The business of dumpster diving

Cory Doctorow profiles dumpster diver Darren Atkinson for Forbes magazine. Atkinson is as diligent, methodical, and dedicated as any successful businessman.

This is Canada, right? So there’s plenty of nights when it’s snowing so hard that you can barely see, nights that you might want to stay home instead of going out to work,” he says. “But those are exactly the kind of nights where someone might just set something out beside the loading dock, instead of putting it into the compactor. Those are the nights where you make the big score. I’ve tried to apprentice people, but they never want to do it like I do, methodically, avoiding left turns and red lights, logging what you found in each dumpster and not wasting time on the ones that are never any good, going out when the weather stinks.

• business
• Cory Doctorow
• darrenatkinson