MARICOPA COUNTY, AZ

Reducing our consumption of products is the best way to reduce our waste. Much of our waste comes from packaging of new products from food to bed sheets. Nearly everything we purchase is in a package.  Packaging is often recyclable and much of it ends up in a landfill. Look for products that don’t come in a package and recycle whatever packaging you can.

Reusing products and maximizing a products life span can prevent materials from going to waste, as well as reduce the demand for new products.

Items We Can Reuse In /Around Home

Canvas Bags

Get a canvas or cotton bag or use your backpack to carry your newly purchased goods such as groceries, clothes, cleaning supplies and toys, home.

Gift Paper

Reuse gift bags, boxes and large piece of wrapping paper or use paper bags or newspaper to wrap gifts in

Glass Jars

Reuse glass jars to store food items in your kitchen such as left over’s, or dry pasta noodles, or sugar.
Reuse glass jars for flower vases

Newspaper

Wrap gifts in this product, line your litter box or bird cage, or clean windows it.

Paper Bags

Wrap your strawberries or blueberries in a paper bag before storing in the fridge to preserve the quality of your fresh fruit. Canvas bags do the trick too. Save the bag and use it for more fruit at the store and canvas bags work best.
Wrap gifts or packages for mailing in paper bags.
Use paper bags as your trash can liner instead of plastic. If you are a one to three family home and recycling your weekly garbage should fit into a grocery store paper bag.
Make puppets out of smaller papers of other arts and crafts. Decorate and use to send party favors in or small gifts on birthdays or holidays.

Clothes

IN Good Condition: Donate clothes in good condition to nonprofits, someone else who can use them, a church or a charity like Domestic violence shelters. You can also resale them at a consignment store or garage sale and earn a little cash.
Business and Career Clothes – Dress for Success Phoenix
Prom Dresses

In Poor Condition: these are great for cleaning rags in and around the house. You can cut them up into smaller sizes for hand rags or leave them large for large rags.
T-Shirts and Blue Jeans are used for insulation
Cut out the good pieces of the clothing into different shapes and once you have a collected enough use the cloth pieces to make a quilt, blanket, pillow slip, etc.

Shoes

Nike-Reuse a Shoe program recycles old athletic shoes into rubber for tracks and playgrounds
Donate the ones in good condition to charities.

Plants/Trees

Post them for free on craigslist.org
Donate them to habitat for humanity
Give them to a friend or neighbor