Dozens of times a year, regular New Yorkers put on gloves, boots and even protective suits to dive through piles of garbage, searching for possessions that were inadvertently thrown in the trash or dropped in a dumpster. After a few hours of searching, they sometimes find their buried treasure — lucky lottery tickets, sacred religious items, cherished family photo albums, literal bags of cash and even dentures — before it ends up on a barge, destined for a dump far away.
“People find some amazing things — wedding rings and engagement rings, wallets, purses,” said the Department of Sanitation’s Sean Brereton, a deputy chief of solid waste management operations. Theodora Adelabu knows the feeling. She was already through JFK Airport security in December, on her way home to Nigeria for her father’s memorial service, when she realized she didn’t have her blue backpack packed with items high in monetary and sentimental value.
She retraced her steps, calling family and friends who saw her early that morning as she prepared for the flight. “I was panicked, I was crying,” she said. She rescheduled a flight one hour later, knowing she couldn’t leave without the bag, which had her work laptop, gold and jewelry, traditional clothing for the service — and $10,000 in cash. Turns out, she had left her car off at a friend’s house at around 5:30 that morning and left the bag sitting outside. A neighbor she asked to look at security camera footage saw that at around 8:15 a.m. a DSNY truck came by and tossed the blue backpack in with other trash.
Adelabu rushed to the nearest sanitation garage after Googling it, found the first employee and fell to her knees, literally, to ask for help. “There’s something taken as trash that is not trash,” she said she told him. He helped her stand up, she recalled, and reassured her. “‘If we picked it up, then we’ll find it,’” he told her, suggesting she get some gloves and boots for her dig at a waste-transfer site later that day in Brooklyn, after they isolated the truck that picked up her bag.