Is it a mortal sin to dumpster dive?!

[timeandeternity]

I was recently reading about people who go dumpster diving and find amazing food in dumpsters behind grocery stores and bakeries and such. I decided to look up the legality of dumpster diving and discovered that although picking through trash is not illegal, you can run into trespassing laws when dumpster diving (if the dumpster is on private property).
This got me thinking about the necessity of obeying civil authorities as long as they do not command something immoral. I’ve been trying to find relevant Catechism paragraphs on when breaking a law is a mortal sin, a venial sin, and no sin at all. I haven’t been able to find much clarity on this, though. Obviously something like driving recklessly, way over the speed limit, would be a way of breaking the law that would be grave matter. But what about something like dumpster diving on private property–would something like this be considered venially or mortally sinful, not sinful at all, or what? Relevant documents/quotes from Church authorities are always much appreciated.

 

[Joannm]

People who do this are hungry, poor and most often homeless. They are trying to keep themselves alive. The real sin is in throwing good food out rather than making it available to the poor and homeless.

 

[timeandeternity]

People who do this are hungry, poor and most often homeless.

Yes, but there is a growing number of people who do this who are not poor and homeless. They dumpster dive because there is a lot of perfectly good food to be found behind stores, so they dumpster dive to get food for free and to reduce waste. They’re now being called “freegans.”
I’m talking about them, not about the homeless.

 

[michelleds]

Yes, but there is a growing number of people who do this who are not poor and homeless. They dumpster dive because there is a lot of perfectly good food to be found behind stores, so they dumpster dive to get food for free and to reduce waste. They’re now being called “freegans.”
I’m talking about them, not about the homeless.

Dumpsters are owned by private companies and those companies all post no trespassing signs on the Dumpsters for liability reasons. the reason Dumpster diving is illegal is because of the liability. a person might think that the food looks perfectly fine but don’t know that it was dropped in the toilet before being thrown out or left sitting out on a counter accidentally for 2 days or whatever.

years ago when i worked at a fast food restaurant, i was offended by the food that was thrown away. i suggested that all the food be given to a homeless shelter. i was told that the fast food chain had been sued more than once by someone who had been given free food and then claiming it had made them sick.

look at all the food handling classes and certifications that charities have to go through just to provide food to the hungry. you can’t just go and start handing out sandwiches to people on the street.

unfortunately, we live in a very litigious society. I would almost guarantee you that if one of those “freegans” got hurt while Dumpster-diving, say cut their hand badly on a torn piece of metal on the Dumpster, he or she would sue the Dumpster owner.

Again, I’m talking about the freegans, not the homeless.

 

[FaithByProxy]

My parents used to do this sometimes when I was growing up. Not because it was the new cool thing to do, but because we were dirt poor. Luckily for us, they never yanked out food, but other stuff like lamps and so on that we couldn’t afford on our own. In cases like that I could hardly consider it a mortal sin.

Honestly, even when it comes to the folks that are yanking food out because they feel like it and not because of necessity…I don’t see how it could be a mortal sin when it is food that is going to be thrown away. I could be completely wrong, but it just doesn’t seem right to label it a mortal sin.

 

[InspiritCarol]

Dumpsters are owned by private companies and those companies all post no trespassing signs on the Dumpsters for liability reasons. the reason Dumpster diving is illegal is because of the liability. a person might think that the food looks perfectly fine but don’t know that it was dropped in the toilet before being thrown out or left sitting out on a counter accidentally for 2 days or whatever.

years ago when i worked at a fast food restaurant, i was offended by the food that was thrown away. i suggested that all the food be given to a homeless shelter. i was told that the fast food chain had been sued more than once by someone who had been given free food and then claiming it had made them sick.

look at all the food handling classes and certifications that charities have to go through just to provide food to the hungry. you can’t just go and start handing out sandwiches to people on the street.

unfortunately, we live in a very litigious society. I would almost guarantee you that if one of those “freegans” got hurt while Dumpster-diving, say cut their hand badly on a torn piece of metal on the Dumpster, he or she would sue the Dumpster owner.

Again, I’m talking about the freegans, not the homeless.

This is exactly right.

The intent of the “No Trespassing” signs is to protect the owner; not to actually insure that the food goes to the landfill. My friend recently discovered she had to put those signs in all her barns because if someone gets hurt in one, though uninvited, they can sue her. In other words not having “No Trespassing” posted has become a tacit invitation to any and all to come hurt themselves and sue.

How sad is that?

