My brothers and I invented the term Dumpster Diving. I even wrote a story about brothers who find an alien artifact while dumpster diving.
Now there is a whole site devoted to dumpster diving, although the site includes some darker uses for the things that you might find in a dumpster, including blackmail, identity theft, and corporate whistle blowing.
My brothers and I are more concerned with finding buried treasure.
Once I was with my brothers and one of my cousins down in the Tribeca section of New York, near Canal Street and we passed a dumpster. A building was being renovated and the contractors had dumped the contents of all the abandoned apartments into the dumpster. There was lots of stuff. I jumped in and started digging. I looked up a few minutes later and my brothers and my cousin were also in the dumpster looking for treasure and finding it.
The first time I heard the dumpster was in Honolulu. I spent the summer there with my Uncle when I was 14. He was in the army and was stationed there. There was a company called Dewey Dumpsters that placed the dumpsters around the army camp. My cousin and I started our long careers in Dumpster Diving during the summer of 1965.
It must be in the DNA.