If You Use Some of My Garbage…I’ll Use Some of Yours
A few weeks back I inquired within my CSA as to whether or not “our” farm would take back the containers that they use for berries and little tomatoes. Didn’t hear back from them or the farm so I assumed they could not for some sanitation reasons. Most of the containers were that green paper material which I could recycle in the paper bin but some were the plastic kind that can’t be recycled here in the city…so I was a little bummed. Fast forward a few weeks and guess what I saw at the CSA distribution? A little reuse rainbow…a sign saying the farmer will indeed take back the containers AND the farm that distributes eggs will take ANY egg cartons. How cool is that? I had been recycling the new paper Trader Joe egg cartons, but a reuse trumps a recycle, no?
This also inspired me to think about “garbage” I could reuse from other people. Like bread bags. I have run out of my old stash and was contemplating buying a box of zippies but realized that there must be a world of bread bags hitting the trash right in my very building. Most of my friends do not make their own bread. (Yes…they can still be my friends even though they don’t bake bread. Hard as it is…I find ways to love them anyway.)
What can you pick from your friend’s trash? (And no…that is not a euphemism. Get your mind out of the gutter and into the dumpster people!)
Thanks for stopping by my blog. Good idea about using ice cube trays to create portion size pesto poppers. I like that.
Have any ideas about what to do with all those plastic bags you get when you buy groceries? I have about a million of them. I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I thought about stuffing throw pillows with them. Actually, I think I might have enough to stuff a mattress!
The shopping bags or produce bags? If you don’t have reusable cloth bags you could just reuse the plastic ones or buy some cloth ones so the plastic will stop piling up. My mother-in-law uses hers for garbage instead of buying grocery bags. (She lives alone and doesn’t produce much garbage.) The plastic ones I end up with when people give me clothes or food, etc., I use for when I buy a raw chicken. I don’t like them in my cloth bags because they pee chicken juice sometimes. Ewwww. Also, if you know someone with a dog they might be able to use them for poop picker-upers. The trick is to stop the plastic flow.
We use our plastic grocery bags for kitty litter. Double bagged in case there is a microscopic hole in one. Despite that, I have went to reuseable grocery bags because the bulk of the grocery bags ended up with holes in them and just thrown out. When I use up our good plastic bags, I will go with using small kitchen trash bags. That will still use far less plastic bags. I wonder what Fake Plastic fish uses for her litter.
What a great reminder! I will have to call my friend Michele and see if I can nab some of her garbage.
Our CSA farmer is happy to get his tomato baskets back. The egg farmer gets his cartons back - in fact, he has labels on them which serve as a reminder to return them. And the backyard eggs from various members are sold in re-used cartons folks have brought in. The goat cheese farmer gets all of his packaging back from shipping the cheese, including cold packs. The only problem I have is the huge build-up of ziploc and perforated produce bags from two years of CSA shares. A number of things come in bags: grains, beans, roasted green chiles, greens, etc. I wash and re-use them but I have enough for several lifetimes!
The ziplocks are great for freezing stuff but I have no clue as to what to do with those thin perforated CSA bags.
Great blog! Had to reply to this question (belatedly): buckets. My neighbors must be wondering if I have a dozen cats instead of one, what with the half dozen kitty litter buckets currently decorating my balcony, but I need more! Testing bokashi(sort of a pre-composting technique for kitchen waste), so I need lots and lots of buckets.
DSF