Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living
based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal
consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social
concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society
based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.
After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations
responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and
animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended
up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem
isn’t just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself.
Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit
motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex
systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have
detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus,
instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only
to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we
are able.
The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”. Vegans are
people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on
animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step
further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production
economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth
abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to
production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy.
Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of
indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of
wildlife on farmland as “pests”, the violent overthrow of popularly
elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big
business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in
environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and
payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the
seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day.
Freegans employ a range of strategies for practical living based on our principles:
We live in an economic system where sellers only value land and
commodities relative to their capacity to generate profit. Consumers are
constantly being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and
replace the goods they already have because this increases sales. This
practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous
that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash. As
freegans we forage instead of buying to avoid being wasteful consumers
ourselves, to politically challenge the injustice of allowing vital
resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like
food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce the waste going to landfills
and incinerators which are disproportionately situated within poor,
non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and
asthma.
Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly
called “urban foraging” or “dumpster diving”. This technique involves
rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and
other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society’s sterotypes
about garbage, the goods recovered by freegans are safe, useable, clean,
and in perfect or near-perfect condition, a symptom of a throwaway
culture that encourages us to constantly replace our older goods with
newer ones, and where retailers plan high-volume product disposal as
part of their economic model. Some urban foragers go at it alone, others
dive in groups, but we always share the discoveries openly with one
another and with anyone along the way who wants them. Groups like Food Not Bombs
recover foods that would otherwise go to waste and use them to prepare
meals to share in public places with anyone who wishes to partake.
By recovering the discards of retailers, offices, schools, homes,
hotels, or anywhere by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters,
and trash bags, freegans are able to obtain food, beverages, books,
toiletries magazines, comic books, newspapers, videos, kitchenware,
appliances, music (CDs, cassettes, records, etc.), carpets, musical
instruments, clothing, rollerblades, scooters, furniture, vitamins,
electronics, animal care products, games, toys, bicycles, artwork, and
just about any other type of consumer good. Rather than contributing to
further waste, freegans curtail garbage and pollution, reducing the
over-all volume in the waste stream.
Lots of used items can also be found for free or shared with others on websites like Freecycle and in the free section of your local Craigslist. To dispose of useful materials check out the EPA’s Materials and Waste Exchanges directory. In communities around the country, people are holding events like “Really, Really, Free Markets”
and “Freemeets”. These events are akin to flea markets with free items.
People bring items to share with others. They give and take but not a
dollar is exchanged. When freegans do need to buy, we buy second-hand
goods which reduces production and supports reusing and reducing what
would have been wasted without providing any additional funds for new
production.
WASTE MINIMIZATION
Because of our frequent sojourns into the discards our throwaway
society, freegans are very aware of and disgusted by the enormous
amounts of waste the average US consumer generates and thus choose not
to be a part of the problem. So, freegans scrupulously recycle, compost
organic matter into topsoil, and repair rather than replace items
whenever possible. Anything unusable by us, we redistribute to our
friends, at freemarkets, or using internet services like freecycle and
craigslist.
ECO-FRIENDLY TRANSPORTATION
Freegans recognize the disastrous social and ecological impacts of
the automobile. We all know that automobiles cause pollution created
from the burning of petroleum but we usually don’t think of the other
destruction factors like forests being eliminated from road building in
wilderness areas and collision deaths of humans and wildlife. As well,
the massive oil use today creates the economic impetus for slaughter in
Iraq and all over the world. Therefore, freegans choose not to use cars
for the most part. Rather, we use other methods of transportation
including trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking.
Hitchhiking fills up room in a car that would have been unused otherwise
and therefore it does not add to the overall consumption of cars and
gasoline.
Some freegans find at least some use of cars unavoidable so we try to
eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels by using cars with diesel
engines converted to run on biodiesel or “veggie-oil” literally fueling
our cars with used fryer oil from restaurants – another example of
diverting waste for practical use. Volunteer groups are forming
everywhere to assist people in converting diesel engines to run on
vegetable oil.
