Behold, The Urban Scavenger’s Treasure Map: Groundscout.com
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 02. 6.06
Last week, after finding some beautiful wooden CD racks in the trash (one still in shrinkwrap), I was mumbling how the adage “seek and ye shall find” could easily be changed to “seek in the garbage and ye shall find.” Ever since high school, when I would cruise the Boston suburbs following trash night around the city, seeking and finding glorious cast-aside artifacts, I have trusted in curbs and dumpsters to provide no end of worldly wonders (including the office chair I currently sit in). Well, technology has just raised the bar for dumpster-divers. Garbagescout is a website that allows people to post and retrieve great groundscores around New York. From your phone, you snap a shot of some good looking item in the garbage, email it to Garbagescout with the location and description, and it is posted on a Google map that others can browse. The freshest sightings are demarcated with a flaming garbage can. Dive in! :: Garbagescout via Inhabitat
Scrapping has been an excellent source of swag for me, the best finds so far have been a half case of 2 Buck Chuck, a
paper -mache green monster
and a complete set of kitchen knives, plus lumber to build raised garden beds. And that's just from walking down my ally.
The first or second issue of "Found" magazine had a great article about a guy in Ann Arbor who did a lot of "dumpster diving." He said that the difference between something "valuable" and something that was "garbage" was simply its location -in or out of a garbage can.
that's way cool, someone should mash that up with http://www.freecycle.org/ though as well.