Day 23

 365 Day 23 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Oh, this picture represents a number of things.  I have sorted through my tool-box where useful items like wire nails and rawl plugs had multiplied beyond the call of duty: but the fruits of those labours really belong to a later day in the 365 chuck-out.  This photo logs a preliminary review of the tool box and a synthesis achieved between that and my Collection of Useful Containers.  I had stored some of the tool-box items (eg panel pins and picture hooks) in stout little home-made envelopes, but over time those had begun to show signs of wear and become less reliable as containers.  However I did also have some dear little tins and also some packaging items (like houmous pots) that I felt bad about throwing away.  It seems so awful that for a few mouthfuls of food we create a throw-away container of such lasting and substantial material.  Even where they can be recycled, long transport distances are involved – and when I say ‘long’ I don’t mean as in Sussex to Kent, I mean more like UK to China.  And the recycling, though an improvement on landfill sites, is still industrial process.  The optimum would be to create no packaging – but re-use is one better than re-cycling for such packaging as we do have.  So I kept some of the houmous pots hoping we might re-use them.  The envelope holders being in a terminal state, I added them to the kindling pile and drafted in the stashed houmous tubs – later, when I free-cycled many of the tool-box contents, I used up most of the saved food containers – some plastic boxes from take-out suppers, a yoghourt jar, etc – so that all the categories of nails and hooks were separately stored.

This picture of the two little envelopes is the record of a tranch of disposable (but not bio-degradable)containers that were saved, responsibly re-used and (crucially) left the house in the course of the 365 project.