that really I didn't understand until I experienced it is they could be checking the same dumpster multiple times a day. You never know when an employee is going to throw out some trash. And they have notes that they keep where they say, "Okay, I think this day is trash day." So, there were a few times where the trash had already been picked up. And so, we missed it. We missed it by minutes. And there was

Rosie Grayton: [snorts]

Anne Marie Conty: Both Tiffany and Ella's husbands will look for them as well. So, what happened on one of the days is Ella's husband said he was driving to work and he said, I think the TJ Maxx dumpster is full and she grabbed a couple bags for us. So, we didn't physically see her pull those bags from the trash, but she showed up with them in her trunk and we were able to go through them. And so, that to me is it was like very much like a team effort. It feels really exciting. There's like the highs are high and the lows are low and you're checking the dumpster and then you're moving on and you're driving around and you're you know, it was very fast-paced.

Anne Marie Conty: And New York, in contrast, was slow because New York doesn't have dumpsters. They put all of their trash at store closing. So, the store closes at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. and then the employees will put the trash on the curb and we walked from spot to spot because it's not really easy to drive around in the city. And so, that was slower, dirtier. The trash was much more mixed in. I think the thing that people do not understand is dumpsters are surprisingly clean.

Rosie Grayton: The dumpster >> How? [laughter] >> How?

Anne Marie Conty: It shocked me, too. There's no food waste in there or there's minimal food waste. The dumpsters that are behind malls and strip malls are dedicated to the store. So, if you have a store, like you're not going to go through the Five Guys dumpster. That is a crazy idea because that's going to be filled with food waste.

Rosie Grayton: Right. But, the TJ Maxx dumpster, the Marshalls dumpster, the Dollar Store dumpster, those are going to be filled with mostly packaging, Styrofoam, plastic, that kind of thing. Sometimes display units. And sometimes product waste. And in contrast, New York is not like that. [laughter] I was so naive. Like I was not prepared for the mixed trash, the smells. People just throw their food waste in with everything else and it's like so many Dunkin cups, like 1 million Dunkin cups. That was a bit of a rude awakening for me and also so important for me to have experienced both aspects of this. I'm so glad that I did that second trash walk so that I did not make assumptions about what it's like everywhere.

Rosie Grayton: What did you pull out?

Anne Marie Conty: Oh my goodness. It's a lot of tchotch. It's a lot of tchotchke. [laughter] But there was stuff like apparel, children's toys, a soccer ball, a dog bed that had a slash through the bottom. So the bottom of the bed, the fabric on the bottom was cut through. And the suspicion is that sometimes the employees are being told to destroy things, but they're like, "Just destroy it a little bit." Right? In hopes that it can be reclaimed. You know, we don't know that firsthand, but I think it is really hard on these retail employees to be smashing mugs and picture frames and things that really could be used again. Ella had found just before we got there, she found a Coach hat and scarf new in box. She found two beautiful a silver necklace and a gold plated necklace. Just all sorts of stuff. All sorts of really interesting stuff. And what's interesting is that we did the life cycle assessments which

Rosie Grayton: Yeah, talk about that. Yeah. So

Anne Marie Conty: Sustainability experts will do these estimates to try to understand the impact of producing these products and shipping these products and the whole life cycle of these products. How long they are used for, all of that. So I worked with a company called Earthster and they use AI to create these assessments for businesses. So their intention is to help a business reduce their footprint. They were trying to help us understand what it took to get these products, produced, and brought to the US in most cases, and put on the store shelves, just for it to get thrown out. To me, that is wild. So, the necklace, which was the lightest object, the smallest object, involved metal mining. It involved air freight because it's a light, small item, so it likely wasn't shipped. It was likely flown. And that just has a huge carbon footprint and a big impact on the environment. So, our lightest object also had one of our largest carbon footprints. And for it to just get thrown out and not be able to be used, anyone would love to have this like little heart-shaped necklace. Like delightful.

Rosie Grayton: Yeah. What was the ickiest, strangest, bizarrest thing you found in the dumpster?

Anne Marie Conty: I know I just spent a long time telling you how clean the dumpsters were in Texas, and they were for a large part. However, there is something called souping. It seems to happen with the beauty chain Ulta. They will take product testers, returned goods, anything that they're trying to get rid of will go into a trash bag, and then they cover it in liquid, water, foundation, and it creates disgusting soup. And so, we put on our rubber gloves and went through it, and they will reclaim some of that stuff. They will clean it. There are sometimes beauty products that are still sealed and in packaging, and so they will take it, and they will clean it, and make use of it. But, that was definitely, I think, the grossest. And we also found soup products in New York as well. So, behind an Ulta as well. They had also cut the cords of hair tools. And I tried to understand, I contacted the hair tool company to say, "Why is this happening? Is this something that you're dictating or is this something that Ulta is doing on their own?" And they basically referred me back to Ulta and Ulta did not respond to our request for comment. So, that to me is fascinating and Tiffany's husband will actually repair the cords on the cut tools and they will clean it up and they will resell them, which that's going to avoid the warranty and if you try to do it yourself and you don't know about electrical, maybe not the best idea, but it's something that she does.

