Jessica’s apartment is trashed.
It’s an abode of overload filled with furnishings and fashions she and her best friend, Carina, found in dumpsters on college campuses.
Rather than spending thousands shopping on luxe labels at high-end boutiques, the native New Yorkers, occupational therapists now living in North Carolina, spend their free time studying the college move-out schedules of local universities such as Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
With the intel, the fearless friends dive through garbage bins, hunting for goodies that the undergrads ditched.
“Every day is like Christmas morning,” Jessica, a 30-something, originally from upstate, told The Post of the trashed treasures she and Carina, also in her early 30s, have dug up over the past five years. The duo chose not to provide their last names for privacy.
“I hoist Carina into dumpsters,” added Jessica. “I lower her down, holding onto her ankles, while she grabs things.”
From $1,000 Balenciaga sneakers to a MacBook laptop, which can range from $600 to over $2,500, to a brand new Sharper Image streaming drone, the bin buddies are making out like bandits — and making a tidy profit by selling some of the loot they lift, too.
“Carina will be in the dumpster and I’ll be like grabbing things and running to look up their retail value,” said Jessica, prompting Carina to chime in with, “She’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, that table is worth $500.’”
The scrappy pair hawks any wow-worthy waste that neither of them want, reselling the finds online. The cash they earn goes into a “dump fund,” which they use for vacations.
“We recently traveled together to Cancun; that trip was 100% dump funded,” said Jessica.
She and Carina, who met as graduate students at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, typically blow the dough they earn from their hobby-turned-side hustle on lavish vacations.
“We did a three-week trip through Europe, we went to Prague, Portugal, Ireland and some other countries, with dump money two years ago,” Jessica said. “And we plan to go to San Francisco, California, in September. So, we’re saving up for that.”
The not-so-squeamish besties even make light of their bizarre business with their over 24,000 social media followers, writing, “one man’s trash is another girl’s vacation fund,” in their Instagram bio.
To protect themselves from the gunk, grime and bed bugs found in most garbage piles, Jessica and Carina wear gloves and use hand sanitizers to keep as clean as possible. The millennials also wash, hose down and vacuum the pieces they pluck, ridding the goods of unseemly stains and unwelcome critters.
Jessica and Carina are just two in the thriving dumpster diving community, a growing faction of worldwide folks who’d rather rummage through rubbish than pay for hot commodities.
A whopping 21% of US residents have gone dumpster diving on occasion, while 37% of UK young adults routinely dig for food, with 28% doing it once a week or more often, per a 2026 study.
Melanie Diaz, 22, a proud trash can crawler from Tampa, Florida, has saved a staggering $50,000 by salvaging clothes, home décor and pet food from residential and commercial dumpsters.
The putrid pastime, on which the penny-pincher spends 4 to 5 hours each day, has become so financially beneficial that Diaz quit her job in photography to dive full-time.
Sofie Juel-Anderson, a 30-year-old dumpster diva from Sydney, Australia, hasn’t gone grocery shopping in over four years thanks to the treats she cherry-picks out of garbage heaps. Like Jessica and Carina, Juel-Anderson used the green she would have spent in the supermarket on travel.
And much like the Aussie, Jessica and Carina, who were once roommates but now live next door to one another, haven’t had to hit the stores for everyday needs in years.
“We literally haven’t bought cleaning supplies in four years,” Carina laughed. “We don’t really have to buy any of that stuff because the kids throw it away at the end of the year.”
An abundance of cleaning supplies aside, the brave besties have also retrieved flat screen TVs, lamps, rugs, deli meat cutters, mirrors, headboards, dining and living room sets, antique tables, couches, designer jeans, a genuine Coach leather jacket and a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace — accessories from a luxury French jewelry house can come with price tags exceeding $38,000, but Jessica and Carina’s find is likely way less expensive.
The must-haves they chose to neither keep nor sell are donated to charities, including women’s shelters, foster organizations, group homes, animal shelters and schools.
“This is a really fun hobby that’s definitely changed our lives,” said Jessica. “It’s made us more mindful. We like being able to save stuff. It feels good to know that, like we saved something from ending up in a landfill, giving it a second life with people who really need it and will enjoy it. That’s beautiful.”
Carina concurred, adding that each dive is “an adventure every time.”
“We never know what we’re going to find or who’ll be able to use it,” she gushed. “We just have so much fun together being idiots in a dumpster.”
Read the full article here
