What does our trash say about us? For the freegans, waste is a symbol of capitalism’s excess – perfectly good food or items thrown away because it no longer holds market value. For law enforcement, trash can be a source of evidence, as seen in California v. Greenwood. These two distinct perspectives – trash as a resource vs. trash as surveillance – reveal how waste is more than just discarded material. It becomes a reflection of power, privilege, and systemic contradictions.
The Freegans see trash as an opportunity for protest and resistance. By salvaging food and goods that corporations deem worthless, they expose the flaws of a system that produces an immense amount of waste while millions around the world are starving. The Freegans movement challenges the capitalistic idea that everything must be bought and sold. They want to show the world that discarded goods still have value. Through their actions, they want to show how all this excess waste is proof of a failing economic system.
Quite different from the Freegans, in California v. Greenwood trash is seen as public property, free for police to search without a warrant. This court decision allows law enforcement to treat discarded items as fair game for surveillance. This raises a troubling question: why is trash considered abandoned when it comes to legal rights, but still “owned” when people try to reclaim food or other goods from dumpsters? Freegans and other people are often harassed or arrested for taking discarded food and goods. Companies even directly destroy perfectly good products before putting them in the dumpsters, or their dumpsters are off limits to public. Less fortunate people are directly prohibited from searching dumpsters or harassed for it while the police are given full legal access to search through someone’s garbage.
These glaring contradictions highlight who gets to control waste and what that control represents. Corporations throw food away because of business decisions. When freegans than take that same food, it’s sometimes treated as theft. When the police look through trash, it’s a legal investigative tool. At first glance trash seems meaningless. But these social and legal treatment of trash reveals how deeply power structures shape even the “worthless” items we discard.