BTW: This problem was solved in this town by the store donating the bread a day or two before it expires to the needs center. But that’s not all. The needs center does nothing with it except to put it on a shelf well away from its good food with a sign reading something like: take at your own risk. It occurs to me that the sign could read: not for human consumption; just to be extra safe. In any case all know what it is and for whom it is intended and none take advantage. It works out well.

 

[DexUK]

There are two issues here.

Moral culpability and legal culpability.

Morally, if you are in dire need of food, it is the settled theological position of the Church that it is not mortally sinful to obtain food by means of theft if the reason you do so is in order to survive, however you would be expected to use your judgement to try your hardest not to steal food from some as poor or poorer than yourself and also only so much as you absolutely need. Stealing a luxury is not countenanced under this rule.

Legal liability is of course different depending on all sorts of outside influences: who owns the food, whether you’re legally allowed to approach the dumpster (trespassing, etc).

As regards food that will be wasted by being removed and thrown into landfill or a trash compactor or an incinerator, then that’s a little bit more of a grey area, but personally I can’t see that as theft in a moral sense, since it is being discarded and it would do more good to be eaten than to be destroyed. In these ‘green’ times also, there are frequently costs involved in disposal too - landfill taxation, transportation costs, etc - which might be reduced if people removed the food.

In any case, retailers frequently throwing out good food that doesn’t look as attractive as the more recent deliveries of replenishments. They should be encouraged to donate it to charity rather than throw it away.

It’s a bit difficult to say whether ‘freeganism’ related ‘dumpster diving’ is a sin or not, since the food clearly has no value to its original owner and may in fact represent a cost to them, but then deliberately avoiding paying for something because you can sneakily obtain it another way is a bit troubling too.

I’d hesitate (a lot) to call it mortal sin, but there are probably venial elements to it.

 

[CarrieH]

As michelleds said, those “no trespassing” signs are there to prevent lawsuits. I would have to be very hungry to eat food picked from a dumpster, but I am a proud “freegan” when it comes to other things. I live two miles from a mid-sized university, and you would not believe the household items these students will throw away when they move out at the end of the spring semester. Several times I have gone dumpster-diving at the student apartments to get things to donate to the homeless shelter (OK, I admit, I have kept a few things for myself along the way ). This is not a sin at all. The sin is found in the laziness and wasteful attitudes of some of these students, who would throw perfectly good household items into the trash rather than save them for the following year or donate them to a charity.

 

[DexUK]

CarrieH, how do you know that those dumpsters of discarded possessions aren’t actually sorted for usefully recycled objects before disposal?

Not that I’m criticising, since disposal of such things is usually charged for by weight or volume, so your careful removal of useful things to give to charity or re-use is saving someone some money after all…

 

[CarrieH]

My brother used to work for the trash removal company. He told me that this stuff went straight to the landfill. He did his share of trash-picking, too!

 

[KostyaJMJ]

I used to do a little dumpster diving on Sundays. You’d be surprised at the stuff wealthy people will toss out.

I got a brand new riding lawnmower. The owner told me it was broken, but all that was wrong with it was it had stale gas in it. It was about 1500 dollars and I got it for free.

I salvaged a couple of refrigerators that were thrown out because of rancid meat.

sometimes it is just last years model that has just been replaced.

I don’t think that there is anything wrong with making a little money off of other people’s wastefulness. And 99% of the owners would prefer see their garbage go to good use rather than go to a landfill and get destroyed.

 

[Buck_Crosswhite]

It isn’t a sin at all to dig through someone’s trash for something they threw away.

If someone is digging for information like names, addresses, phone number, and other info so they can steal an identity that’s a different story.

 

[St_Francis]

If someone has thrown something away, they have renounced their possession of it; therefore, taking it is not stealing at all.

There may be related issues of trespassing, and there may be dangers involved, but it’s not stealing.

Maybe the charities should either advertise more or put containers at the college dorms so they can get that stuff.

 

[Tenofovir]

In any case, retailers frequently throwing out good food that doesn’t look as attractive as the more recent deliveries of replenishments. They should be encouraged to donate it to charity rather than throw it away.

The issue as someone said was that it opens the retailer to the danger of lawsuits. Not only that but people with agendas may use this against the retailer - he’s so rich and makes so much profit, why not give more good food away, before it become spoilt or becomes questionable?

