THE day after New York University's class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of an NYU dormitory at Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the end-of-year move-out, when the mostly affluent students' discarded items are put into curbside rubbish bins.
The gathering quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another. Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s, unearthed a television. Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old student, was pleased with he
r haul of a desk lamp, a dish rack and dusters.
Most were there in response to a posting on the website Freegan.info - which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anti-consumerists who call themselves 'freegans'.
Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimise 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 rubbish and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out. Some negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
They also 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.
Freeganism dates to the mid-1990s, and grew out of the anti-globalisation and environmental movements, and groups such as Food Not Bombs, a network of small organisations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market rubbish.
There are freegans all over the world. But New York has emerged as a freegan hub, possibly in part due to the quantity and quality of its refuse.
Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, but there are also older freegans who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives.
Freegans believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, and hold in disdain any interaction with the marketplace.
According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St Lawrence University in Canton, New York State, the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.
Environmentalism, Torres said, "is becoming this issue of consume the right set of green goods and you're green", regardless of how many natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.
"If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they'd say 'buy a Prius'," he added.
Freegan.info founder Adam Weissman, 29, said: "If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle, it's not enough to be vegan; they need to absent themselves from capitalism."
