Meet The Bro Who Could Make $250K This Year Dumpster Diving Behind Retail Stores

The expression “you can tell a great deal about a person by rummaging through their trash” is true. The refuse inside a trashcan is a peek inside a life. Matt Malone once took a peek inside the lives of major retail stores in his hometown of Austin, Texas. He found not only secrets but discarded products worth insane amounts of money.

Wired did a feature on Matt Malone and his high-end dumpster dives and it’s a fascinating read. Before we discuss how much Matt makes, or could make, off his garbage expeditions, let’s backtrack and cover how a guy who already makes a boatload of scratch each year got into rummaging through the trash of stores like OfficeMax and Sears.

Malone started dumpster diving nine years ago, when he was working at a lower-level corporate security job. His employer had assigned him to conduct what’s called a “zero-knowledge attack” on an Austin-based company. “That means you hire me and don’t give me any information about your operation,” Malone explains. “I’m just a random guy who wants to break into your system.” The most effective way to do this was to dig through his client’s trash; many hacks and identity thefts come from information left in dumpsters. Sure enough, after just a couple of weeks of looking through the dumpsters outside the client’s offices, he had amassed a box full of documents, loaded with the confidential information of thousands of customers. (“It made quite an impression” on his client, he recalls.)

But he also discovered something else. One night while doing his research, he decided to poke around in neighboring trash bins, including the dumpster at OfficeMax. Inside he discovered “a whole bunch of printers, discontinued lines that were still in the boxes.” He took the printers home and put them in his garage. But he couldn’t stop wondering what else was out there in the dumpsters of Austin. Before long, he went back out to see what else he could find.

What did Malone find? Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of near-mint condition products. Already making serious money pulling in a six-figure salary and a start-up ready to take seed money from two different investors, Malone realized a second gig nosing through trash, he prefers to call himself a “for-profit archaeologist”, could make him filthy and rich.

Ten minutes later, when he’s again behind the wheel of the Avalanche, Malone continues to tell me about the material benefits of dumpster diving. If he were to dedicate himself to the activity as a full-time job, he says, finding various discarded treasures, refurbishing and selling them off, he’s confident he could pull in at least $250,000 a year—there is that much stuff simply tossed into dumpsters in the Austin area. He lists a few recent “recoveries”: vacuums, power tools, furniture, carpeting, industrial machines, assorted electronics. Much of it needs a little love, he says, but a lot of it, like this Uniden system, is in perfect condition.

Malone’s story is insane but only because of the millions and millions of dollars tossed in the trash by big box stores. It’s no wonder most go bankrupt and close.

Malone’s tale is sure inspire — retailers will do a little more due diligence in regard to what exactly gets thrown into store dumpsters and thousands of people are going to do their first dumpster dive today.

[H/T: Wired]

Chris Illuminati avatar
Chris Illuminati is a 5-time published author and recovering a**hole who writes about running, parenting, and professional wrestling.