The dumpster diver who's making thousands off America's biggest retailers

By day, Matt Malone is a security specialist for Slait Consulting. By night, he earns even bigger money as a dumpster diver.

He’s not diving in just any dumpster. By targeting electronics stores, like Office Depot or Best Buy, he makes away with like-new vacuums, computers, surveillance systems—you name it. If he pursued this secondary career full-time, Malone estimates he’d make more than $250,000 a year.

Although he doesn’t object to the term “dumpster diving,” Malone prefers the term “for-profit archaeologist.” One man’s trash is this man’s treasure—because we’re conditioned to see it that way. “We can only do what we do here because we live in a society where most people have been conditioned to look past what’s right in front of them,” says Malone.

Take a dive into the lives of scavengers like Malone—and learn the history behind our disavowal of the perfectly functional in favor of the immediately new, looking back to J. Gordon Lippincott, the marketer behind the Coca-Cola logo in the 1940s and the father of planned obsolescence.