Trash Day Jogging: A Weekly Ritual Helped My Health and My Budget

After years of living in the country, I purchased my first home in a small city. No more foraging the woods for free supplies, I thought, but I soon discovered an equally bounteous source of forage: trash day piles.

The neighborhood I had moved into had an unwritten agreement that discarded amounts would be put out the evening before trash collection day. Whether most people did so for convenience or the salvager's, I never knew, but I came to see each street as my own personal buffet of scrap wood, fertilizer, furniture, electronics, and the occasional treasure, including some lawn ornaments and an antique wooden Coca-Cola tray.

I put my own share of such goods, in the spirit of letting each item find a good item; only rarely were my offerings still in place when the trash man came the next morning. It was a good feeling to know that my largesse had found a willing, anonymous beneficiary. The best feeling was seeing an item thatI had taken in and subsequently reliquinshed now sitting in front of a neighbor's house, awaiting its third (or greater) satisfied owner.

Most of my neighbors confined their attention to their immediate surroundings; I would watch them meander over to my pile just as I set it out, or scrutinize it from behind a curtain pulled to one side. A few more ambitious scavengers would troll the neighborhood in their pickups at low speed, stopping occasionally to ad a broken lawn mower or some half-rotted landscaping timbers to their findings.

I chose an ambulatory method: since I was in the habit of making frequent jogs around the block, I devised a 'salvage rule': if I passed an items worth saving on my evening jog, then I was allowed to walk back to the house item, in hand, instead of jogging. Depending on the weight and bulkiness of my find, this might be easier or harder than the jog; ether way I came out ahead with a workout on the way out and a valuable treasure on the way back. The prospect of a decent bookshelf or a box of LP's or just a few bags of grass clippings for my mulch pile was often enough to get me into my jogging clothes when I might have been tired or distracted otherwise.

I'll admit I may have gone overboard in some respects. For instance, I would often grab something I had no use for, with the sole intention of putting it in my own pile: I wanted the glory of recognition of having put out the best stuff on the whole block. I also filled my basement with scrap wood and broken garden hoses and such, and while a lot of this stuff eventually got used, a lot of it eventually found its way back on my pile. But I can't claim it was much of a waste when all it cost me was a walk home that would have been a jog.

The moral is this: for a genuine hunter-gatherer, there is always treasure to be found in the gleaning of your immediate vicinity, whether it's the break room table, the apartment bulletin board, the wilderness, the internet, or the pregnant piles of promise that are the urban trash night.