I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear gloves and clothing you don't mind throwing out afterward, but MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you'd think.
Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truck full of stuff. Common items I typically find are: clothing (especially coats), backpacks (which sometimes have money and other valuables in the small pockets), food (unopened), bathroom supplies, cleaning supplies, notebooks, bins/organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.
There is lots more that I typically don't bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, "items of a personal nature," etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.
For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop or anything particularly in line with my other hobbies, but the general day-to-day stuff is quite plentiful if you're willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.
I went to the university of Durham in the U.K. - I paid my tuition, rent, and living expenses every year by just collecting the stacks of discarded textbooks, and selling them on at a 30% discount from the university bookshop’s prices to the next year’s undergrads. My only cost was paying (cheap) rent on a house under a railway bridge that I turned into an amazing fire hazard over the summer.
Best (in terms of mass to value) dumpster dive find I had was a box of laser rubies.
Seems straightforward enough. Laptops are portable and contain things of personal value (configuration, if nothing else!). Or just might -- if you're dumping stuff because you don't want to deal with it, so why would you deal with searching through your laptop to look for photos or incriminating messages or whatever? Or opening it up to pull the hard drive? That's work!
Formerly, they'd also be as much value to the owner the week after classes end as they were the week before, but maybe that's changed now? Do people rely only on phones and not use laptops for anything other than school?
On the curb, I've found over 100 total tower/desktop PCs/Macs, countless printers/monitors/televisions, and even a few game consoles, but I don't recall any laptops nor smartphones.
I was thinking either laptops&phones are too easy to move, to easy to sell, they don't last long on the curb, or they're small enough to get tossed into the trash.
If you were opening trash bags in the dumpsters, and still didn't find any, I guess they're too easy to keep/move/sell.
Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truck full of stuff. Common items I typically find are: clothing (especially coats), backpacks (which sometimes have money and other valuables in the small pockets), food (unopened), bathroom supplies, cleaning supplies, notebooks, bins/organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.
There is lots more that I typically don't bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, "items of a personal nature," etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.
For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop or anything particularly in line with my other hobbies, but the general day-to-day stuff is quite plentiful if you're willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.