Ways to make a difference

Dumpster divers. Yikes.

It is just past 9pm and Geoff Bice emerges from a skip bin at the back of a shopping centre.

He triumphantly holds something up to the torch light. An egg carton. He opens the carton. One egg looks only slightly damaged. The other 11 appear intact.

He puts the carton into a tray, climbs back into the bin and disappears.

Welcome to the world of the dumpster divers.

Over about an hour Mr Bice, Jarrod McKenna and the third member of the group, Amy, visit five sites.

At one site honeydew melons sit on a wooden pallet next to the bin. The trio leave them untouched though it seems almost certain the fruit is to be dumped.

The fifth bin looks full of promise with fruit in glad wrap enticingly near the top.

But as store employees emerge and see them, the trio decide to leave the fruit and move on.

However, by the time they have finished, their tray is loaded with fruit, vegetables, processed meat, pasta, packaged olives, eggplant, cheese, soup, breakfast cereal, coleslaw, sliced bread, bread rolls and dairy products.

The trio are not down and out. They do not live on the streets but they are appalled at the level of waste our society tolerates and believe they should do something about it.

Members of a Christian community in the eastern suburbs, they will either eat what they have retrieved or give it to others, telling recipients it is from a dumpster.

If in the end they decide some of the food is not suitable to be eaten, they will give it to their worm farm, chickens or put it into the compost.

Mr McKenna, 30, is World Vision Australia’s national advisor for youth, faith and activism. What drives him is simple.

“We waste, on an island of affluence amid a global sea of poverty, where about 900 million people go to bed hungry each night,” he says.