I Found Gucci In Uptown Garbage With "The Trash Salvager"
One man’s trash: hunting for that “grandma smell”, estate jewelry, and an unlimited drive.
When The Trash Salvager (TTS for our purposes) kicks a trash bag, he waits for the audio feedback. “I’m just getting a resonance,” he tells me. In addition to searching the streets for treasure within trash, TTS drums in his spare time. His percussion-trained ear allows him to listen to the bags, giving him an almost cosmic X-ray vision by way of his sonar toes. “One of my secret talents is that I can draw with my eyes closed. I can visualize [the contents of the bag]. It’s almost like the echo location is at my feet,” says TTS. “By doing it so much, it’s muscle memory.” TTS has assigned his own do-re-mi solfège to the bags. A thunking and dense sound, like sludge hitting the ground, typically means old food or diapers. Crinkly and crispy? Paper discards incorrectly disposed of (that’s for recycling!). If he’s lucky, there is a jingle or a jangle: a sign of something valuable, like jewelry. TTS’s finely-tuned ears are just one of the qualities that separate him from the rest of the trash-picking world.
I do not know TTS’s surname. On Instagram, he goes by @thetrashsalvager. In his bio, he states that he’s been saving finds from the trash for over 10.5 years. His feed is filled with chronicles of nights marching uptown to find valuables among the trash to resell. He never shows his face online. Scouring the streets is his full-time job. Rain or shine. Frost or boiling heat. He lives a nocturnal life, walking for hours, sometimes until the sun rises. It’s given him an interesting perspective on other people’s habits. “Everyone is dead asleep until 5:45 or so,” he says. “Then, the 70-year-olds start trotting around a little bit, in their little jogging shorts, or it’s the dog walkers.” That’s his cue. “It’s like, I better hurry up and get home before people start judging me.”
Well-heeled passerby can judge all they want: He is doing just fine. TTS sets goals and tracks his progress on Instagram for his followers to see. Anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 a month. From trash! In February, he made $12,750 with no repair costs. For this coming April, he has set a current challenge of $15,000.
A trash salvaging session can last six to 10 hours a night, an experience mixing pungent hope with rank despair. When I join TTS for a night of trash picking, I experience the full gamut of emotions when we approach a tsunami of bags on a monied uptown block. On the edge of the pile, I immediately spot a box. I open it to find perfectly intact ornaments from the ‘50s. I gawk, but TTS is unimpressed and goes to sort bags on the other side. Compared to, say, an ounce of gold, these Mercury glass ornaments will not have a high resale value. (These are also a pain to carry, and TTS does not like to haul boatloads of things. The more stuff he schleps, the more he is a target for theft.) Also, there is no time to waste here amongst, well, the waste, as there is someone else here whom TTS knows. An upstate dealer.
When I start to go through the box of ornaments, I hear a voice with a searing non-rhotic lilt. “Those are mine,” says the upstate dealer, peekabooing from out of the mound. He’s a weathered guy of slight build who I learned has driven his van down to also search the streets for a diamond in the polyurethane rough. I would think a prior picker at the pile would produce a sinking feeling, but TTS insists it’s fine: The upstate dealer only does surface-level sweeps. TTS goes deep. He knows there is something worth our time here in this pile, which seems to be a deceased woman’s belongings. He can feel it.
I first met TTS last year via Instagram, after I, like, over 24,000 of his followers, became consumed by his discoveries. Trawling the Central Park-hugging uptown areas, he finds boring yet pricey items, like vacuums that he fixes and resells to his followers. (He has hundreds of spare parts he’s collected over the years.) There are also loads of strollers: TTS knows the models and pricing. Bugaboos. Mclarens. BOB. “Rolls-Royce strollers with bassinets.” Collapsable. Double strollers. Baby joggers. On one outing, he texted me a photo of a perfectly intact Yoyo carriage (estimated retail $400-$500). There is also a fair share of Le Creusets, various electronics, and pill dispensers.
But TTS also unearths actual gold while he is uptown, cast aside among rotting food and dirty diapers. This is what gets his viewers going. I get it: Watching his stories is like seeing a pirate’s booty rise like a phoenix from the filthy New York City asphalt. He’s found jingling jewelry bags full of lockets and pins and pearls. Bakelite bracelets. Antique engagement rings. 18k gold scalloped hoops in a mint tin. Dental gold. And there are other treasures: A WWI medal from 1915. A Bob Ross…Chia Pet? Old iPods that still work. Burberry trenches and Celine dresses. His oldest find was a book of sermons from 1748. “Technically, it was potentially ancient Coptic fabric fragments,” he tells me.
The cash to be made from the glimmer is entertaining, but I always have the same thoughts when I see his stories: Who are these people throwing away these often precious pieces? And who exactly is this guy? How does someone become The Trash Salvager?
In a way, I felt like I already knew him. My mother is an antique dealer, and I grew up around off-the-grid people who sifted through other people’s belongings for a living, hibernating in vans, surrounded by shrines of used Dunkin’ Donuts cups and Reagan biographies. I met the occasional trash picker, armed with GTS acid testers and gram scales, who hated keeping their cash in the banks, so they hid it.
