68 Wild Dumpster Finds That Prove One Person’s Trash Really Is Another Person’s Treasure

My father retired from the Department of Sanitation in NY a few years ago... When I was younger, somebody had thrown out an Xbox 360 and so he brought it home for me (it was in a clear, plastic bag). Sometimes he would even find video games for the 360 and bring those home as well. I remember once he had brought home Rainbow Six: Vegas.

I run my towns transfer station and recycling center. The amount of perfectly good or even brand new stuff I see thrown out daily is absurd. I collect and restore antique radios so one of my personal favorites was a Thomas Edison phonograph from 1906. I have a 55" Samsung in my living room I got from work guy wanted a smart TV and just canned the old one. I even have a decent size trailer cause some guy couldn't be bothered to sell it.
Also the money you save is amazing if you have mechanical and/or electrical knowledge. I've never had to buy lawnmowers or snow blowers weed wackers etc even things like shovels garden tools hoses. Microwave dies? One will come in at work in a few days. It sounds horrible to say but when someone's parent dies is the best cause they just bring all their stuff to the dump.

Weirdest- A whole, skinned sheep head. A GIGANTIC, filthy adult toy. Entire rooms full of furniture. (We called them "Move-out piles", because it looked like the people were moving out of the house and just threw everything away.) 18 large trash bags of brand-name clothing, at the same house, three weeks in a row. (18 each week.)

Coolest- a big box of brand-new Rolling Rock Beer embossed metal signs, which I sold on Ebay for almost $400. Two beautiful 1950s pastel-colored sewing machines, one turquoise, one coral pink, with all their accessories. 12 working VCRs (This was in 2002, so DVD players were taking over).

My loader, a month before I started driving, found two antique baseball cards. They were the small ones from cigarette packs, and were worth several thousand dollars. He found them in the hopper, so he had no way of knowing which house they had come from, and no one ever claimed them.

I worked at a dump for the local council and we have a free E-waste service for dumping all electrical items which was a big thing seeing as general waste is $300 a ton.. Tv's, computers, phones, you name it we took it. Our lunchroom had a big screen tv with surround sound and a lot of the good stuff was exchanged for beer to the garbos who would come check daily what we had.. also we legally owned all material on any PC or SD card, think I had 20 at one point.. so smash your laptops before throwing them away guys.. ps first post ever:).

Probably a $100 big black office chair with a tear on it, found some black tape taped it up works fine. Also found a bench press with 120 lbs of weight in near mint condition just out on the curb.

My sister's boyfriend is a garbage man and he found a whole Wii system with a bunch of rechargeable remotes and the charging station. All in perfect condition.
They also tend to find a lot of really expensive perfumes.

Food. Perfectly fine food. I've worked at a major retailer in the UK as a warehouse guy. We are the ones that have the awful job of throwing away day-old food in those wheelie bins.
I saw awful because, 90% of the food is perfectly fine - like i would eat it.
They keep a lot of meat in higher temps and thus the sell by dates are not as long as they would be if they were in a proper freezer. It was ridiculous. Stupid thing was, company policy prohibited us from giving it away or taking it for ourselves.

I used to do recycling outreach for my city and worked closely with the drivers. Things I have collected from cans, neighborhood cleanup piles: dozens of bicycle wheels and tires, several complete bikes, tons of books, tons of lumber and tools. And the craziest thing I've taken home, a working treadmill. I still have it.

When I was younger, a family friend worked as a garbage man in a ritzy shopping town, and he let me ride with him a few times. (This probably wasn't legal, would not recommend.)

I still have the perfectly-working electric sander and air compressor we found in someone's garbage. I guess a lot of it was wives telling husbands to get rid of stuff in the garage. I also got a working backpack leaf blower in this way from someone's front yard. I asked the guy why he was giving it away and he said his wife was making him. I don't get why people throw away functional things.

I'm not a garbage man nor a dumpster diver, but I have made a few decent finds over the years. Some lcd monitors when they were still pretty expensive, a big UPS which just needed a new battery, etc.

The most interesting was a firemans SCOTT pack. They are kinda like scuba but for use by fireman. I passed it along to a friend of mine who was a firefighter. Come to find out it went missing several years earlier from one of the fire stations a couple counties over. They were very interested in where I found it.

I do junk removal on the side and a lady insisted on getting rid of a diamond necklace. We got it appraised, its value was $5000.

My dad was a garbage man about 8 years ago and he found an old gameboy color with Pokemon yellow. We were broke and living in a fifth wheel at the time so this was awesome for 10 year old me.

Not a garbage man but a few years ago during a council clean up in my town (Sydney, Australia) I managed to dig up an old Super Nintendo and a few games, worked perfectly.

Soooo many toys. Lego out the wazoo, enough nerf blasters for a whole neighborhood of kids. That's the normal stuff.

The weird. Prosthetic limbs. Police light bars. Art?

Many of my first computers came out of dumpsters. Often times there was absolutely nothing wrong, the company just upgraded and into the dumpster the old one went. Rarely did I find something that was totally beyond repair, and even then I could salvage parts.

I saw a lady toss a couple hundred records on the side of the road about 25 years ago. I hit the brakes, she said 'Take them if you want!' Not being a moron, I did.

I still wonder if her husband came home that day to a 'surprise'. She seemed a bit upset. It was loaded with tons of classics.

Not a garbage collector but I once was helping a friend move in to a new apartment and it appeared that one of the room mates never moved out, so all his stuff was just dumped in a big pile on the side of the house. There was a lot of baseball cards, Derek Jeter, Bo Jackson, ARod (all rookies and some multiple rookies), a signed Magic Johnson card from the early 90's, some pretty ok furniture. Literally looked like all his stuff just got dumped out.

The weirdest thing was that there was a file box with some letters from a girl, family pictures, some nice jewelry and the kids PASSPORT...what? I searched for him online and found nothing, and dropped the passport off at the police station and asked them to contact me if the found out anything so I could give him his stuff back...never heard a thing, still have the "important" stuff in case.

My dad runs a janitorial company, sometimes he finds cool stuff. Just last week he pulled 8 brand new Lenovo keyboards out of the trash. One of the offices must have upgraded computers, but not needed the keyboards that came with them. I’m gonna see if I can sell them even though they’re pretty cheap. Don’t really care how much I make on them as long as they’re out of the landfill.

Roughly $1000 worth of retro games and consoles, and a fog machine.

I found a gold chain and a set of keys in a dumpster once.