Today I’m beginning perhaps one of the most privileged exercises a globally wealthy person can undertake: going through the stuff I’ve accumulated and finding out what I actually have.
My intent is to approach this pursuit as one part mindfulness exercise, one part sharing & repair economy enterprise.
What do we actually have?
What value has been languishing unnoticed in a hidden pile?
What can we use? What can others use?
What can we fix?
How did we get these things?
Why do we keep the things we keep?
Will this exercise make our lives better? More stressful? A little of both?
Day 1
Today I went through a couple of boxes I’ve been avoiding since I moved in with Mark. They were the leftovers from the moving sale we had at my house. This was the stuff we couldn’t even give away for free. (I went through some adjacent stuff too, but I started with the dread boxes.)
Items recovered:
- Various cleaning supplies, including rubber gloves I will need to clean our hard-water-stained toilet
- A few personal care items (dry shampoo, oil control serum)
- A few bottles / containers we can reuse in the kitchen or for travel toiletries
Items to jettison:
- Trash bag full of bubble wrap and a few opened but barely used personal care products to offer for free
- A couple of radio control toys to sell if they work or can be repaired
- Trash:
- A crusty sponge
- Personal care items in containers that did not seem recyclable by our provider
- A box of brittle, water-damaged compostable trash bags
Packaging designers should strike. Especially those who design packaging for personal care products. I cleaned out a few bottles that seemed like they could be recycled in our program (including a very weird steel canister of toothpaste), but personal care packaging is largely unrecyclable, even if the plastic polymers used to make the packaging technically are. Some reasons these items are hard to recycle:
- They’re difficult to empty. Because most products are in narrow-neck bottles instead of wide-neck jars, it’s very difficult to remove all of the product. Some containers are designed to not open at all except for a tiny hole (like the toothpaste canister).
- They’re made of mixed materials. The process of recycling depends on being able to separate different materials so they can be pelletized and used in manufacturing. Packages are often made of multiple materials that are difficult to separate. While each material may technically be recyclable on its own, if you can’t separate them, the package as a whole is unrecyclable.
- Many recycling companies focus their guidelines to customers on food and beverage packaging and don’t provide clear guidance on personal care packaging.
Packaging should be safe, clearly communicate what’s inside, and ideally let you see how much is left. Instead of focusing on practicality or circularity, packaging designers are tasked primarily with making products stand out on the retail shelf. There are some useful and functional examples of packaging out there, but very few that lend themselves to circularity or even to ease of recycling.
Cleaning products often have the same issues as personal care products in terms of their packaging. However, I’m finally almost out of the commercial cleaning products I bought years ago! Soon it will be just vinegar jugs for me!