Curb Mining

Searching the sidewalks for discarded goods, such as furniture and electronics.

“What would happen if a furniture company left 24 designer chairs, many equipped with GPS tracking technology, on the streets of New York?” –asked Andy Jordan in The Wall Street Journal:

Blu Dot, a furniture maker based in Minneapolis, found out with its “Real Good Experiment,” which it developed with branding firm Mono. The experiment was equal parts marketing campaign for the chairs, which retail for $129, and research into the recession-friendly phenomenon of “curb mining” — the practice of nabbing household items left on street corners.

The chairs contained hidden notes asking their takers to call and be interviewed. A video company, Supermarche, was hired to film the taking of the chairs.

One chair-taker and veteran curb miner, Jonathan Levine, told the Journal that the recession had created more competition for discarded items.

Like many other PUNCOs (a term coined by Supermarche and Mono to indicate “potential unidentified new chair owners”) who stumbled on the chairs, Mr. Levine checked out his chair to make sure it wasn’t broken, and did a double-take amid his surroundings to see who might have left it there.

Terms similar to curb mining include dumpster diving andfreeganism. In June 2007, The Times’s Steven Kurutz wrote:

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged.