A small but growing group of well-educated urban dwellers, often in well-paying jobs, is challenging the socially sanctioned revulsion around waste by engaging in ‘skip dipping’: sorting through the contents of publicly located skips for items which are still useful. Emma Rush examines the phenomenon in this paper.

Drawing on a Newspoll survey of 1200 people, Emma Rush and Andrew Macintosh show that over 50 per cent of Australians receive unwanted Christmas presents and that 21 per cent of Australians will give presents to people they don’t want to during the festive season. Nearly three quarters of those surveyed said they would be...