RENT-FREE HOUSING
Freegans believe that housing is a RIGHT, not a privilege. Just as
freegans consider it an atrocity for people to starve while food is
thrown away, we are also outraged that people literally freeze to death
on the streets while landlords, banks and cities keep buildings boarded
up and vacant.
Squatters are people who occupy and rehabilitate abandoned, decrepit
buildings. Squatters believe that real human needs are more important
than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed
to buildings but won’t allow people to live in them, even in places
where housing is vitally needed, don’t deserve to own those buildings.
In addition to living areas, squatters often convert abandoned buildings
into community centers with programs including art activities for
children, environmental education, meetings of community organizations,
and more.
GOING GREEN
We live in a society where the foods that we eat are often grown a
world away, overprocessed, and then transported long distances to be
stored for too long, all at a high ecological cost. Because of this
process, we’ve lost appreciation for the changes in season and the
cycles of life but some of us are reconnecting to the Earth through
gardening and wild foraging.
Many urban ecologists have been turning garbage-filled abandoned lots
into verdant community garden plots. In neighborhoods where stores are
more likely to carry junk food than fresh greens, community gardens
provide a health food source. Where the air is choked with asthma
inducing pollutants, the trees in community gardens produce oxygen. In
landscapes dominated by brick, concrete, and asphalt, community gardens
provide an oasis of plants, open spaces, and places for communities to
come together, work together, share food, grow together, and break down
the barriers that keep people apart in a society where we have all
become too isolated from one another.
Wild foragers demonstrate that we can feed ourselves without
supermarkets and treat our illnesses without pharmacies by familiarizing
ourselves with the edible and medicinal plants growing all around us.
Even city parks can yield useful foods and medicines, giving us a
renewed appreciation of the reality that our sustenance comes ultimately
not from corporate food producers, but from the Earth itself. Others
take the foraging lifestyle even farther, removing themselves from urban
and suburban concepts and attempting to “go feral” by building
communities in the wilderness based on primitive survival skills.
WORKING LESS
How much of our lives do we sacrifice to pay bills and buy more
stuff? For most of us, work means sacrificing our freedom to take orders
from someone else, stress, boredom, monotony, and in many cases risks
to our physical and psychological well-being.
Once we realize that it’s not a few bad products or a few egregious
companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world
but rather the entire system we are working in, we begin to realize
that, as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death,
exploitation, and destruction. Is the retail clerk who rings up a cut of
veal any less responsible for the cruelty of factory farming than the
farm worker? What about the ad designer who finds ways to make the
product palatable? How about the accountant who does the grocery books
and allows it to stay in business? Or the worker in the factory that
manufacturers refrigerator cases? And, of course, the high level
managers of the corporations bear the greatest responsibility of all for
they make the decisions which causes the destruction and waste. You
don’t have to own stock in a corporation or own a factory or chemical
plant to be held to blame.
By accounting for the basic necessities of food, clothing, housing,
furniture, and transportation without spending a dime, freegans are able
to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be
employed. We can instead devote our time to caring for our families,
volunteering in our communities, and joining activist groups to fight
the practices of the corporations who would otherwise be bossing us
around at work. For some, total unemployment isn’t an option it’s far
harder to find free dental surgery than a free bookcase on the curb but
by limiting our financial needs, even those of us who need to work can
place conscious limits on how much we work, take control of our lives,
and escape the constant pressure to make ends meet. But even if we must
work, we need not cede total control to the bosses. The freegan spirit
of cooperative empowerment can be extended into the workplace as part of
worker-led unions like the Industrial Workers of the World.
Source: http://freegan.info/
Roman Krznaric, Ph.D., wrote this article for 
So those of us involved in the simplicity movement have been asking how we can help increase social ties. In my new book, 
A simple life is a good life. Voluntary simplicity is the act of consciously choosing to live with enough, but without excess. Simplicity is not about depriving oneself or living in ultra-sparse conditions. Living simply is about reducing the clutter and narrowing down one’s possessions, engagements, and thoughts to something more manageable. It is about eliminating the noise to find the essence of the good life.
