TRASH IS IN FASH’
NY eco-influencer
She’s airing corporate America’s trash online.
A New York City influencer is exposing the country’s decadent excesses by exhuming mountains of perfectly salvageable food and other goods from garbage cans in the Big Apple.
Anna Sacks’ damning dumpster dives are amassing millions of views on TikTok and Instagram.
“It’s very meditative for me,” the Upper
West Sider told
The Post of her routine in which she goes through her neighbors’ and nearby retailers’ trash bags three or four times a week, sometimes for four hours at a time.
It’s the former investment banker’s new way of living — sleeping on the bed sheets she snagged from a garbage bag (after washing them) and drinking coffee she makes from the unsealed containers that CVS routinely tosses.
The eco-warrior, 30 — who goes by @TheTrashWalker on social media — wears puncture-proof gloves to sift through trash cans in search of reusable goods, which she then loads into a shopping cart and takes home.
In her most recent video, which has garnered 2.5 million views, the trash-tivist uncovers a Halloween-worthy trove of Twix, Snickers and other candy in a CVS trash can.
“It’s all past the best-buy date, but it’s like a month past,” laments the New York native.
“I am still going to enjoy this.”
But Sacks hopes to do more than save money: She’s wants to change the world. Now a full-time waste consultant, she’s taking big companies to task for wasteful practices. Her change.org petition urging CVS to “Donate, Don’t Dump” has nearly 500,000 signatures.
Another CVS-cavation, from March, shows how the drugstore had deliberately ripped open perfectly good protein bars and squeezed out the contents of toothpaste tubes before discarding them.
“It’s so gross that this is what they like to do as a corporation, rather than help people,” says the garbage pail-eontologist, who boasts almost 250,000 followers on TikTok.
And it’s not just multinational corporations that are letting good-as-new items go to waste. Sacks has also found edible — and expensive — fresh meals and smoothies that were discarded by Maison Kayser, Juice Press and other ritzy city food chains,.
However, getting corporations to change their ways has proven to be an uphill battle. Last year, Sacks accompanied The Post on an excursion to the dumpsters of seven Manhattan Starbucks stores, which revealed that the coffee giant had hardly fulfilled its 2016 pledge to donate “100%” of its unsold food by 2020.
“It’s very easy for companies to make public sustainability goals for which they receive positive press . . . but then not follow through with them,” Sacks said.