Is One Mans Trash Another Mans Treasure?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the famous saying: “one man's trash is another man's come up.” Well this saying has been taken quite literally in the streets of San Francisco because there are actually people who will go around searching through people's trash in hope to find something valuable. But why has this common but strange habit started to grow in the streets of San Francisco? Could it be because we as residents of Silicon Valley are often exposed to expensive and good food that we simply do not consume and therefore dispose of? Normally, when we believe a belonging of our own is trash, its trash. People will often feel as though their own things hold a lesser value than they did before so rather than selling it they simply dispose of it on the street. Let's take a couch for an example: to one person it could have been used to the point where it doesn't hold its original value anymore and decide it’s not worth the valuable space that it's taking up so naturally they would dispose of it onto a street corner or in front of their house. However, to somebody else, this couch could be extremely useful and worth a lot more.

Public storage industry is huge especially in California, and has been growing exponentially because we often don’t like things that do not live up to the value that we would need them to. Luckily there are lots of people already  brainstorming solutions to this problem for example, a company called “Imperfect Produce.” Every year 20 billion pounds of fruits and veggies go to waste because they don’t live up to the “standards of grocery store” veggies and fruits. What this company does is it buys the “ugly” produce from farmers markets that don’t sell it to supermarkets (because the supermarkets won’t sell it) and then sell it across the country to people who aren't picky about what their food looks like but rather care more about the taste of it! This allows for people to not waste food and still make a good amount of profit just by continuing to sell what the majority of people do not want.