I have loved jumping into dumpsters since my first dive, at seven or eight years old. A friend and I recovered a large quantity of very nice marbles and some other toys from a dumpster in front of a moving family's home. How wonderful! Great stuff for free!

At MIT there is the well known 'reuse' email list, where everything and anything free is posted. In particular, it is usually possible to obtain some very nice, over-sized ancient capacitors, and the like. There is nothing quite like the twinkle in the eye of a young first year student picking up their first totally useless, but oh so very awesome, piece of electronic junk, having difficulties comprehending how exactly such a desirable object could be offered for free! Eventually, of course, it is time to graduate, and the stuff is offered back to the community, for the next generation to enjoy. The list is supported by the university, and deactivated, non-sellable, property is often offered to the list. Once, when they were finally bringing down the legendary Building 20, the whole building was posted to reuse. Some frenzy ensued as geeks descended to take everything not nailed down, and quite a lot of stuff nailed down as well! (I think a few other buildings were posted at other times as well. I remember a bathroom door in a student dwelling that was one of those large walk-in bio-freezer thingie doors.)

For a while I lived in a warehouse in Boston where most of the furniture consisted of electronic junk, or other discarded items. Tables made of old mainframes or large capacitors supporting glass sheets. It was da bomb, to be sure.

I knew some people who were graduates of MIT that tried to live without buying anything, and with no income. There are a number of nooks and crannies where one might set up a place to sleep, a number of ways to get free food, and no lack of free furniture and clothes available, all discarded by others.

I met a few people in the catacombs in Paris who were living down there, at least temporarily. They had hammocks strung in some of the higher and drier places, and seemed to have quite a nice setup, with stuff I assume was obtained from the 'trash'. I didn't get a good sense of how they consider themselves and their place of residence, poor with the French as I am. Seems like the type of thing that would be done voluntarily, rather than out of necessity, though. Cool stuff, definitely.

Why would one not want great stuff free? Scavenging looses me no dignity!