Thrift Week 2019, Day 3: Silicone lids

One disposable product we had a bit of trouble figuring out how to replace in our kitchen was plastic wrap. When we can, naturally, we use reusable containers that come with their own lids, but the problem is that the lids always wear out faster than the containers. So if we wanted to go on using them, we needed some other way of covering them, such as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. (We've tried covering them with a reused plastic bag, but it needs something to secure it, and some of the containers are too large to stretch a rubber band around.)

The solution came to us as a gift—or rather a couple of different gifts from different people over the course of a couple of years. It's a set of silicone lids that stretch to cover a container, then cling to the sides and hold themselves in place, just like plastic wrap. 

As you can see in this picture, we have one set of clear plastic lids and one set of multiple colors. The largest and second-largest of the clear ones can cover the smallest and second-smallest of our enameled metal bowls, which lost their lids to wear long ago, so we can now use them for transporting food as well as for mixing.

The smaller, colorful ones can fit cans of different sizes, so if you've used only part of the contents, you can just cover up the rest and store it in the fridge instead of having to transfer it to another container. The smallest lid from the clear set can also serve this purpose, as you can see here with a can of pumpkin we keep in the fridge as cat food. (Our kitties mainly eat dry food, but a little pumpkin every day is supposed to help their digestion, and they seem to look on it as a treat.)

None of the lids from either set was quite large enough to fit our biggest metal bowl, so we picked up the extra-large purple one for that purpose at Kitchen Kapers. This was the only one we bought ourselves, and it cost somewhere around ten bucks; however, you can buy sets of them for much less at cheaper stores. A quick search just now turned up a set of six different sizes at Walmart for only $12, and a similar set on Groupon is marked down to a mere $6.


Now, I'll admit, these reusable lids aren't completely idiot-proof. It takes a bit of force to stretch them over the rim of your container, and you have to make sure you've managed to get them stuck down securely so they don't just slip and pop right back off again. But then, plastic wrap has problems of its own, often seeming to deliberately cling to itself, your hands, and everything else except the sides of the bowl you're trying to cover. So I would say, on the whole, these lids are no harder to use, and they can take the place of whole rolls of plastic wrap. I can't speak to how long they last, since we've only had them for a couple of years. But I can say that in the time we've been using them, they've shown no signs of wearing out or losing their suppleness.

These lids probably aren't saving us a huge amount of money, since we never were in the habit of using plastic wrap all that often to begin with. But it pleases me every time I use them and know I'm not putting any disposable junk into the waste stream. Plus, if the Daily Mail is to be believed, they're protecting us from a whole host of toxins.