But TTS, whom I first met uptown for coffee after a postpartum checkup, once led an ordinary New York life, working a normal 9-5 job in corporate sales and later at a global financial institution as a project manager. When he has time, he says, he plays baseball.
The thrill of discovery was always bubbling in the back of TTS’s head. He was interested in treasure hunting from a young age, using a metal detector to root around his backyard for trinkets. The love for the hunt followed him to New York, where, while climbing the corporate ladder, he began thrifting on the side and then reselling his finds. Eventually, he built a savings, waited for his bonus, and quit on his birthday. “I trusted myself to see what it was like to do full-time versus coming in late to work, running out on lunch breaks to ship the items.”
Around the time TTS put in his two-week notice, he noticed blue and white bins piling up outside an orthopedics store that had closed down next to his old apartment. “I just figured they were renovations because they were always loaded up right by my staircase,” says TS. “Eventually, I was like, ‘This is obscene. What is in these bins?’ I got curious, so I popped one open, and I just gasped. I was so upset at myself for not looking sooner because it all clicked.” In the bins, TTS found discarded postoperative merchandise, like leg braces and special shoes for infants. “It was very valuable stuff that people without health insurance couldn’t afford.” He listed them on eBay and sent items as far away as Tanzania. He made a ballpark of $10,000 on this first batch of sales. That is when TTS began to see the value in the streets. “I instantly realized the potential and applied my thrifting knowledge to the curbs to virtually never thrift again,” he told me.
When I walk with TTS, it’s eerily calm out. I tell him that I haven’t experienced this sort of silence since strolling a late night during COVID. This library-quiet ambiance is what gives TTS zen and heightened awareness, he says, a far cry from when he was soldered to his phone during his office days, never looking or observing his surroundings. He’s like a fox prowling for prey. “It’s a constant meditative state. I’m constantly at peace. I know I’m doing something good. I’m happy. I’m calm. Sometimes there’s a sense of urgency to get to a spot or a pile before the trucks, or beat someone who’s out doing it too. But it’s just a constant three, four, five, six hours of peace and serenity. Everyone’s asleep. It feels really interesting going against the entire grain of the world.”
Throughout the night, we see a few other people, typically doormen. Many of them know TTS. Later on, one doorman asks us if we are together. As we walk, TTS mentions that most tag-alongs are women; these doormen see him with a different lady weekly. There must be something about hunting and gathering!
Interest in trash picking has long existed, and it has only grown thanks to social media. The draw towards the oddities market via trash-to-treasure hunters has skyrocketed on TikTok and Instagram, cropping up in cities all over the world. Who doesn’t love to pull out two vintage Tiffany & Co. 24k gold barrettes from a trash bag before they get buried in a landfill? A gilded needle in a stinking haystack.
TTS has a zealot drive, Navy Seal-level stamina, and mystical patience. In addition to his drumming background, he taps into smell and sight and touch. He can pick up the scent of diapers. Cat litter. Rancid food. Sometimes, he’ll feel the bag with his hands to double-check the contents. “This is a melon,” he tells me at one point, squeezing the bottom of a black industrial trash bag.
But TTS also possesses a specific olfactory bonanza. It’s the umami moneymaker of the curb: his “smelling grandma” sense. When TTS “smells grandma”, a distinct vintage aroma, he feels that there will be gold or silver in the pile. “I literally will jump through my skin when I smell that. It’s like Pavlov’s Dog,” he says, adding. “You get this rush. I just sit down and dig in. It’s like a feast.” This scent usually emanates from the apartment clean-out of a recently deceased elderly inhabitant. These clean-outs can last weeks, months, or years. But even when he picks up that “grandma” whiff, sometimes, there is still nothing to be found, especially if the trash is organized with all the good stuff already sorted through.
Yet, there have been countless instances when TTS has discovered something worthy thanks to his sniffer. Once, he saved a load right as the garbage truck pulled up, later unearthing a jewelry box brimming with estate jewelry. “It’s just instincts that snowball or domino effect into what you’re looking for somehow. Or it just is a manifest,” he shrugs.
While not everyone can pick up the scent of the offloads of the recently buried, there are clues, like books. “I’ll look at the age of the book.” Old paperbacks often signal older people. “Older people have silver and trinkets and tchotchkes, versus like a modern couple that’s got ‘Amazons,’” he says. Then again, there is that luck-of-the-sift moment: A few months ago, he found a thousand-dollar Ralph Lauren Polo gift card in the papers and recycling. “It’s not always bagged properly.”
I am shocked by how much energy and patience TTS has mustered on our uptown death march in this freeze to pick through trash. Along our route, he has carried with him bags of Legos and stuffed animals. (He gets the bags en route from the trash.) He likes to send the stuffed animals to classrooms. One teacher later reached out to tell him that their students christened the stuffy “Trash”.
