VICE Side Hustle: I Tried To Sell Trash I Found on the Street

Everyone knows it: we’re in a cost-of-living crisis. Turns out a pandemic, an older generation obsessed with owning everything, and multiple catastrophic recessions don’t do great things to the economy.

So VICE is trying to figure out what our options are.

Sydney has been ranked the second most unaffordable city to live in…IN THE WORLD…for the second year running. For fuck’s sake. When will it end? You feel it, I feel it, our not-so-deep pockets feel it.

But with that news I say to you: “Let’s try and make some extra money”. Preferably extra money that doesn’t involve exploiting anyone, as with hustle-bro-inclined dropshipping pyramid schemes, or, damaging the environment. Again, dropshipping pyramid schemes.

So what to do? 

Well, a little while ago I met a guy who unwittingly found a piece of art worth $10,000 piled on top of other – at first glance – worthless items on the street. Someone, also unwittingly, had put it on the curb, knowing nothing of its value or importance. This guy, though, picked it up, brushed it off, took it home, did a Google search and (probably) gasped.

His name online is the Trash Lawyer, or in conversational settings just Leo, and for the last little while he’s been travelling around the suburbs of Sydney reinvigorating curb trash to treasure. To date, he tells me he’s made about $20,000 on top of his day job earnings. If he’s taking the hustle seriously, he profits about $700 to $800 per week.

Not only did I like the sound of reselling unloved trash, but it seemed easy, affordable AND environmentally friendly. So I contacted him again. If selling trash was to be my new venture, I needed expert help. 

For those people who don’t like reading or who scroll to the end of the article for answers, I made $195 from about two hours of work… and still counting. I sold a couple of electronics, a bed stand, a clothing rack and still have a skateboard and an iPad case for sale online (if you wanna buy, check it out on Facebook Marketplace). If you want to see how I did it. Well then be my guest. Keep reading. 

I turned up to Leo’s place – a beautifully furnished apartment (yes, most of it was trash he’d found) on the top floor of a complex – on a kind of sunny afternoon. For about a week it had been raining so I was a bit sceptical about finding anything that hadn’t been water-damaged. Nevertheless we put our shoes on and got the lay of the land.

1. Don’t be scared of electronics. Electronics can be valuable. Electronics make money.

On our journey outside in the real world, we come across a big pile of trash with a washing machine and a plug that’d been cut for the wires… yes, even this can make you money.

“There are some people that collect the wire. So if you find a lamp or sewing machine you can cut the cable and you make a couple of bucks with the cable,” says Leo.

He looks at the washing machine. I ask him how much he thinks we can get from it. He seems dubious because of the rain but says:

“The washer in my house was actually found on the street and it works just fine. If you get it, you clean it and then you can test it. But you could sell this one for $100/ $200.”

1. You can go through construction bins or residential bins… if you want to.

This is only a lesson in trash collecting so we don’t pick up the washing machine but we head to a street where Leo often finds some smaller, more carry-able things. We pass a construction bin and I ask him if he’s ever gone through one.

“Sometimes I find stuff in bins like this,” he says.

“I can use things in construction bins like little pieces of wood or some old paint or some old brushes. But I normally only open [the residential] bins when I see stuff coming out of it.

“For example, there could be an end-of-lease clean. Normally, they throw away all the cooking stuff, they throw away the cleaning products. I save as many as I can and for years I haven’t bought anything to clean my house.”

1. Kids’ stuff is everywhere

One notable category of trash we do find in our expedition is kids’ stuff. This is an area where young families run rampant. And though kids’ stuff may make you money, Leo sees these products as more of an opportunity to give back to the community. But still, they can make you money.

“Kids’ products are the things I see most often,” he says.

“The car seat or toys or things like this [points to a baby seat?], they end up way too often in the trash cause the kids grow quickly. So people just dump them instead of donate them. I take them when they’re in very good condition and put them for free on the marketplace. It’s a lot of plastic.”

1. Council clean-ups are a must.

Our trash-trek comes to an end around this time. Today has been pretty unsuccessful but Leo leaves me with a few extra tips.

Leo lives in a well-to-do suburb in Sydney’s inner-west but he’ll also venture out when he hears about council pick-ups. Decades-old furniture rotting in the corners of people's attics or basements will find its way onto the street, left under the promise that they’ll be towed away into the ether of the tip without too much effort from the dumpee. 

“Instead of bringing rubbish to the landfill, you leave your rubbish on the street and people will collect it for you,” he tells me.

“So you can look online when that happens in your area and you’ll find thousands of kilos of rubbish. I decorated my whole place with those finds.”

1. The rubbish rooms of big apartment buildings are, also, a must.

According to Leo, these are trash-to-treasure havens.

