Simply Garbage? Rubbish! It's Found Treasure

Goodwin enjoys hauling away trash so much that he quit his part-time corporate job earlier this month.

"I wanted to focus more on driving a dump truck," he says. "Office work corrodes my soul."

Trashball contents can get dicey. Goodwin has been known to toss dead bugs, drug baggies and broken glass into the plastic capsules. A sign atop each machine asks that no one under 18 buy a Trashball.

A handful of Warehouse regulars are Trashball devotees who plunk down a quarter every time they come, Warehouse manager Molly Ruppert says.

"When we first heard it was going [to Busboys and Poets], we thought, 'Oh no, this is so terrible,' " Ruppert says. "We felt some proprietary interest."

On the blog, trash becomes social commentary. A Trashball blog post of two receipts attracted a wave of Web traffic last September, Goodwin says. One is from a Yes! Organic Market and includes purchases of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, organic spinach and Tuscan risotto. The other is a 99-cent buy from 7-Eleven that says "FOOD STAMP PURCHASE" across the top. He says he found the receipts within two feet of each other in a Capitol Hill park.

A few days later, Goodwin posted this diary entry he found, written in juvenile cursive:

"I am sad mom hit me a lot. I am sore all over. Dad is in California. I miss him. He will not be home in time to get mom a preseant. I love mom."

He gets some of his best Trashball material from eBay auctions of ephemera, or people's collections of vintage junk. But he hasn't abandoned Washington's litter, especially the Trashball gold mine of Columbia Heights, he says.

"Another way to look at it is I'm cleaning up the city in a very slow, inefficient way," he says.