It’s the end of the school year. College students all across the nation are tossing their notebooks aside and heaving sighs of accomplishment, relief, abandonment. As a teacher I feel the same, happy to be done with tests, grades, and lectures, for three months at least. For some it’s the end of a college career and on to, as they say, “The Real World.” So long to the dorm, that cozy hive. So long to all that crap I bought at Ikea with my student loans.

That’s right. The end of the school year is a boon for dumpster divers, who flock to the many and massive residence halls of New York University in Manhattan. Students who have accumulated as much as can fit in a dorm the size of a prison cell cathartically fling their undesirables (and the smart closet organizers that once held them) “away,” ready to take a plane back to California or a train to a studio in Bushwick, with a light load and a head full of ideas. It feels good to throw things away, to unburden yourself from (some) material things. And besides, there won’t be any more all-night crams or four-hour workshops, so there’s no need for that clunky Keurig coffee maker anymore, right?

A friend and I biked to 14^th street to check it out. Union Square seethed a few blocks away. It wasn’t hard to spot the meat. There was an open-topped commercial dumpster parked outside Coral Hall, the kind used by contractors gut-renovating apartments. Seven or eight people stood atop the cornucopia, tearing through black plastic bags. They passed out items to a motley group of a dozen or so people standing nearby. A trove of paraphernalia lined the sidewalk, including clothes, shoes, the contents of dorm-fridges, appliances, office supplies, pharmaceuticals, knick-knacks, cleaning supplies, and oddities.

My friend Josh scored an HP laptop sans power cord. Spencer scored some avant-chic sunglasses. The lens is flat and rectangular, so if you wear them it looks like your eyes have been censored. In a glamorous way. I picked up a half-full bag of organic sugar, some American Apparel t-shirts, and unfamiliar Chinese condiments. A young lady with flame-toed waffle-stompers and expensive-looking tattoos snatched up a trove of cosmetics. A very enthusiastic bro-type was graced with a new pair of loafers. Someone found a pint of Jim Beam and passed it around. And, at the very bottom of the dumpster, the item that brought cheers from the crowd was a couple of silicon dildos and a strap on. I die content.

There is something thrilling about the dive. It feels like stealing. It also feels liberating and empowering, an outwitting of the consumer market superstructures that are cynically presented as inescapable. In another (mostly empty) dumpster outside of The New School, a fellow diver found a carton of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate ice cream and triumphantly slurped down the melted chocolate syrup. She laughed. I laughed. Ah, the joy of life!

There is, of course, a political dimension to the dive, organized by a freegan community in NYC, which seeks to “create models of living that allow us to limit the control that corporations and money have over our lives,” “to reduce our financial support for the destructive practices of mass producers,” and to “act as a living challenge to waste and overconsumption” (freegan.info). The website Freegan.info was created in 2003 as an information hub for freegan communities in NYC and beyond, but is part of a long tradition of thrift and salvaging going back as far as the practice of “gleaning.” You’ve probably seen Jean-Françoise Millet’s famous painting of 1857 depicting “Des Glaneuses,” three women bent over a field gathering stray grain after the harvest. Agnes Varda brilliantly traces this lineage from pre-industrial gleaning to contemporary dumpster diving in her film “The Gleaners and I.” Walter Benjamin discusses The Ragpicker as a social archetype who appeared in response to industrial abundance and waste (“The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”). Closer to our cultural hearts is the punk movement beginning in the 1970s and 80s, which spawned a generation of train-hopping non-conformists who were committed to a DIY and anti-consumerist ethos.

I get most of my food from supermarket “waste,” and I salvage furniture and construction materials, and I commute by bike, but I’m not so radical. I still pay (cheap) rent and work for money. I still have a cell phone. I do not expect to change the system—the machine grinds on—or reduce the overall waste of the city I live in, the daily volume of which is calculated in tens of thousands of tons. The real value for me is that I find salvaging to be a creative and subversive navigation of our economic system, just as I find bike-commuting a creative navigation of the grid. I also think it’s necessary to be intimate with the quantity and quality of waste produced daily by the people and businesses around us, by ourselves. It is a fascinating aspect of humanity, yet most people are unwilling to even acknowledge that it exists.

New York garbage is infamously visible. There are no containers as there are in Seattle. Instead bags are placed directly on the sidewalk. On trash day outside of any large apartment building is a pile of black plastic bags, chest-high and thirty feet long, topped with broken furniture, old appliances, and the like. A pile of garbage like this is sublime—terrifying, awesome, and beyond comprehension. People like to think of garbage in negative terms, as a non-thing, something that has been subtracted. Most of the things we throw away are packages, containers that once held an object. Shells. In fact, trash is the number one human product. It outclasses all other human achievements and should be revered as such. The Great Pacific Garbage patch attests to this. As do massive, so-called “sanitary landfills,” like the Puente Hills landfill outside of Los Angeles, which is as tall as the great pyramid of Giza but covers 700 acres. It is a great tomb of our human culture. It will outlast our civilization.