Freeganism Facts for Kids

The word "freeganism" (person: freegan; related: freecycling) means to get things for free rather than buy those items. A freegan is a person who does not like to pay for things, but does not steal either. Freegans like to find things that other people throw away that are still useful. People often throw things away that are not used up or broken. Sometimes they throw things away because they are bored of them and like to shop for new things. Freegans look through other people's rubbish bins and take what they can use, to the point of dumpster diving. This can be good for the environment, because no energy is used to make new things, in those cases. However, some cities have rules about taking things out of the rubbish, and freegans can get in trouble for this.

The name "freegan" rhymes with "vegan". It combines the words "free" and "vegan". Freegans are not necessarily vegans.

Motivations and ideology
- Veganism and food waste
- Back-to-nature
Impacts
Images for kids
See also

Motivations and ideology

Studies usually find that most people that participate in practices associated with freeganism, such as dumpster diving for food, do so for economic reasons. Freegans are usually distinguished as being a subset of this population which has an ideological or political motivation for recovering waste or avoiding consumption, although some freegans also say that they do so for amusement, to acquire free goods, or out of religious conviction. Anthropologist Loretta Lou has demonstrated how freeganism is closely related to notions of freedom, especially "ethical freedom", among some freegan practitioners in Asia.

Veganism and food waste

Research on freegan.info in New York found that most participants were vegetarian or vegan prior to becoming freegan. In many cases, though, freegans critique vegans by arguing that vegans ignore the environmental and labor impacts of the products they buy and corporate ownership of many vegan product lines.

Back-to-nature

Freeganism is a largely urban or suburban phenomenon. Freegans attempt to re-naturalize the city, treating urban waste as a "natural" resource and approach dumpster diving as a practice analogous to hunting or gathering.

Impacts

Media coverage of freeganism in the United States peaked around the financial crisis in 2007-2009 and dropped off subsequently. More recently, freeganism has been discussed in the context of increasing public interest in food waste. Tristram Stuart, a prominent food waste campaigner and founder of the organization "Feedback" claims that media attention to freeganism was crucial in attracting attention to the problem. Other analyses of the origins of contemporary public policy initiatives around food waste have also concluded that freeganism contributed to new initiatives, like the French law on food waste or the U.S. food waste reduction challenge.