“Once in a while when you park your car, go to the place where people throw their trash. I think it’s literally called the trash room,” says Leo.

“I’ve found computers. I’ve found TVs. I’ve found lamps. I’ve found couches in good condition. Because in these buildings people move in and out very often. So when they hire the people to do the end-of-lease clean they just tell them, ‘throw it all away’. And a lot of things get dumped in the basement.”

1.  Facebook Marketplace is the best place to sell

The most important part: Where do you make the money?

“If some items are very specialised you can use eBay or Gumtree, but I find Marketplace is the quickest one. You can set your distance to kilometres and people come and get it right away,” he says.

The next day, with Leo’s tips in mind, I head out to look for some trash. It had still been raining on and off so, again, I was sceptical. Surprisingly, the streets were full.

I live between Camperdown and Newtown, and being an avid walker, I already knew where to find the junk hotspots. The stark wall at the end of my building is one, and a couple of the alleyways near Camperdown Park are another. 

Though some people have cars, others might hire a car or recruit friends to help them carry bigger items home. I, however, wanted to see if I could do this the old-fashioned way: on foot, no car, no friends.

That first day I came across various collections of dumped goods: Old chairs (ugly), woven baskets (wet), old rugs (uglier and wet). I also came across a sign saying “These electronics work”. All the electronics were gone. 

I finally found success in a small alley where a white bookshelf, a small side table, various pieces of clothing, jars of pickles and an iPad case lay.

Having the weakest upper body strength known to man and being a kilometre from home, I trudged only the small side table and iPad case back to my minuscule apartment. 

For the next week or so, when I was out and about or just walking somewhere, I’d spot a piece of trash, pick it up and drag it home. My favourite was a ‘70s style coat hanger and shelf I found after an afternoon at the pub. I carried it 2km home. Without the slight inebriation, I may not have found the motivation.

With the heavy lifting done, and having realised I needed to get rid of a bunch of my own trash before moving house in a couple of weeks, I started going through the suitcases I had stored in my cleaning cupboard. 

Much of the contents were old notebooks I’d been hoarding since I was a teenager, but I did find two broken laptops, a skateboard deck and various chargers, wires and plugs. (I admit that this may have been cheating, but I asked my boss and he said it was fine… and boss knows best?!). 

Once I had all this stuff – a small side table, a ‘70s shelf, an iPad case, a skateboard deck and two laptops – I opened up Facebook Marketplace and tried to sell.

Small side table = $20

Ipad Case = $20

Laptops = $100 each

Skateboard deck = $80

70s Style shelf = $35

My descriptions were pretty lacklustre – “Very aesthetically pleasing”, “Laptops broken but you can use them for parts”, “White side table” – but the process was simple, and within minutes of being advertised, messages flooded in for the laptops, side table and shelf. The laptops especially: Over 24 hours, I had about 70 messages.

To date, the iPad case still sits in the oblivion of forgotten Facebook trash and I’ve only received about three messages for the deck but alas, the table sold the same day (I conceded to a $10 offer), someone came to pick the shelf up the next day ($35), and two people picked up the laptops within a day of each other (one for $100, the other for $50 after realising it had a chip in the screen). 

TOTAL CASH: $195

My main takeaway from this is that finding and selling trash online is incredibly easy if you have the stamina and insatiable desire to make money. 

Compared to trying to sell my underwear (my last effort at a Side Hustle), this endeavour was more fruitful and time-efficient. But if you’re lazy outside of your already five-day work week and you’re already tired, like I am, you might lose patience after the first few sales. Especially if you’re by yourself and you don’t have a car or any way to get the bigger items back to your house to clean. 

And that might be a problem you come across. A lot of the money is in bigger pieces of furniture and electronics – the former are the things people seem to throw out the most often – but that means that there’s an added need to either be good at fixing things or have the patience to take these items to get fixed or the, sometimes, delusional confidence that someone will buy them broken. 

If I had more patience and was more willing, I definitely see myself – or anyone – being able to make $800 per week.

One note about Facebook Marketplace, though, is to watch out for the scammers. There are many. The conversation will usually go, “Hey”, “Hey”, “Can I bank transfer/ Pay ID you and my cousin/ brother/ son/ daughter will come pick it up?”. This is where you go, “Rack off scammer, stop wasting my time.” 

Overall, I would deem this a huge success and a really good way to make money and I’ll probably keep doing it here and there when I need a few extra bucks or if I randomly come across things that look to be of value. But whether I’d turn this into a full-time side hustle is questionable considering the work of transportation, cleaning and selling. If you haven’t gathered, I’m a lazy gen z stuck in the paradigm of not working if I don’t have to even if that means losing money.

And if you're wondering what I spent the money on: a bottle of cheap vodka (it was my birthday), groceries and also about half of my weekly rent.

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