New York artist Justin Gignac's trash is also his treasure.

File this under “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this first, how do I rip it off?” In the tradition of turning cat hair into jewelry and other sustainable craft ventures, New York artist Justin Gignac has introduced the ultimate recycled craft: garbage. Customers can purchase a transparent, sealed cube of bona fide New York garbage — labeled, naturally as sculpture. While he started selling them streetside for $10 nearly a decade ago, they now go for five to ten times as much and ship all around the world.

It started out as a bet with a friend at an ad agency that packaging made all the difference in selling a product. It might seem to embody the worst of conspicuous consumerism, but there is an appeal to being able to have a snapshot of a culture’s castaway, better than any time capsule. Gignac’s more expensive cubes include garbage from President Obama’s inauguration (he deals in some outside trash) and the Yankees’ ticker-tape parade.

His website doesn’t go into much detail about how he actually hand-collects his art, but the cubes seem to contain an odorless, curated collection. Maybe the next step is to send every New Yorker a plastic cube to fill on their own, which is kind of like how those Cash for Gold shops work. I, for one, can pay rent for a month just cleaning the floor of my bedroom, if the rest of the world is buying.

[via Crushable]

Follow Eric: @primesilver.

Food reclaimed from the trash, from Alex Mallis's film Spoils.

Last month we featured an article on foraging in Prospect Park for food (read: living like a rabbit) that casually besmirched Dumpster diving as an inferior means of procuring free eats. If trying to determine which berries and fungi in the wild won’t seriously disrupt your digestive system or poison you is a little too much work (hey, it worked for the guy from Into the Wild, right?), then maybe selecting the edible parts of pre-screened throwaways may be the way to go.

Dumpster diving is nothing new, particularly for fans of counter-culture literature from the 60’s and 70’s. Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman endorses it among other survival skills for “Amerika,” but filmmaker and inveterate Dumpster diver Alex Mallis has repackaged diving as a different sort of political act in his new film, Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest.

Spoils follows three groups of divers over the course of one night as they travel to the Trader Joe’s on Court Street in Cobble Hill and bring their loot home. The film itself provides no commentary, preferring to let the images, the people, and — most importantly — the food, speak for themselves. The freegans come from all walks of life: people living on a budget, looking for free high-quality food, or those who want to make a statement about society’s waste. Mallis told us that rather than trying to explore a sub-culture, Spoils instead seeks to demystify the act of Dumpster diving, perhaps waking the dormant diver in you.

How did this movie come about?
I had been Dumpster diving for a year, and it occurred to me that people needed to see how much waste was being created, and there’s an interesting sub-culture of people who do this right under our noses. And the majority of people who hear about it want to know more. The approach I decided to take was to meet people at the Dumpsters, befriend them, explain what I was doing, and then accompany them with the camera as they traveled from their house to the Dumpster, and back home.

There are three different main characters: an older artist, a grandmother with her grandson, and a young hipster, and they all live in Brooklyn. They all get to the grocery store in different ways, and I follow them, without a lot of commentary. I really just want to show people what they can see any night on a Dumpster dive. People are meant to come to ask their own questions and come to their own conclusions.

Divers on their nightly ritual at the Court St. Trader Joe's. Still from Spoils.

We all probably have an idea of it, but how do you define “Dumpster diving?”
Dumpster diving is living off of the excess of society. It can be furniture, toys, clothing, but what it is in the context of my film is food. To put it in perspective, you go into a grocery store and you look at the bananas. The ones that you don’t choose are blemished and brown. So those are the ones that go out the door. And there are different standards, especially at a place like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods.

You go out after the store is closed, there’s this 50-pound bag of bananas, and maybe they’re a little mushed, but they’re perfectly good. Or if expiration dates are reached, or will be expiring the next day. Trader Joe’s has a lot of prepared foods, and you can find ones that will expire by the next day. It’s not like you’ll blow up when that date is reached.

If someone wanted to do this, do they have to become their own FDA? Don’t you have to know the difference between a dented can and a dose of botulism?
Well, yeah, there are rules with cans. If it’s dented inwards, there’s probably no problem. If it’s dented outwards, that could be a problem. For other stuff, you can look at it. Does it smell ok? Is it warm? Is there mold? Use your common sense. In general, I spend 20-30 minutes cleaning everything off.

How does it work with your personal lifestyle?
There’s a stigma to it, sure, but nine times out of ten, you tell someone about it and they say, “Gross.” But you show someone, and they say, “Holy shit.” They’ll jump in there with you, too. I brought my mother with me one time, and she got in there with me.

