Eco Lesbo Vego

We have a lot of glass jars. Like, a lot. Half a cabinet full. We haven’t thrown any glass jars out for about 18 months. Based on the fact that we use maybe one glass jar a week (pasta sauce, curry sauce, salsa etc), I think we’d have at least 52 jars sitting around the kitchen. That’s a pretty conservative estimate – there are probably more!

We use empty pasta sauce jars to store dried fruit, mushrooms and nuts.

So why do we keep them? Mostly because they’re such handy containers, and because we can’t bring ourselves to recycle them when there’s so many things they can be used for. You see, recycling is the third R for a reason – reduce and reuse come before it. You should only do it if you couldn’t manage without something (that is, couldn’t reduce) and once you’ve used it, you find yourself unable to reuse it anymore. Recycling (while better than landfills or creating new things) is energy intensive, creates pollution, and not everything can even be recycled. I’m not saying recycling is bad – it’s not – but it’s also not ideal.

We got these empty coffee jars on Freecycle and use them to store our tea

So we keep trying to reuse things as long and as much as we can. Especially jars, it seems. We even get all categorical and use particular jars for particular things. We use jars for:

• Storing nuts and dried fruits 
• Storing baking goods like cocoa, chocolate chips and coconut 
• Storing grains like polenta and barley 
• Storing food in the fridge, like pineapple chunks or pickles 
• Storing craft supplies, such as buttons, beads and cotton thread 
• Storing tea and tea bags – we Elves are a family of tea drinkers so we have a lot of different kinds 
• Storing tea bags in my drawer at work 
• Making and storing sauce and dressings – the best way to mix up a homemade sauce or dressing is to put it in a jar and shake it, and you can store it in there too 
• Containing picnic food – we go picnicking with nuts, dried fruits, pickles, pimento stuffed olives, fruit salad and other little snacks in jars, which don’t leak! 
• Giving – we fill up a clean, non-curry scented jar with lollies or chocolate covered sultanas, peanuts and scorched almonds and give them to people as gifts 
• Storing Yankee Elv’s OCM mix in the future (she just has to get some castor oil, then she’s starting that)
• Storing dog treats 
• Storing stationery – pencils, pens, thumb tacks, paper clips and so on
• Storing kitchen utensils on the benchtop (typically near the stove) – chopsticks, wooden spoons, tongs and so on
• Holding flowers 
• Holding water for Mr Pre-teen’s painting (he puts the lid on if he wants to walk around with it, which prevents spills… for this reason alone, jars are possibly the most awesome invention ever.

We store wooden kitchen utensils in empty Marshmallow Fluff jars

Essentially, we use jars wherever we can. And we still have half a cupboard of empty ones. So what are we going to use those for? Any ideas? Anyone need a jar or two?

Or eighty?