A NYC Woman’s Crusade to Showcase Usable Items in the City’s Trash and Recycling Bins—and Push for New Solutions

Anna Sacks is a 30-year-old Manhattanite who takes regular “trash walks” in which she rummages through retailers’ discards as well as recycling bins in search of items that are still perfectly usable. Why does she do this? In order to bring attention, and offer solutions, to our “culture of throwing things out, which leads to businesses and consumers alike producing untold amounts of waste.”

On Sacks’ social media channels (she has posted as @thetrashwalker on Instagram since 2018 and more recently on TikTok), she documents what she finds, and showcases “just a fraction of the usable food, clothing, housewares and more that gets thrown out every day.” She also encourages retail workers to share stories of instances where they have been instructed to destroy unsold or returned merchandise.

Sacks wants to make a real difference through her work—and contends that retailers could and should give away “unsold or lightly used, returned (but still good) items to their low-wage employees, instead of tossing them, or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles to donate them.” But she also recognizes the difficulties in making this happen.

In the spring, Sacks left her job at ThinkZero, a zero-waste consultancy, and is now working to build a coalition focused on passing bipartisan legislation that “would make donating ‘the obvious choice’ for corporations, schools and other groups looking to offload unsold or unused goods.” She notes that, “If you don’t make it a law they’re not going to do it.”

Read the original article here.