The same happens with medicine and medical supplies. Very good medicine, such as anti-HIV medicine and antibiotics which would help hundreds of thousands of people is thrown away when it expires, yet the expiry dates have some leeway - they’re overkill, usually the medicine is good for at least another 6-12 months, yet it has to be destroyed, rather than shipped to Africa of Asia (or even dispensed to local poor who have no insurance) where tens of thousands die of AIDS (and high blood pressure, diabetes, infections, etc) every day because there’s not enough medicine or the right sort of medicine to go around. And if organisations did start to do this pretty soon activists would come along and suggest that rich people are playing with poor peoples’/foreigners’ lives - it would be racism and elitism.

A good example could be the reaction of some intellectuals from editors of the British medical journal - the Lancet to polemicists like Hitchens to Mother Theresa. She is portrayed as not doing enough to provide cutting edge medical aid to her sick, yet there were more than enough sick to go around - and we didn’t see Lancet editors or Hitchens open up their own Mayo or Johns Hopkins type hospitals in India to provide cutting edge first world medicine to people who would otherwise get no care and medicine at all.

 

[CarrieH]

The same happens with medicine and medical supplies. Very good medicine, such as anti-HIV medicine and antibiotics which would help hundreds of thousands of people is thrown away when it expires, yet the expiry dates have some leeway

The mother of a lifelong friend of mine passed away a few weeks ago. She was at home with hospice, but when she passed, the hospice wouldn’t accept the return any of her unused supplies, even those in their original intact packages and offered for free. No other agency would accept these, either, because the law prohibits re-dispensing medical devices once they have been in a client’s home. I finally found a charity which accepts donations of such things for use in overseas medical missions, but nobody here would accept these items, not even the oxygen tubing sets which are a non-sterile device for external use. If I hadn’t been so persistent, this stuff would have ended up in the landfill. Talk about a waste!

 

[fred_conty]

As someone said, taking these items is not stealing since they are not wanted by the owner and have been thrown out.

There would be no sin if the person taking the items had no intention of sueing if hurt.

That leaves tresspassing. What is the intention of this? To avoid lawsuits in most cases.
If the person has no intention of sueing, then that fulfills the intention of the sign.

Now it might be said that the owner of the store dosen’t want his trash taken because that leads to less store sales. But does it? The only reason most do it is for treasure finding not that they are on the way to buy at that store.

Go to it and trash pick.

However if they decide to sue you, then you will have to pick up the tab.

 

[surritter]

Violating a civil law is sinful, because you are disobeying legitimate authority. However, if there is just cause to violate a law that has no intrinsic morality, then no sin is committed.

Example: If I run a stop sign for no particular reason, I am sinning because of my flagrant disregard for legitimate authority. But if my wife is about to give birth and I must get to the hospital, I can run the stop sign (with care!). That’s because failing to stop at a corner is not intrinsically evil; a reasonable judge would dismiss the ticket. On the other hand, even if I have a good reason, I can never directly do something intrinsically evil.

So for dumpster diving, it can be sinful because of the failure to observe a legitimate law (I would think not mortal, though). But if you have a good reason – simply a need for food or items such as a working lamp – then it’s probably no sin because of the similarity to the stop sign analogy.

 

[Tenofovir]

The mother of a lifelong friend of mine passed away a few weeks ago. She was at home with hospice, but when she passed, the hospice wouldn’t accept the return any of her unused supplies, even those in their original intact packages and offered for free. No other agency would accept these, either, because the law prohibits re-dispensing medical devices once they have been in a client’s home. I finally found a charity which accepts donations of such things for use in overseas medical missions, but nobody here would accept these items, not even the oxygen tubing sets which are a non-sterile device for external use. If I hadn’t been so persistent, this stuff would have ended up in the landfill. Talk about a waste!

Yup it’s standard practice to reject all unopened meds, even here in South Africa. I don’t think any local charities would take those either.

It should be said that medicine usually needs to be stored in room temperature in a dry environment. Keeping drugs, even sealed, in humid, very hot or sunny conditions can cause their degradation. In practice however, I don’t know how serious a problem that is. Still people err on the side of caution.

 

[Calgar]

People who do this are hungry, poor and most often homeless. They are trying to keep themselves alive. The real sin is in throwing good food out rather than making it available to the poor and homeless.

It is very unfortunate. What is more unfortunate are laws/regulations that prevent establishments from giving their leftover food to the needy.

 

[Rascalking]

It’s repulsive. Even if your starving to death (quite hard to do in America, actually) it’s still disgusting. Why in the world would anyone do that?

But-it’s not sinful. Disturbing and gross, but not sinful.