My name is Michael. I am a (former) educator, software developer, writer, and social activist.
Magdalena and I had been dumpster diving around Brooklyn and Manhattan for over a year when we decided to create an instagram account in 2019 to document the quantity (and quality) of all the things we were finding in the trash. Toothpaste. Candy bars. Razors. Pads and tampons. Crackers and dry goods. Pet food and products. Holiday items, decorations and treats. And so much more!
When we made our instagram, I also started a spreadsheet to document the total value of everything we were pulling from the trash—six nights a week, 52 weeks a year!
While we have not posted on our instagram in quite sometime nor have we updated our spreadsheet since 2021, the 'data' we collected is so valuable. Just the two of us checking a couple of dumpsters each night were able to document over $150,000 of wasted goods in a year and a half, which was more than our combined income at the time! We didn't sell any of it. We 'redistributed' it out to friends/coworkers and to our community through neighborhood fridges/pantries and directly off our stoop. Imagine a world where hundreds of millions of dollars of usable (already created and distributed!) goods were given to those who would use them rather than being sent to the landfill!
But if this is the trend for small cornerstore CVS' and Walgreens in the little sliver of New York that we covered each night, imagine this trend magnified across the city, the country, the entire global market.
Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, theorized that the entire market was guided by an invisible hand that (through aggregating supply to meet demand) could collect all of the bits of local knowledge about demand that are dispersed throughout the economy and transmute them into material prosperity and create the most effecient economic system in human history.
So what is happening to all of those bits of local knowledge? Are they actually able to transform themselves into the products and goods that people need? Not really. Instead, they wind up in the landfill while people wonder where their next meal will come from or else have to decide between having food and making rent. Of course, credit card companies make it possible to afford rent and groceries; though they only help resolve this issue by tightening the vice around your neck.
The scope of this project is to present our findings in order to expose the waste inherent in capitalism and its consequences and to start to conceive of the new way forward.
As part of the project, the thousands of rows of information from our spreadsheet into a SQL database for visualization purposes.
Here's the repository where I populated the SQL database (NeonDB) from the excel sheet; see the readme for an explanation.