Rosie Grayton: Is it soup on the outside and in the inside of these bags?

Anne Marie Conty: Is clean on the outside. So, you're pulling a clean bag that is filled with liquid and grossness.

Rosie Grayton: I get the impression that the chance of finding these huge halls where you're going to a dumpster and you're finding tons of valuable, resellable items is fairly low. Number one, is that fair to say? And number two, if that's true, what reasons are Tiffany and Ella giving you for doing this?

Rosie Grayton: This is their full-time job.

Anne Marie Conty: This is their full-time job. So, they not only make money from the views on social media, but they also make money from selling the products. And they really do feel passionately that they want to illuminate this waste that is happening.

Rosie Grayton: I want to hear some more specifics about what you found in these dumpsters. And I also want to hear about how retailers are thinking about or not thinking about the issue of retail waste. So, we'll be right back.

Rosie Grayton: Welcome back. My guest today is my colleague, a deputy editor here at Wirecutter, Ann Marie Conty. And we have been talking about Ann Marie's recent trip through the dumpsters. Fair to say? A deep dive, as they say.

Anne Marie Conty: Deep dive. One of the first things you wrote in this piece was how much you enjoyed the process of dumpster diving and that it was, quote, addictive. So, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how that can be the case.

Anne Marie Conty: I didn't understand it until I experienced it. I mean, the bottom line is it's like free stuff. And there is definitely the dopamine hit that comes with getting free stuff. And the fall when you don't see anything, but it's basically like a giant claw machine, right? Like you're popping it open if you see something, especially if something is out of reach. And then you grab your grabber tool and you take it and then you throw it in your cart, you get out of there and you're And the idea of rescuing something that otherwise would have ended up gone forever is really addictive. But I'm not going to force you to dumpster dive. Don't make me go.

Rosie Grayton: For me, I think the most powerful sentence in your article is this, [snorts] quote, "Waste is not a byproduct of manufacturing and retail, it's part of the business model." Can you tell me what you meant by that?

Anne Marie Conty: As much as companies say that they are trying to think about the end of life of their products, the idea that there will be loss of product, whether it is because it gets broken accidentally or because they are destroying it themselves, is part of most companies corporate model. That to me is the really sad part of this. Most companies, I don't want to paint all companies with a broad brush. There are plenty of companies that are trying their best here. And there are are a lot of sustainability teams in these large corporations who are trying to create change. But at the end of the day, this is the system that they're working in. It is cheaper to throw out some of this stuff than to find a place for it to go. And you could quibble about the word cheaper. Right. Fiscally, ethically, sustainability-wise, you know, there are I it's yeah. That's what I wanted to explore in this piece is really what is the cost? What is the environmental cost? What is the financial cost of these items and everything that goes into them for them to never get used and just get thrown out.

Anne Marie Conty: So, a product you might find in a dumpster, it could be damaged in some way and deemed unsellable. It could have been defective in some way and deemed unsellable. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are perfectly fine, good items that are actually just overstock. Often overstock, you know, like what I found with the pallet. When we were in that liquidation warehouse, we saw an entire pallet full of new in box LEGO from Target. And that was overstock. That was liquidated and sold for pennies on the dollar and ended up in that warehouse for reseller to purchase and resell. But if there's one damaged LEGO box, there isn't quite a flow for it. So, that might end up in the dumpster. Not too long ago, one of our dumpster divers found a bunch of LEGO that was wet. There was like writing on the side that said flood. So, the boxes got wet and they're not going to liquidate that. So, they threw it in the trash and she found it and resold it.

Rosie Grayton: Let's speak about the overstock for a second. Why is there so much overproduction happening?

Rosie Grayton: When I think about this process of doing the life cycle assessment, my brain immediately went to Pixar movie. Like, what is this little piece of an I love you, Mom mug that ended up in a dumpster in Fort Worth? What is the process from ideation all the way to it ending up in a landfill somewhere? The reality is you can't chart that entire process. Is that true? Only the companies themselves can chart that, and even that with getting materials and the you know, I think the thing that people really don't understand is how many different parts there are of this process to get the materials, get the production, to get all of that together. It's so many different small decisions and steps. I would love to watch that movie. I would probably sob as hard as I did at Toy Story. It would be sad. It would be sad, but that's really something that only the brands and manufacturers know.

