From $12,000 in Debt to $140,000 in Dumpster Resale Sales

By Nathan Brooks

Carter Stevens, a 31-year-old Nashville resident, generated about $140,000 in sales from dumpster finds over 12 months after starting his resale business in March 2024, according to CNBC. He launched the business while roughly $12,000 in debt.

CNBC reported that years of addiction and reckless spending had preceded the launch and briefly left him living in his car. The business gave him a way to turn discarded property into cash while he worked to rebuild his finances.

On the headline numbers, his $140,000 in sales equaled nearly 11.7 times the roughly $12,000 debt he carried at launch. That comparison frames the value he recovered, but it cannot establish that he earned $140,000 in profit or erased every personal and business expense.

He works near office parks and luxury condominiums in Nashville, according to CNBC. He pulls discarded furniture and electronics, cleans them and lists them on eBay and Facebook Marketplace. His finds have included Persian rugs, iPads, West Elm furniture and samurai swords.

His biggest score came from 190 Steelcase office chairs beside an overflowing bin. He sold the batch for a combined $27,600. CNBC did not specify whether the chairs sold individually or in groups, so any per-chair figure is only a mathematical average.

That implied average was about $145 per chair. The batch also supplied roughly 19.7% of Stevens's $140,000 in first-year sales. Spread evenly across 12 months, the total would average about $11,667 a month, or $2,692 a week.

Those benchmarks describe scale, not the shape of his income. “The amount of waste in this country that you’ll find is unbelievable,” Stevens told CNBC.

Stevens acknowledged that a handful of large hauls produced most of his income and that it may not happen again. One missed big find could therefore matter more than the weekly average suggests.

He is saving as much as he can while studying real estate wholesaling as a steadier backup plan, according to CNBC. That choice reflects the central weakness in the dumpster model: a strong headline number can coexist with unpredictable cash flow.

What does the $140,000 sales figure change for would-be resellers?

For anyone considering dumpster resale, the practical lesson is to separate gross sales from profit and repeatability. CNBC's account provides a sales total and examples of valuable finds, but no expense breakdown, profit figure or monthly earnings series. The $140,000 says more about recoverable value in a few fortunate hauls than about a stable annual wage.

A reseller trying to reproduce the model would need to track gross proceeds by haul, actual cash receipts, time spent cleaning and the selling costs attached to each recovered item. CNBC did not provide those operating details. The decision is not whether $140,000 sounds attractive; it is whether large, high-value finds recur often enough to cover the slower months.

Cleaning sits between salvage and sale in Stevens's model. His inventory ranged from office furniture and electronics to rugs and swords. CNBC offers only one item-level sale total, for the Steelcase chairs.

Concentration changes how a reader should interpret the total. Nearly one-fifth of first-year sales came from a single haul, while the remaining sales depended on other finds of undisclosed size. The report does not establish that the largest scores repeat at any regular interval.

Stevens is already hedging against the windfall. His savings push and his study of real estate wholesaling show a practical buffer against another year without a comparable haul. Going forward, the test is whether that steadier plan can replace the large, opportunistic sales that carried his first 12 months.