Dumpster Treasures
Every May across US college campuses, dumpsters overflow with unopened food, mattress toppers, working electronics, and barely worn clothes. It’s a cyclical snapshot of a global crisis: humans generated about 2 billion tons of waste in 2016 and are on track for 3.5 billion tons by 2050. The US alone averages almost 2 tons per person per year.
Many campuses promise “zero waste” yet the move-out week at the end of the year exposes a major gap between pledge and practice. Dumpster Treasures steps into that breach with a simple, urgent question: what if we treated the discard pile as both a mirror of our values and a supply chain of care?
Dumpster Treasures v1.0 catalogs Spring 2025 move-out waste from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Our aims are practical and public. We aim to make waste visible and to interrupt disposability as a habit. We aim to move people to buy less, and to keep usable goods in circulation, not in landfills. And we help build dialogue around building better systems: listening to the custodians who witness this cycle every year, inviting students to reflect and tell stories about perfectly usable trash, and partnering with local groups to turn waste into resources. Because change so often takes both material action and a shift in how we view this issue, we pair recovery and redistribution with storytelling and art.
This site is your entry point. Visit the Gallery for photos and short videos that reveal the scale -- and the humanity -- of what gets thrown away. Check out the Art Installations including the ongoing Food Shrine, which has already redistributed 1,200+ recovered food items to graduate students on a university campus. And on March 21, visit From Discard to Trashterpiece, featuring art and performance by nine local artists at the Sustainable Future Center in Knoxville, TN. Finally, dig into the Data, where we draw on a detailed dataset to visualize the items we recovered.
Browse, share, and join us in turning discard into care, pledge into practice, and waste into something worth remembering.
Artwork
Food Shrine
Ferris Hall, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Comprised of more than 1200 recovered food items, this installation in graduate student offices quickly became known as the “food shrine”. Students also began donating items, demonstrating an ethics of care and mutual aid.
March 21st 2026, 2-6PM
at the Sustainable Future Center
in Knoxville, TN
This exhibit will feature artwork using items reclaimed during the 2025 campus move out. It includes a dorm room installation, a diorama, a quilt, a sculpture lamp, a scarecrow set, and a stuffed sculpture, among others. Explore the diverse range of works that local artists imagined from the recovered treasures.
About and Thanks
Dumpster Treasures isn't so much about “finding stuff" as it is about trying to step outside overabundance and an insulated reality where materials appear on demand and disappear the moment we’re done with them. The project is a practice of remembering: remembering from where we came, and what we actually belong to. The Earth has limits, and there is no real “away” for all the trash we produce. Nor is there an infinite supply of material we keep drawing from, extracting and transforming into “stuff,” from food and forests to minerals pulled from the ground and the industrial processes that reshape them into the materials of everyday life.
The project considers this phenomenon of discarding usable items as trash through the lenses of the systems that normalize it: instant gratification, consumer capitalism, industrialization, and immense control over our physical environments. It also stands in opposition to labor extraction that is racialized and gendered and unequal across nationalities, cultures, languages, and more. These systems prioritize convenience as a default even as convenience is marred by choice overload, and by a culture that trains us to invest our energies and time into a mode of replace instead of repair, to consume instead of care, and to move fast enough that we don’t have to look too closely at what we’re leaving behind. There is time poverty, while a certain few profit enormously from the churn. And so we do not only consume and waste by choice. It takes on justification and reason: there just isn’t enough time.
That time poverty can be seen in the swelling fast food lanes every Friday night when biking south along Chapman Highway biking from the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) campus. It is exhaustion from a sedentary week, which is against our very natures along with eating processed, non-whole foods which mess with our metabolisms and reward systems. We uproot ourselves from the places that formed us, from our origins. We’re held together through increasingly sophisticated forms of technology-mediated and abstracted communication. And our livelihoods are held together through a disconnect from the land as we exchange intangibles for tangible goods, food, linens, even sounds and images, all done through increasingly abstracted and detached forms of wealth all the while disparity grows relentlessly.
Dumpster Treasures has several major parts so far: documenting all the reclaimed items, scholarly work based on reclaimed item inventories and interviews, and a trash into art exhibit.
Dumpster Treasures got mostly started by Chris Mayer, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who’s been scavenging off of excess since he was four or five. During grad school, UTK's move-out dumpsters have saved him and his partner around $900 per year from 2021–2025. He cynically hopes to push past $1,200 in 2026 to account for inflation and his own lifestyle creep resulting from increasingly lucrative dumpster finds. Dumpster Treasures is pretty much an experiment, says Chris, but it mostly seems to be shaping up OK.
A huge part of why it is shaping up OK is because of everyone who's helped. The list will never be complete, but here’s a start:
Ayumi Anraku contributed at every stage of the process, from first-draft grant conception to coordinating video editing and feeding Chris on 16-hour waste reclamation days. Leia Cain reminded Chris to reapply for grants and egged him on by saying his purpose on Earth is to make the ugly beautiful, and also taught him a ton about qualitative research. To Ross Cullum and Carlos Rosales for helping with discard reclamation, for all kinds of input during the chaotic planning stages and for being there for the reclamation and cataloguing phases.
Leading up to Spring 2025 move-out was hectic.. It entailed navigating (and in several cases, charting) institutional pathways and check-points to make this all happen. Jay Price and Brad Moats at UTK Sustainability and Recycling helped make this happen IRL. Thanks to the Environmental Health and Safety Office (EHS) at UTK and to the Process Owner, who accommodated multiple “High Residual Risk Level” categories flaring up in the Job Risk Analysis after a logistical issue with safety gear required last-minute revisions to safety protocols and gear. And to EHS for providing detailed instructions on what to do upon finding human body parts, and also for engaging in a requested follow-up conversation about the relative value of humans to animals and the additional health risks posed by animal parts relative to human parts. To Leanne Hinkle and Judith Canter in UTKs English Department, who coordinated chaotic and time sensitive orders along with Alissa Reeves in the Writing Center, and special thanks to Leanne, who facilitated the purchase of accident insurance far outside of regular work hours for those going on-site for discard recovery.
For the March 21 exhibit, Discard To Trashterpiece: David Bolt for use of the Sustainable Future Center and his capacity to absorb chaos from food pantries to bees to groundhog-proofing gardens to peepoinics to dumpsters. Hannah Trammell for helping think through and plan logistics for opening day, for figuring out how to represent the frequency and salience of recovered items through the concept of the midden heap, and for helping with dorm room setup. Talia Marshall for suggesting the word "trashterpiece" which helped shape how Chris thought about the exhibit--it's tone, framing, and approach to the data--giving it a more anti-elitist, playful, and grungy feel, and for helping with flyers. To April Trepagnier, Ilina Arsova, and Jenifer Tenache for serving as judges for artwork selection and also to Ilina for helping brainstorm the proposal stage and to April for helping draft press release statements. (And more to some, surely)
And obviously to Abhay Shetty and David Peavy for nonstop Trash Talk.
This initial work is made possible through two grants from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: a Graduate Student Research Award of about $3,800 and a grant from the University’s “Green Fee” of $10,400.