Rosie Grayton: What infrastructure is in place for actual proper recycling of unwanted or unsellable goods? And why is this not lucrative big business?

Anne Marie Conty: Yeah. Part of it is that you can't recycle items that often have mixed materials. With clothing recycling, it's a growing business. People are trying to create technology and infrastructure to help support textile recycling, but ultimately, this is a story of overproduction, and we can't recycle our way out of this. What infrastructure is in place in terms of donation, or is that also kind of a wild west one-off situation? Some donation is very effective. I think it's also fairly common that these secondary sellers are overwhelmed. And so they are often throwing out product, too. Anna Sax in New York told me that some of her best finds come from thrift store garbage. Wow. So, it just always comes back to an overproduction problem.

Rosie Grayton: Okay, so it's not financially worth it for the companies to recycle or donate unwanted or unsellable items. All the time. So, right, so they do this to some extent and I don't want to give the impression that they don't, but there's still excess even despite efforts to donate or recycle if they are there's still excess. And it takes a lot of effort to dive into these dumpsters, finding and reselling or occasionally repairing these items. This problem of waste continues to grow year over year. Products are increasingly expensive to produce. Why aren't you in a ball sobbing?

Anne Marie Conty: [gasps] It's so interesting because when I reported the pallet story in November, I was in a ball. With this, what I actually found was hope and I think that there are a lot of different ways from the dumpster divers who are doing this in their communities on a very small scale to companies that are attempting to make these efforts to create circularity. That's when you don't have excess in the manufacturing process and you're taking scrap material and you are cycling it back into your products. A really good example is Coach. So, they are using leather scrap from their manufacturing process to create new bags. They have a program called re-loved where they take bags that are bought back by them and they will refurbish them or they will redesign them. And then they have a second line called Coach Topia, which is where they take these leather scraps and they create bags out of those. So, there are efforts being made by some companies to create a closed system so that there isn't excess waste. And I think there are people that are doing things like that all over. And the EU just created a law. So, it's not happening in the US, but the European Union is making efforts to one, inventory how much excess product these companies have. So, this is focused on medium and large companies. And two, create an end-of-life plan for these products. So, they're not allowed to just ship them out to another country and dump them. They need to figure out how to create more circularity in their processes so that we are not creating mountains of waste.

Rosie Grayton: I know, Amory, that you're careful about not implying that the problem of waste is a problem for individuals to solve. I do wonder, though, what do you think we can be doing or what can we be mindful of when buying, returning, or disposing of the stuff in our lives? I think about that checkout gauntlet that a lot of stores have, which is basically like your impulse purchase hellscape.

Anne Marie Conty: Oh, I'm weak. [laughter] I think that it is just trying to be more mindful of what you're purchasing and when. I do a lot of thrift shopping. I also have realized that there are more of these buyback programs, or repair programs. I just dropped three pieces of clothing at Patagonia for repair for free. One of which I thrifted. I thrifted a jacket, the zipper broke. They repaired it on the spot. They put a new zipper in that jacket for me and I walked out with essentially like a completely usable jacket. And then there were two other items that they sent out for repair. Just getting more longevity out of those items. And then, you know, I'm not going to tell you not to like buy things that delight you, but just be a little bit more careful about what you are bringing into your home and what you are purchasing and not thinking about items as disposable because at the end of the day, everything ends up in the trash. Reduce, reuse, recycle is an order of operations, right? Don't buy in excess, reuse what you can, either your own goods or buy purchasing previously loved things, and then recycling if and when you can.

Rosie Grayton: So, are you on trash beat? Is this Is this your job now?

Anne Marie Conty: I would really like my next story to be about puppies or candy or

Rosie Grayton: [laughter] Thanks for joining me, Anne Marie. This is always so fun. If you want to see Anne Marie on her quest to diving in these dumpsters, there's a ton of video, amazing images and graphics on our website. The piece is called Why Do Stores Throw Away So Many Perfectly Good Products? I Went Dumpster Diving to Find Out. And we'll link the story in show notes. That's it for us. We'll see you next week. Peace.

Rosie Grayton: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Grayton, and produced by Abigail Kiel. Engineering support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alicia Betts and Rowan Nemi, Catherine Anderson and Diane Wong. Cliff Leavy is Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. And I'm Rosie Grayton. Thank you for listening. Should we just dive in? Dive in.

Anne Marie Conty: [laughter]