Scavenger

WORD OF THE DAY

scavenger / noun / SKAV-un-jer

Definition
1 (chiefly British): a person employed to remove dirt and refuse from streets
2a: one that scavenges: such as a garbage collector: a junk collector
2b: chemically active substance acting to make innocuous or remove an undesirable substance
3: an organism that typically feeds on refuse or carrion

Examples
My uncle, a habitual scavenger and clever handyman, found a broken exercise machine left on the curb and fixed it so that it works again.

"The 34-year-old scavenger has had to work longer and harder over the past year, underlining how a drastic decline in scrap metal and commodity prices has hurt even the poor who collect discarded metal to sell to scrap yards."
— Brendan O'Brien, Reuters, 4 July 2016

Did You Know?
You might guess that scavenger is a derivative of scavenge, but the reverse is actually true; scavenger is the older word, first appearing in English in the early 16th century, and the back-formation scavenge came into English in the mid-17th century.
Scavenger is an alteration of the earlier scavager, itself from Anglo-French scawageour, meaning "collector of scavage."
In medieval times, scavage was a tax levied by towns and cities on goods put up for sale by nonresidents in order to provide resident merchants with a competitive advantage.
The officers in charge of collecting this tax were later made responsible for keeping streets clean, and that's how scavenger came to refer to a public sanitation employee in Great Britain before acquiring its current sense referring to a person who salvages discarded items.