Money Crashers: 5 Ways to Reuse Items to Save Money and Reduce Waste

Here's another Money Crashers piece on an environmental topic. This one didn't get published in time for Earth Day (or even Earth Week), but you could say it is sort of COVID-adjacent; according to the New York Times and Vox, the one-two punch of a pandemic coupled with a recession is encouraging lots of people to adopt new frugal habits that the green set has already been following for years. (Until I read the Vox piece, I literally did not know there were people who just threw out the ends of a loaf of bread rather than eating them.)

According to these articles, people reluctant to spend money and/or leave the house are becoming increasingly inclined to make the most of the stuff they have. They're rinsing and reusing bottles, Ziploc bags, and aluminum foil. They're putting the cut ends of scallions in water to regrow them (a trick I myself only learned a few years ago) and starting vegetable gardens.

So I guess this is the right cultural moment for this piece: 5 Ways to Reuse Items to Save Money and Reduce Waste. In it, I explore the five ways you can save money through reuse:

1. Replacing disposable items (e.g., water bottles or napkins) with reusable ones
2. Repairing damaged ones, from torn clothing to old cars, rather than replacing them
3. Shopping secondhand and/or swapping through sites like Freecycle
4. Taking part in the sharing economy, which lets you share anything from books to bikes
5. My personal favorite, creative reuse: putting waste materials to new uses, like blue-jean aprons and canning jar lamps

The articles in Vox and the New York Times aren't overly optimistic that these new frugal microtrends — the "novel frugality," as Vox calls it — will last long after the pandemic is over. But personally, I'd like to hope that maybe they can be not just a temporary blip, but the beginning of a long-term shift in behavior. After all, when this crisis is over, we'll still be facing an even bigger threat from global warming, and the more of these earth-friendly frugal habits we can hold onto, the better our chances are of surviving it.