Reduce. Reuse. Recycle

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Reduce. Reuse. Recycle

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, February 18, 2008

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Ever since I wrote a story about Eric Smith last week, I’ve been thinking about something he said. He said, “People don’t hang on to their stuff anymore. If it’s damaged, they throw it away and get new stuff. People don’t want to fix things anymore.”

The motto for Angleton’s new recycling program (which is doing so well they ran out of packages of blue bags, but don’t worry, they’re getting more) is “Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.”

Reduce is easy to understand—You can help the world by reducing the amount of packaging in products you buy, by reducing the amount of trash your household generates, by reducing the chemicals you put in your yard (they enter the watershed with every rain, and go where they’re not wanted). Reduce is easy.

Recycle is easy, too. The least we can do is to take part in the city’s program, which will reduce the amount of matter that has to go into the landfill. There’s always more you can do, but that’s a good start.

Reuse, though—What’s it mean to you? I reuse the usual things—coffee cans hold flour, sugar and other pantry supplies, as well as making good cookie jars; I’ve already described here my experiments with forming soap slivers into useable bars again; plastic bags from stores (which have been singled out in recent news stories as some of the worst offenders in landfills because they don’t biodegrade very quickly) can be recycled, used again or disassembled—if you cut them into strips and link the strips together until you have a giant ball, you can use a big crochet hook to make cushy little plastic rugs that are excellent for the bath, or for cats’ sleeping pleasure.

But I never really thought about the things we throw away, instead of fixing. People used to have their shoes repaired. They used to darn socks and stitch up torn or worn clothing.
They used to have their furniture repaired or recovered, which is what Eric Smith was talking about.

There was a time when newly married couple actually waited and saved to buy their furniture, because it was a major investment. Typically when they married, they got some pieces from their parents, but they put a lot of time and thought into buying their own furniture: They were going to use it all their lives, then give it to their children.

Now, most people I know buy what they can afford, and what we can afford isn’t generally heirloom-quality. You don’t repair molded-composite bookshelves, you put them on the curb.

It’s the same with shoes—I own a couple of pairs of shoes that I will have repaired when they start coming apart. They were expensive, and they’re well-made. But the vast majority of my footwear is cheap, which means they’re glued together, not sewn. Which means that when they get wet they come unglued, in varying degrees. Sometimes they actually come apart. Sometimes they just make funny noises. I once had a cheap pair of loafers that quacked like a duck for a whole day if I stepped in a puddle in them.

I am saddened by the transitory nature of my stuff, but I don’t know what can be done about it. I can’t swear off cheap shoes, unless I take out a mortgage on our house to finance expensive ones. And we’re never going to have nice furniture, because the Last Homely House is always full of dogs and cats and kids.