The Scavenger's Manifesto: Why Dumpster Diving Can Save You from Going Off the Deep End

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2009.

And then?

Welcome to the world of scavenomics.

To paraphrase Kristan Lawson, who coauthored The Scavengers' Manifesto with me: Scavenomics picks up where economics traditionally leaves off. Scavenomics is that other, too-long-ignored half of the cycle: the part that occurs after consumption. And just how do products find their way back to "production" at the so-called beginning of the cycle?

Scavengers are the driving force for this hidden half of the story. We are the ones who take society's trash and either re-use it, introducing it back into the middle of the standard economic system (i.e. trash is rechristened as goods for distribution and consumption), or recycle it, introducing the material back at the starting point of the system (i.e. trash is reprocessed into raw material for production).

Modern economic theory is not as blind as it used to be. These days, recycling is regarded as a valid economic activity, as yet another way to make money. (Re-using and re-purposing, however, are pretty much still off the radar screen.) But to the extent that it's been considered at all by economists, scavenging is regarded as a behavioral problem, a sort of consumer dysfunction that prevents people from properly purchasing and consuming their fair share of stuff. If too many people scavenge instead of buy retail, then the economy won't grow and a disastrous recession ensues. (Sound familiar?) But the reverse can also be bad: mindless, endless over-production, overconsumption, and then overdisposal. Hence, those endless tons of trash. Scavenging as a naturally occurring method of acquisition puts the brakes on what otherwise might be a runaway train of capitalism; by opting out of the consumer cycle, scavengers slow the system down to a reasonable pace.

If there is over-production, and everybody buys too much stuff, then sooner or later some of that stuff will be discarded, and if enough gets discarded, then an increasing number of people will see that the products they used to buy can now be scavenged for free. Once a sufficient number of people become scavengers, they stop buying new stuff, and production thereby slows down to sustainable levels. But the opposite is also true: If everybody starts scavenging, then production ceases entirely because no one is buying. But if nothing is being produced, then the inventory of scavengeable goods will shrink and finally disappear, and then (after scavengers harm or kill each other while fighting over the last few scavengeables) demand will rise again for new stuff, and production will restart. When a society such as Japan's in the 1980s engages in reckless overproduction and overconsumption, the principles of scavenomics dictate that a collapse is bound to happen. When a society such as current-day sub-Saharan Africa depends too much on scavenging (in this case on donated goods and food), that too portends economic havoc. Scavenomics is the economics of self-regulating moderation.

One of the principles of scavenomics is to unleash the creative power of scavengers. Often we, and only we, can find ways to use discards. A real-world example comes from the realm of chocolate production. For centuries, cocoa farmers simply threw out the husks left over after shelling cocoa pods. But in recent years, entrepreneurial scavengers thought of selling the otherwise worthless cocoa husks as gardening mulch, because so many consumers love anything that smells like chocolate, as the husks do. So today, many nurseries sell scavenged cocoa-husk mulch. Multiply that scenario by thousands of times and the power of scavenomics becomes clear. So green economics and scavenomics are not always in opposition. Often they are complementary, and scavenomics can be viewed as a subset or a variant of green economics.

Economic activity is not a line, but a circle. A continuous cycle. The missing steps are: this manufactured or refined material, whatever it might be, is eventually used up or becomes broken or obsolete or unwanted, and is then discarded. And then somewhere, somehow, by somebody or something, it all gets fed back into the beginning of the system and the cycle begins all over again. This can happen on a very short time-scale (the discarded product is immediately scavenged and re-used or re-purposed) or on a medium time-scale (discarded products are broken down into their original constituents and recycled back as the raw material for manufacture) or on an extremely long time scale, in which everything is at first just unceremoniously "thrown away," which essentially means returned to the Earth far from its point of origin in a new place such as a landfill or a dump, and perhaps a million, or ten million, or who-knows-how-many years in the future, some distant civilization will discover a rich "deposit" of iron ore in a location formerly known as Melvin's Salvage Yard and U-Find-It Car Parts Emporium.

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Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, most recently The Scavenger's Manifesto (Tarcher Press, 2009). Read more of Anneli's writings on scavenging at scavenging.wordpress.com.

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