Mallis says there's an art to knowing which items to take. From Spoils.

How much can you save Dumpster diving?
In a night you can bring back about $200 of groceries in a suitcase. But it’s also about quality. When I go shopping at a store, I buy the cheapest stuff there is.

Alex is currently working on post-production for Spoils, which he plans to submit to film festivals nationwide. Visit Alex’s Kickstarter page for more information and to learn how to contribute. The page offers to donors, among other things, a guided tour of a Brooklyn Dumpster dive.

Dealing with Coke can pay off

If you’ve ever spent your working hours navigating a gray cubicle maze or strangling yourself with clothing hangars at a retail job, just about anything seems like a valid career alternative. Even, we’ll admit to daydreaming, joining those guys who pick bottles and cans out of your apartment trash every morning. Fresh air! Exercise! The thrill of the hunt! Maybe it’s a little messy, but we had to look at dead bodies at our last newspaper job, and you can’t turn corpses into nickels. Walking to work one day, the two of us wondered whether those humble trash pickers are really laughing their way back to McMansions in Jersey. So we decided to find out for ourselves.

Armed with the only granny cart we could find, a handful of empty trash bags and a few hours to kill, we hit the streets of Boerum Hill at 11 a.m. on a hot Thursday in September. The first few buildings on our block alone suggested a fruitful harvest, despite the disgusted leers from neighbors and passersby who seemed to be, judging by their faces, slightly reviled. Or maybe it was just their concern that trash picking had become the latest breaking trend among the young white males of Brooklyn, right up there with Dumpster diving and boat shoes. About a half-dozen residents had separated out their  redeemables into plastic bags and hung them from fences.

Three blocks down, the easy access to trash cans in the front yards of the Boerum Hill brownstones and apartment buildings was proving to be a boon: Our cart was filling up quickly. It doesn’t take long to become an expert at what to take: Any water bottles count (and you drink a lot of them, Brooklyn), as do sparkling waters and energy drinks—basically anything that isn’t 100 percent juice. Boerum Hill had a lot of Bud Light on this particular day, and a lot of wine bottles, which were no good to us (see the full list of redeemables and other official info).

Cheer up, Conal. This hard work will make it rain nickels.

Turning up toward Gowanus, we hit a mineral reserve of malt beverage bottles and scooped them into the cart. Collecting cans and bottles, you get a supernatural ability for spotting your bounty—in the street, on top of corner waste baskets, even at the bottom of someone’s bin in the mess of last night’s dinner. Bottles start to look like scattered nickels in the trash, making the whole thing like collecting coins in a Super Mario game: Sure, I don’t need the coin all the way at the bottom of the pit near the sea of hot lava. But I want it.

The only direct competition we encountered came from an elderly lady on Bergen St. who paused in her trash-digging as we passed by with our lush cart and followed us with a narrow-eyed leer that penetrated the cloud of stale beer and hot sugar water. As we kept moving down the block, it became clear she had beaten us to the punch on this side of the street. We were tempted to yell ”Don’t worry! We’re just tourists!” to assure her we weren’t a threat to her income, but we didn’t want to scare her even more.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps a Purell in your pocket, this is like three levels of hell distilled into one afternoon. We spilled hot, stale beer on ourselves, handled wet cigarette butts, and touched ancient mold and mysterious foodstuffs. We picked up one warm water bottle off the street and realized, yep, that’s probably pee inside. We touched goo of every consistency. Some of the pros we saw had gloves, but more were barehanded. A few pros were truly helpful, pointing us in the direction of more grocery stores when it was clear the machines at one store were busted, and informing us why some of our bottles were rejected (they have to be from New York and the labels have to be intact so the machine can scan them).

Sorting through the trash involves a great deal of patience. Maybe six houses on a block won’t have anything to claim, but the seventh house is the one who had a Diet Pepsi party the night before. By the time we were at Court St., we were ready to cash in. It had been just under an hour and we already had an overflowing cart.

Mr. Darcy builds his empire

Redemption
So what can you earn? In a best-case scenario, you can make a bit more than $5 an hour from collection to redemption (untaxed, of course). We each walked away with $2.50 from our trips, but in truth the whole enterprise was a one-man job. On the first run in September, we collected $5.60 for an hour’s work; the second run last month netted a smooth $5.25.

