TO REUSE OR RECYCLE

My Kitchen?  Not!!!

Don’t you just ‘love’ all the hints for ways to reuse rather than recycle your household items?  Many publications, in print an on line, offer up ways to reuse everything from glass jars and egg cartons to old boots and torn stockings. Every day brings reuse emails to my inbox.



Creative reuse of old boots at The Walled Nursery
in Kent.  Picture from Sharon Santoni at
her blog, My French Country Home

They all tell me to reuse glass jars to hold everything from tea lights and cotton swabs, to nuts and bolts out in the garage.  I should sort my earrings in used egg cartons, grow plants in old boots, and tie up my tomato plants with torn stockings.  Excellent ideas, but I need only one, at most a few, of each of those.  What kinda bothers me is the feeling I get that if I don’t reuse and ‘repurpose’ as many of the recyclable items as I can, I am a slacker and a threat to the environment. Sites like these don’t seem to me to be just making suggestions, they are making demands.

From Squidoo comes a list of 50 things you can reuse.  I love this one: 

14. Reuse your used margarine and butter tubs by cleaning them and keeping them for leftovers (free ziploc containers!).  And this one: 18. Reuse newspaper, interesting magazines, and other paper products by using them as wrapping paper. After a while I’d become inundated with paper and margarine tubs. I could become inundated with anything I choose to save to reuse. I could become a hoarder!

Well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.  I suppose it’s just the righteous language that gets to me.  How ‘bout something like this: “save a the next few glass jars you empty and create some lovely tea light holders,”  or “Be on the lookout for colorful or interesting pages in newspapers and magazines: they make excellent gift-wrapping paper.” 

Meanwhile, I’m going to ‘unsubscribe’ to several of those ‘holier than thou’ sites that email all these reuse suggestions that nag at me, and I am going to continue to recycle everything I possibly can.