How two dumpster divers found love and a living combing through trash

To Dave Sheffield, the dumpsters of Western New York are like old friends — reliable, generous and still capable of surprising him sometimes.

As snow falls on the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga, Sheffield leaps into a garbage bin and begins rifling through a pile of greasy pizza boxes in search of something more valuable.

Pushing aside heaps of plastic bags and discarded chicken wings, he hoists a beat-up microwave and a tangle of electrical equipment.

“This is a gas line, and then this is like a 240-volt plug that would hook up to a dryer or something like that,” he said.

If it has a product code or a part number, he can look it up and hopefully sell it online. If not, it’s scrap metal, which can net him a few bucks. Sheffield frequents this dumpster because it belongs to an auto shop that fixes up police cars and emergency vehicles.

“What I’m really looking for is like the sirens, the light bars and stuff that I can go sell on eBay, Facebook Marketplace,” he said, “but I’m here, the scrap’s here, might as well grab it and we’ll just move on to the next place.”

The sale of “official emergency lighting systems or sirens” is banned on eBay, and Sheffield says some of his listings have been removed. Luckily for him, it’s not just police equipment. There’s a seemingly bottomless demand for parts, he says, everything from sub-assemblies for printers to spindles from copy machines, no matter how busted.

“I’ve sold used disposable cameras because the guy buying them was going to use the capacitors in them to make homemade stun guns,” Sheffield said. “Sometimes I’ll just list stuff and see what happens. You really can sell anything.”

Sheffield’s regular stops include dumpsters outside discount stores, an industrial park, and a food distributor, where today he finds cases of Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes nearing their expiration dates.

“This is a full case pack so it’s easy enough to just grab this,” he said, depositing several boxes of creme pies and star crunch cookies into the front trunk of his Ford F-150 Lightning. “I’ll put them out between the curb and the street at home and people can kind of help themselves.”

Dumpster diving began as a hobby for Sheffield. As a college student, he was attracted by the promise of saving money, but also the thrill of the hunt. Fifteen years later, it has become his livelihood thanks to a growing audience on social media eager to gawk at what he finds while digging through the trash.

Sheffield finds a lot more than metal scrap and snack food in his travels. He owes his marriage to dumpster diving. As a student at the University at Buffalo in 2009, he became a score himself, says his now-wife Erin.

“I saw someone in one of the dumpsters and I popped my head over and said, ‘Hey what are you doing in there?’” Erin recalled. “I was like ‘You finding anything good?’ and he was like ‘Yeah actually I am!’ and I was like, ‘Oh I’m doing the same thing.’”

Erin was already a seasoned treasure hunter at the time, and she clued Dave in to some of her favorite spots. Their first few dates were spent dumpster diving together around Buffalo.

Big scores are rare, but Dave is fond of an espresso machine he plucked from the trash. As for Erin’s favorite find?

“People always ask me that,” she laughs. “Obviously my husband!”

Hence the name of the channels Erin started for them on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok: Love in the Dumpster.

The couple doesn’t go out together as often these days, because last year they had a daughter, Evelyn. Now they’re dumpster diving for her, too. Evelyn’s pack-and-play crib is a display model her parents found in a dumpster outside Target.

While the Sheffields hope Evelyn will start dumpster diving when she’s old enough, Erin says they’re not raising her entirely on secondhand goods.

“We’re normal people who live in the world. I don’t think you can get around it completely. Especially with having a baby,” she said. “Normally if we need something we’ll think, ‘Well let’s hope we find it in the dumpster in the next six months.’ When you have a baby you have to run to Target that day. You can’t just be like, ‘We ran out of clothes for the baby, let’s hope we find some.’”

Their 1890s home in north Buffalo is furnished with salvaged goods: hanging pots for houseplants, a ladder shelf, a set of Pyrex mixing bowls, dining room chairs and coffee mugs. It’s hard to tell what was bought new and what was rescued from the trash. Erin says that’s the point: “Trash” is a subjective label.

“It doesn’t matter if one person thought it was trash or one person couldn’t use it,” she says. “That doesn’t mean it needs to go in the landfill and that’s the end of its story.”

One way the Sheffields divert goods from the landfill is upcycling, or turning them into something new.

Over years of scavenging around Western New York, the Sheffields have identified a supply chain of secondhand materials that Dave wants to use to make custom products under the label Lost Goods, a new company they are launching this year.

Those materials include metal wall studs, rolls of mylar packaging, acrylic sheeting, sprinkler pipe, electrical conduit, and hunks of marble and granite countertops.

The Sheffields already have a workshop in south Buffalo complete with a CNC milling machine and 3D printer, which Dave uses in his other business, Buffalo Bottle Craft.

While the Sheffields say they average about $2,000 a month selling things they find while dumpster diving, they make roughly three times that by posting videos online.

“Before we had the social media accounts, it was really like a hobby,” Dave says. “Some people go fishing or hunting, I go dumpster dive.”

What was once a hobby is now a business and a brand.

Love in the Dumpster is just one of many dumpster-diving influencers making a living on videos posted to social media. They include Dumpster Dive King from Boston, who has more than a million subscribers on YouTube, Glamour DDive, and Anna Sacks, who goes by the handle @thetrashwalker.

Videos and social media will also power the Sheffields’ new business, Lost Goods. Dave says they will document how they make everything they sell, encouraging DIY viewers to make it themselves.

There is a larger mission to posting videos, too: Millions of views means a lot more scrutiny on companies that create a lot of waste, Dave says.

“What I do here in terms of climate change or trying to prevent waste is like a drop in the bucket,” he said. “I got one little pickup truck, I go out a few times a week. But with how social media works these days, I could see it being a real positive for some of these companies if they started reducing some of their waste. I think there’s potential there.”

Even Sheffield will admit, sometimes trash is just trash. But if there’s one thing a dumpster diver knows, it’s that everything is worth a second look.