I recently spoke with my friend Ghost, a homeless street youth in Seattle, about dumpster-diving.
Here's what he had to say:
"I do this with no shame. I’ve been doing this a lot of years. A lot of people look at it as embarrassing to go through another person’s trash, like it’s demeaning on the ego. But I and others do this knowing that every trash bag has a treasure in it and there’s going to be something that someone is going to need or want. That’s the way I look at it. I’ll carry around a bag of useless items to me but I know when I open that bag someone’s going to see something and say, “Oh, I need that!” And I’ll ask them what they got that I need.
The things you find, it’s like currency out here."

For the full transcript of my talk with Ghost go here.