Collecting bottles and cans isn’t really that hard, it turns out. But trying to cash them in? That, using the technical term, is the bitch of it. Our first destination was the Fifth Avenue Key Food, where we planned to cash in the bottles in the seemingly convenient “reverse vending machines” that count your bottles for you. The aluminum and plastic machines worked fine and printed our ticket after accepting most of our bottles. But the glass machines—at this Key Food and then at three more stores within a two-mile range we dragged our booty to—were broken, or had gotten filled up quick. And there wasn’t much we could do about it.

This is the part where your hoped-for hourly wage is steadily diminished by a relentless stream of store employees who are perpetually on lunch break and are, apparently, the only people in the store’s employ who are able to fix, turn on or otherwise empty the machines.

Take Met Food in Prospect Heights. We had been waiting for about 20 minutes, along with two other guys with bags of bottles, for a clearly-full bottle machine to be emptied. Finally out onto the sidewalk walks a young guy, who pulls on his work gloves and proceeds to tell us… the machine is full. Yes, but can’t you empty it? “No. Is full.” There has be something you can do? “No. Is full.” He even opened the machine to illustrate the point that it was, indeed, full. When should we come back? “Is full.” Our second outing met with better luck: With an early start, we got a jump on the machines, so we arrived at the Fifth Ave. Key Food as soon as they opened the machines at 9 a.m.

Printouts from Key Food's recycling kiosks

Note: Even if they have broken machines or no machines at all, all stores that collect a bottle deposit are required to give you money back for any bottles and cans they sell (though they won’t be happy about it). So you can get 5 cents back for each of those Simpler Times cans at a register at Trader Joe’s, but they won’t give you anything for a PBR. This involves knowing which products belong to which store, and sorting through the sticky mess of bottles before going into the store—all actions that lower your return on investment.

The regulars
Don’t forget that this is an endeavor where the competition is very seasoned, though perhaps slower-moving. One big dude carting around two black bags nearly as large as he was said he had arrangements with different building supers to save him bags of bottles and cans.

Ronald, a regular at the Fifth Ave. Key Food wearing a Mountain Dew fleece, told us he makes three or four hauls to cash in bottles and cans a week. It’s his only source of income and he’s been doing it for 15 years. One morning this week, Ronald, who lives in the nearby Gowanus projects, had six large yard-waste bags full of recycling in two carts. He wouldn’t say exactly how much he makes, but he did say it’s enough to survive on without welfare or Medicaid. Although his collecting income allows for a steak “every now and then,” he mostly eats “pork and beans and franks.” And he’s no stranger to frustration: He can wait for hours for someone to fix broken redemption machines, and if he tries to take his haul inside the store,  he’ll be hassled or even flat-out refused. Ronald used to be more vigorous, collecting six days a week. “Then I got old,” he says. ” Old and tired.”

We also saw some great ingenuity: One impressive feat of engineering was an all-in-one bike-cart contraption (pictured), complete with baskets, bags, a place to store a trash grabber stick and even a water-bottle holder (a reusable bottle, mind you). Also, containers can’t be returned crushed or broken, so some of the veterans had homemade dowels they used to force bottles and cans back into shape.

A bike contraption, for serious bottle collectors only

Like it or not, these folks have become an important part of the New York ecosystem: New York state alone chugs through 2.5 billion bottles of water a year—enough according to the Department of Environmental Conservation, to reach the moon (where it is even more difficult to find a working Key Food). The collectors don’t exactly walk around like green-mulleted planetary superheroes, but a lot of those bottles they’re collecting come from trash cans, not recycling cans. So the bottle collectors are the only thing preventing those one-use plastic containers from eternal landfill damnation (which is the fate of about about 30 million single-use containers every day).

Glad to do our part—even if we’re not quitting our jobs any time soon. When we finished, we took the money we earned and spent it all on one $5 Porkslap at the General Greene, which is a lot to spend on beer, but at least it gave us a nickel towards our next big haul.

If you find yourself in a rough patch where those extra nickels will make a big difference, two tips: 1) Go early. While Brooklyn is big (and thirsty) enough that it produces enough bottles for everyone, getting to the stores or the redemption machines early will give you a jump on the window of time before the machines break or get filled up for the day. 2) Stick to brownstone neighborhood. Their yards provide easy access to trash cans you can pick through without trespassing too much.

And for no particularly scientific reason, here’s a chart we prepared that measures certain clutch life items in bottle collection time and effort:

*Based on average earnings of two trips, 9/2 and 10/21, in a best-case scenario where redemption machines are functional.

