Carter Stevens spends his days peering into dumpsters outside Nashville office parks and luxury condo buildings, hauling out discarded furniture and electronics that he then cleans up and resells online. Over the past year, that routine generated roughly $140,000 in total sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
The 31-year-old, who lives near Nashville, Tennessee, started dumpster diving in March 2024 and has since built a resale operation around office parks and high-end apartment buildings, according to CNBC Make It. He sells the salvaged and cleaned items on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, turning what other people throw away into a steady, if unpredictable, income stream.
One of his biggest scores came when he found 190 discarded Steelcase office chairs outside an office park dumpster — chairs that were worth more than $1,000 each when new. He sold most of them in bulk transactions on Facebook Marketplace for $17,000, then earned another $10,600 selling the rest individually, per the same account. On another occasion, he found 120 standing desks discarded outside a building in a single haul.
From a Gas Station Find to a Six-Figure Side Hustle
Stevens is not working off some sprawling warehouse operation. He keeps his search locations within a few miles of his apartment to minimize gas costs and works alone, aiming to find roughly one truly valuable haul per month. Supplies like cardboard boxes and packing tape also come free from the trash about 90% of the time, he told the outlet.
“The amount of waste in this country that you'll find is unbelievable. We throw so much stuff out,” Stevens said, according to CNBC Make It. He finds furniture from West Elm, iPads, electronics, and working power tools near high-end apartment buildings, and says almost every piece of furniture in his own apartment came from a dumpster.
His first real find, five months after moving into a new apartment in October 2023, was a discarded pair of black Nike Air Force Ones in good condition, found next to a gas station pump. He sanitized them and sold them online for $35. “That was the first time I had ever found something that was trash and sold it and made a little bit of money,” he said.
Not Always a Welcome Guest
Stevens sometimes asks buildings for permission to search their trash, marketing himself as a junk removal service rather than a dumpster diver, per the CNBC Make It report. When property owners or security guards tell him to leave, he does. The Washington Post, in a separate account, described him inspecting his favorite dumpster behind a luxury high-rise in Nashville, where a 65-inch flat-screen television jutted through cardboard boxes and a marble side table sat wedged between trash bags, according to The Washington Post.
Nashville's municipal code does address scavenging directly. Per the Metro Government of Nashville and Davidson County Code of Ordinances, no person shall scavenge waste or recyclable materials from any container or facility within the limits of the metropolitan government. The evidence available does not detail how that provision is applied in specific cases.
Uneven Income and an Eye on Real Estate
Stevens is candid that the business is far from a sure thing. The majority of his income has come from big hauls across his five highest-earning months, reflecting how uneven the work can be, and he says he does not consider his annual income necessarily sustainable. He is now studying the business of real estate wholesaling — securing contracts for distressed properties and flipping them to investors for a fee — as a potentially more secure way to earn a living.
Still, he pays $400 a month for a storage unit to hold items from valuable hauls before listing them, and he said the turnaround from where he started has been significant. “I dug myself out of a hole. I built up my savings. I really did much more than I thought was possible,” Stevens said. As for whether he will keep digging through other people's garbage: “I don't see myself ever turning down a good looking dumpster.”
A Bigger Pile of Discarded Goods
Stevens is part of a broader scavenging and resale economy; the Better Business Bureau counts around 10,000 junk removal businesses across the U.S., including 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which touts more than 150 franchise locations, as reported by CNBC Make It. Elsewhere, Dallas-Fort Worth divers Tiffany Roach and Ella Rose drive between strip malls and dumpsters to find items to resell on Facebook Marketplace, their own websites, and at garage sales, as reported by The New York Times Wirecutter.
The scale of what gets thrown away helps explain why so much is left for the taking. Blue Yonder estimates that 3.5 billion products are returned in the U.S. every year, with 9.8 billion pounds of returned products ending up in landfills, the Wirecutter piece notes, though it adds that disposing of overproduced goods is sometimes the most economical option for retailers. A separate report from Parcel Industry, citing the Sierra Club, found that 5.8 billion pounds of returned goods in the United States ended up in landfills in 2020, including 700 million pounds of returned clothing.
Across the Atlantic, the BBC has documented similar hauls on a smaller scale: London journalist Darryl Baker estimated she saved hundreds of pounds during a six-month stint of dumpster diving, while Jeff Ferrell earns around $150 every two weeks selling discarded metal to a scrapyard, according to the BBC. The outlet also reported that stylist Millie Diamond once found a discarded dress worth an estimated £600, and that Essex sales assistant Charlotte Bayford said she had not bought shampoo in eight years after finding discarded toiletries.
