Thrift Week 2026, Day 4: How to Recycle Razors and Razor Blades

About four years ago, I gave up on cartridge razors and switched to a safety razor. After some unsuccessful experiments with a cheap one from Target, I bit the bullet and invested in a Twig from Leaf Shave. It cost quite a lot up front, but I'm hoping it will be a lifelong investment, unlike the various cartridge razors I've owned and been forced to discard after a few years of use—either because they broke or because they went off the market and it was no longer possible to buy replacement heads for them. Since it takes single-edged razor blades (which you can make by breaking standard double-edged blades in half), and since my frugal shaving hacks give me at least a month of use out of each blade, it's costing me less than 2 cents per shave. And when those blades finally wear out, all I have to discard is a tiny strip of metal, rather than a whole chunk of plastic.

 

However, I'd rather not discard even that much if I don't have to. So, ever since I made the switch to a safety razor, I've been saving the used blades in an empty candy tin, planning to take them to a scrap metal recycler when the tin got full. The one I initially found in Edison appears to have gone out of business, but a new search for "scrap metal" on Earth911 steered me toward a place in New Brunswick that might be able to take them. However, since the site says only that it takes metal scraps and doesn't specifically mention razor blades, I'm a bit concerned that they wouldn't take them. It seems like they should be able to take the entire steel tin full of blades and treat it as a single lump of metal, but maybe it doesn't work that way.

 

So I'm now thinking it might be a safer bet to recycle my blades through the Gillette recycling program. It takes blades and razors from all brands, and you can drop them off at any public collection site. According to the map on the website, there's one in Princeton that we could easily swing by before dance practice, so we wouldn't even have to make a special trip. Better still, this site takes not just blades but complete razors as well, so I could also use it to get rid of the unused cartridges and the orphaned handle from my last two failed cartridge razors, as well. I'd been thinking it was dumb of me to keep holding onto them "just in case," but now it's actually paid off!