A TJ's Dumpster haul (bag included).

Thanksgiving’s upon us, and we can practically taste the stale-bread stuffing and just-expired eggnog. You too can learn how to turn refuse into a festive holiday meal by joining the Freegans of NYC tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov. 25), for their guided tour of borough’s most fruitful bins. You’ll collect some forsaken feastables and learn the best ways and means of salvaging trash treasures. Ever seen those darkly-dressed, bicycled people loitering in front of Trader Joe’s around closing? That could be you!

Not all Freegans look the Dumpster-diving part (some are quite well-dressed, indeed, coming from work and all). But all take the ideals of frugal living and elevate them to a life-philosophy. Followers of the faith refuse to spend money (either on anything or just on food) in protest of consumerism, current means of production, or simply out of necessity.

The group’s mystery tour finally will reveal just how Freegans manage to come up with everything from gourmet sandwiches and sushi to the staples of bread and milk (expiration date, schmexpiration date). Don’t worry, the experts do know how to safeguard against the dreaded parasite or two. The tour guides themselves go out every night of the week to warehouses, stores, restaurants and even private homes, to collect what often is a truly motley meal. Whether you’re on the hunt for some free Christmas gifts or for a Thanksgiving side, just make sure to bring some gloves.

Meet: Wednesday, 9 p.m. at Court St. and Montague St., in front of the TD Bank. More info here.

Photo by Stefan Tonio

I never really decided to spend only $8,000 in one year—it just sort of happened. I didn’t even realize the extent of my thrift until tallying up my income on the eve of March 15. When you take the amount of money I brought home (roughly $13,000) and subtract the amount I had thrown to the black void that is private student loans (roughly $5,000), combined with the fact that both my checking and my savings accounts were more or less empty on January 1, it was pretty simple math. And while I maybe didn’t expect my spending to have been quite that lean, I can’t say I was all that surprised either. Since I moved to Brooklyn two years ago, I’ve staunchly maintained that despite New York City’s reputation as the playground for the rich (or, as will become clear later, because of it) you can pretty much spend as much, or as little as you want here.

So how did I come to only spend eight grand? Well, in a way, the answer starts right before I packed up my life into a clunker of a 92 Jetta on the verge of a breakdown, and made the drive to my first apartment in Brooklyn.

Just a few days before, I was sweating under the weight of a cap-and-gown ensemble while Mayor Bloomberg addressed my class of roughly 450 Bard College grads. To paraphrase, he promised that all of us who moved to New York City would be welcomed with “open arms.” But that wasn’t exactly how it played out for me.

During the first month of my new life in New York, the superintendent of my building, who I later learned was addicted to crack, broke into my room and stole a handful of blank checks. She then proceeded to use them to milk my checking account to -$1000. After my first six months I was unemployed, having been fired from my first two jobs, the latter of which was bussing tables at a roach-infested restaurant.

I finished up 2007 doing freelance photography. Though it has a romantic ring to it, this more or less translated to taking snap shots of drunk people in nightclubs, and a myriad of odd jobs from taking head shots of a police detective for his MySpace page to playing the role of one of ten “fake” paparazzi photographers in a Burger King commercial. For all of this, I made around $800 a month, $550 of which had to go to rent at the time. With only $250 left for everything else, including student loans, I had to figure out how to live frugally.

Shelter

One of the main reasons I’m able to spend so little is that my rent in a shared Bed Stuy brownstone is cheap, even for Brooklyn. I pay $440 a month, all utilities included. Also included are wooden floors, two large windows, original molding, two large walk-in closets, a built in bookcase, and a personal bathroom. Yeah, that’s right—I have my own bathroom. My rent dropped $110 because we decided to rent out our living room. Bed Stuy might not have the same restaurants and bars as trendier neighborhoods have, but it’s quiet with tree lined streets, and it’s got perhaps the best roti in Brooklyn.

When it came time to paint my room, I went to Build it Green in Astoria and walked off with a gallon of blue paint and a quart of white for a total of $6, which of course I wrote off my next rent check.

Clothing

I don’t need to spend much on clothes because my job, as a part-time assistant for a small business owner, requires only that I look clean. So I usually shop at the Salvation Army or go to a Free Market, basically a massive giveaway that happens usually every few months. They’re highly unpredictable. There’s either tons of great stuff, or a meager selection that’s clearly been sitting at the bottom of someone’s closest for the last year. Still, it’s free, and always worth a check. (To sign up for email notices for when the next one is planned, contact them at inourhearts@gmail.com.)