I notice that every stop has bags of discarded books, some old, some new. I live in eco-conscious Park Slope, where it would be a sin to throw a book away, so people leave them in tiny cairns on their doorsteps for passersby to take. I soon learn that tossing is the norm for uptown. That’s not all: TTS often posts one woman whom he has named the “clothes bandit,” who chucks bags bloated with new, tagged garments weekly.
It’s unsettling seeing so many perfectly intact items that will soon be crushed by the jaws of garbage-processing death. When I scroll back to his archived stories on Instagram, I watch screenshot one where TTS gave his nephew a salvaged electric water pistol. “It’s so sad that people give those things to the trash,” his nephew said. I get it. I feel frustrated seeing all these perfectly usable items that will soon go to landfills, where they will never degrade or decay in any helpful way. As for TTS, salvaging the streets for over a decade has taught him how to cope and accept. “I’m sensitive to the energy, so I almost absorb that energy [of the object]. To some degree, it’s like, ‘I don’t want this consumerism. Get it off me.’ But I’ll absorb it for a little bit, process it, take the cat hair that gets on and off, take stupid pictures at home because I have bad lighting. Just get it out,” says TTS. “And I’m so happy to re-home it to people that will value it and wear it and treasure it.” He first started selling on eBay, and now he mostly sells direct to his followers.
What also propels TTS is the circular economy. “Everything I’ve taken out of a bag or found in the piles has been redistributed and has not been bought new,” he says, adding. “It’s important to reduce our dependence on corporations and retail.” He also wants to teach people just how easy it is to save something, no matter where they live. “It’s like you can help sustain yourself and everyone wins,” he says, adding. “People message me a lot about things in their neighborhoods, like, ‘We’re not in New York, we don’t have the same opportunity, but I did save this thing and sold it for 40 bucks.”
I’m amazed by TTS’s willpower. There’s so much he doesn’t take. And there are incredible finds out here on the hushed sidewalks! (I see a stationary bicycle I want to haul back home!) As a rule, TTS takes only what he can carry. (There are outings when he’ll go back to a pile hours later.) At times, like earlier in the night, when we find a random concert poster signed by the musician, he leaves something good (if not TTS-worthy) on the edge of the trash for someone to pick it up. “It’s really satisfying watching cab drivers or delivery guys pull over and take something right away. It’s like moving puzzle pieces around to normalize it. Hundreds of people might walk by, clueless because it’s on a pile of trash. Then I put it on the corner, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, free things.’ It’s just dissecting the scene. Or just making it not judgy.”
At our current mound, I see TTS toss more bags and open a few. He announces that we probably won’t find anything of true value here: judging by the woman’s “be-garbaged” belongings, she was too neat and everything was too accounted for. There is no room for error, no accidentally tossed treasure. I am, for one, enjoying her organization, completely in heaven looking at a bag of old paper shopping bags that are neatly preserved and folded. Hanro. Hermes. Neiman’s. I find a Saks Fifth Avenue bag with a nutcracker on it. (I later learned the bag is from 1997 and was illustrated by Gennady Spirin, a famous Russian artist.) I also nab an early to mid-’90s Starbucks paper bag splattered with Global Village Coffee House art. (I see that similar Starbucks bags are listed on eBay for $19!). I also keep a glossy bag from a London hotel with the woman’s written name on it to look up later. I want to know who she is.
Before I can start Googling, TTS calls me over. He shakes a trash bag—it clangs!— and says he thinks there might be something there. He lets me have the honor of opening it. I find a sewing kit. And then another sewing kit. He tells me to look closely, as sometimes there is jewelry tucked in the innards. Nothing. TTS flashes his phone light. More sewing materials. Et voila! An ancient Gucci bag with the lining ripped out. The piece, probably from the early ‘70s, is monogrammed with the woman’s initials. A score!
It’s freezing. I’m tired. It’s time for me to go home. TTS has more ground to cover. The Gucci bag he’ll later clean up, list, and sell to someone else with an eye for the old, good stuff. He’s already got his eyes on a bigger prize, the one he hasn’t found yet. The next morning, I wake up to a text from TTS, who says that he found a “good amount of silver” and is floating in the air as a result. As for tonight? Onto the next curb.
Some Notes:
Note 1: I didn’t say exactly where we were. The Trash Salvager doesn’t want to air out the locations. I don’t blame him.
Note 2: But you can go walking with The Trash Salvager and see for yourself! Just DM him. He is friendly and has people from all over the world asking to walk with him. I plan to go on more in the summer.
Note 3: I looked up the woman whose things we found. She was a flight attendant and a model. The ornaments were sent from her father.
Note 4: TTS told me that by 2027, the city will start putting massive “European-style” trash bins out to store garbage bags for pickup. While this will most likely reduce the rat problem, it will be harder for TTS to access trash bags. I am confident he will find a way to dig.
Note 5: This story made me both elated and conscious. We should think long and hard about what we are throwing away, but also…think about what we are buying.
Note 6: Going through other people’s things made me think about things and where they end up. To be blunt, we don’t leave this earth with the material stuff we have accumulated.
This is my Sassy, my New Yorker. THIS IS JOURNALISM
liana this story is everything to me!!!!