Many of us could use more money, and we go about finding it in a variety of ways: asking for a raise, changing jobs, or taking a second job, for example. But you could also start selling trash. Not just any trash, of course—most trash is, well, just trash—but the kinds of things people routinely throw away or leave behind that actually keep enough value to make them worth picking up and reselling them. While these are usually volume businesses (meaning you have to sell a large number of them to make real money), you can make real money just grabbing this stuff from trash, homes, or even public spaces. Six examples of surprisingly profitable trash are golf balls, wood pallets, cardboard boxes, wine corks, and egg cartons.
More than 25 million people play golf in the United States, and if you’ve ever played a round, you know that means a lot of lost golf balls. Approximately 1.5 billion golf balls go missing every year in this country. The surprising part is that used golf balls actually retain a lot of their value. According to Lashan Wanigatunga, co-owner of Two Guys with Balls, used golf balls can go for anywhere from 15 cents to $2 depending on brand, so you can make a fair amount of money just picking up golf balls you find on the ground.
The real money is in diving for golf balls, as water hazards often contain a large volume of them that no one is going to chase after. This is such a real thing there’s even a listing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website for the career, where it’s noted that divers can make $200 per day retrieving golf balls (Todd Hutchinson of Ballhawker claims you can actually make $800 per day doing it). Diving for golf balls can be dangerous if you’re not familiar with underwater work or skip safety protocols, but where else can you make a few hundred bucks a day by picking up stuff someone else left behind?
Wood pallets are pretty ubiquitous—and pretty useful. If you’ve noticed a business in your area that routinely has a bunch of pallets piled up or in dumpsters, you might have an opportunity: Used wood pallets in decent condition are actually worth anywhere from 50 cents to $4 per pallet. All you need are pallets that you can legally take (many businesses are happy to get rid of them if you just ask), a way to transport them, and possibly some tools to repair pallets if you want to maximize your success. You can use the North American Pallet Recycling Network to locate pallet brokers in your area, and companies like Kamps Pallets will actually pay you and come and get your pallets if you have at least 500 per year to sell them. There are usually local pallet brokers in your area, so a little research might lead you to other resources.
Those Amazon and UPS boxes we toss into the recycling bin or give to friends when they’re moving can actually be worth some money. You can sell empty, used cardboard boxes on platforms like BoxCycle, which pays anywhere from 10 cents to $1.25 for standard moving boxes and buys just about any box you might have on hand; U-Haul Box Exchange, where people post boxes for sale or for free; and Used Cardboard Boxes will buy your used shipping boxes. You can also try to sell used boxes eBay.
People in the U.S. tear through more than 4 billion bottles of wine each year, many of which wind up in recycling bins, but wine corks can actually sell for a pretty decent margin on places like Etsy or eBay. They tend to sell for about 10 cents a pop, although some branded varieties can fetch more. Of course, that's not a lot for someone relying on the average American’s consumption of 16 bottles per year for inventory, but if a local restaurant is just tossing their used corks into the bin, you might be in business.
Used egg cartons are a surprisingly large market: People use them in crafts, and small farms also buy them for their own egg sales. Your standard supermarket-derived egg cartons can go for about 30-40 cents apiece on sites like eBay, which means that if you eat the average number of eggs each year (around 285, or close to 24 dozen), that’s an extra $60-70 alone. If you actually go out and collect 24 egg cartons from local restaurants, hotels, or other businesses every day, that’s a few hundred bucks a week.