That said, I did need to buy clothes since moving to the city for interviews, and found them at chain stores common to Brooklyn like “Danice” or “Pretty Girl.” I’ve gotten nice blouses sold two for $10, and basic black skirts for $15 that look just as professional as more costly items elsewhere.

Food

My diet consists mainly of gourmet ingredients: pre-washed baby spinach and watercress, fresh mozzarella, portabella mushrooms, smoked salmon, chocolate croissants, free range eggs, salmon steaks, spicy Italian sausage, hummus, crème fraiche, Odwalla granola bars—these are just some of the gourmet items I’ve picked out of supermarket trash bins in the past year.

As for quality, most of the time the items I find have not even passed their expiration date, and if they have, it’s usually only by a day or two. While sometimes eating for free means slightly bruised fruit or slicing off a bit of mold on a block of cheese, I’ve foraged for everything from fish filets to pork chops and never gotten sick—something I can’t say for people who regularly eat at restaurants.

A recent evening's dumpster haul. Photo by Sara Katz

Where do I find the best stuff? Mainly in Manhattan. Le Pain Quotidien has probably the best bread in all of New York City. It’s covered with rolled oats, and inside is chuck full with nuts and cranberries. They’ve also got nice plain whole wheat loafs, and some serious chocolate brownies. An excess of bagels can be found nightly at Daniel’s Bagels in Murray Hill, or Bagel Store in Williamsburg. For Daniel’s, don’t just hone in on the first bag you find. They usually put out 2-3 bags of just bagels—the freshest will often still be warm, and will always have several bagels still stuck together. That’s how you know they’re fresh off the baking pan.

Fruits and Vegetables: On the Chrystie Street edge of the Whole Foods in the Bowery, between around 4-6:30 PM you’ll find rows of green dumpsters that on any given day are full to the brim with fruit and vegetables. It’s somewhat hit or miss, so if you don’t strike gold the first time don’t be discouraged.

For dairy and meat, Gristedes and D’Agostino also offer a wider array of finds. Pretty much every store is good, but I have particular luck with the branches in Murray Hill. Especially the Gristedes on 32nd Street and Third Avenue. Not only do I routinely get vegetables, dairy, and meat, but this is the main spot where I find special treats like the aforementioned smoked salmon.

Transportation

While the number of people who bike to work rose 35% in 2008, I’d bet a lot of money that even among those most did not bike in the dead of winter. I know because I was out on the streets, come snow or blistery winds, and I can tell you, there were certainly a lot less bikes than there is now.

While I am a huge fan of biking, even I admit it’s not for everyone. You will get into accidents. I don’t care how cautious you are. If you don’t feel you can afford to hit the pavement every once in a while, then biking probably isn’t for you. Even I sometimes drop the cash to take the train if I’m on my way to a photography gig; my camera is just too valuable to risk a long ride.

Entertainment

I always take full advantage of free museum days and summer concert series during summer, but I also have a few money-saving tricks that aren’t so obvious.

Movies: If you don’t have a Brooklyn Library card already, get one. Their movie collection is actually pretty impressive, and while it can be hard to just walk in and find the title you want, you can request anything in their system to be shipped to the branch nearest you.

Eating Out: Two words—mystery shopper. For obvious reasons, there is a limit to what I can say about this, but I highly recommend searching around Craigslist for people advertising jobs as mystery shoppers. It allows me to drop $240 on a dinner for two without having to actually pay.

Drinking: Probably my favorite way to drink for free is the weekly see-and-be-seen fest that is gallery openings in Chelsea. Not only is the booze free, but it tends to be decent, often with accompanying snacks. Plus you get to look vaguely classy in the process, making this a great idea if you want to hang out with a friend who has slightly higher standards. A little advice: I’ve found a somewhat intriguing negative correlation between the quality of the artwork and the quality of the free handouts.

In the end, I’m not sure how long I’ll live like this. While I can’t say that I feel like I’ve missed out at all by living such a thrift-conscious lifestyle, I admit my current situation is not ideal. There are some things that I’ve yet to find a solution. For example, if anyone knows an affordable darkroom rental, uh, let me know.

And certainly, if I landed one of those salaried jobs I sometimes fantasize about, I’m sure I’d spend more money. But until then, I know I can live for a year on less than some people in this city spend in a month.