Alex Masi

Stephanie, 21, member of the Freegan community in New York, standing by the food recovered from dump sites along 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, New York, NY., on Wednesday, July 5, 2006. Freegans are a community of people who aims at recovering wasted food, books, clothing, office supplies and other items from the refuse of retail stores, frequently discarded in brand new condition. They recover goods not for profit, but to serve their own immediate needs and to share freely with others. According to a study by a USDA-commissioned study by Dr. Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona, half of all food in the United States is wasted at a cost of $100 billion dollars every year. Yet 4.4 million people in the United States alone are classified by the USDA as hungry. Global estimates place the annual rate of starvation deaths at well over 8 million. The massive waste generated in the process fills landfills and consumes land as new landfills are built. This waste stream also pollutes the environment, damages public health as landfills chemicals leak into the ground, and incinerators spew heavy metals back into the atmosphere. Freegans practice strategies for everyday living based on sharing resources, minimizing the detrimental impact of our consumption, and reducing and recovering waste and independence from the profit-driven economy. They are dismayed by the social and ecological costs of an economic model where only profit is valued, at the expense of the environment. In a society that worships competition and self-interest, Freegans advocate living ethical, free, and happy lives centred around community and the notion that a healthy society must function on interdependence. Freegans also believe that people have a right and responsibility to take back control of their time.