What is junk for some is riches for others, explains Clea Myers

When I was a tweaker (slang for crystal meth addict), living in Los Angeles, my favourite past-time was dumpster diving. My tweaker friends and I would joke about setting up Dumpster Divers Anonymous.

Our mission was to out-do each other with our stashes of re-cyclable junk, stored in both our cars and apartments, alongside war-stories of the long days and nights we had spent gadding about, on 'dives', all over the city of LA. My car was stuffed-to-full with dived materials - from stereos to a wide range of furniture, clothes, china, books - and people often assumed I was living in it. Indeed I was not, but my dumpster-diving was so extreme that I could barely move within my apartment and certainly could not fit any passengers in my car.

Following a successful dive, non-stop days and nights would be spent with a staple gun in one hand and mad mix of activity on the other, usually involving reams of fabric, a piece of furniture - often times a sofa, or chaise-longue; my personal favourite, in a hyper bid to convert this so-called rubbish into ready cash. I sold plenty on to 'vintage' furniture shops and kept myself afloat, for a while at least, until the crystal meth totally took me over (read more in my MEMOIR).

Maybe we were, after all, onto something in our disillusioned tweaker life-style - just a shame that the diving stopped as soon as the drugs wore off! I am, however, delighted to see that in the last five years, dumpster-diving has become entirely legit and is known as freeganism.