a ramble on reuse

A chair made of an old wooden frame and a used sack. It's comfy, I sat in for a bit.

Reuse is very nice. It's my second favorite R, next to Reduce. You give a product a new shot at life, not wasting its embodied energy. Let's talk about reusing everyday stuff.

We're familiar with this. When printing stuff, it's not uncommon to go "ay, mali!!", flip the paper over, and use the other side. We reuse mineral water bottles, though apparently there are health risks. (Occasionally, someone on the street will think about the environment, take the liberty to refill a beverage bottle, and sell it to us as a new one.)

This is common-- maxing out the useful life of a product that is intended to be fairly disposable (what isn't these days), using it more or less for its original purpose. This is the best kind of reusing, as it results in a reduction of overall waste. Gets? I'm rejecting something (like packaging, for example), because I brought my own, thank you very much. Buying secondhand stuff is also a form of reuse.


I bring water around in a glass bottle. It doesn't make that annoying pisat sound, and you can leave it by a hot sunny window and not fear melted plastic. The only drawback is that people on the street think I am an alcoholic.

Other times, we reuse an item in ways very different from the original intended purpose. We've seen it all over the Philippines-- tires becoming flower pots, slippers becoming doormats, bottles becoming hanging plant containers, juice packs becoming bags, plastic cups becoming art sculptures, plastic cups becoming fiesta decorations, tarpaulins becoming tricycle mudguards, basketball stars becoming actors, actors becoming presidents... the list is endless.


Bags out of juice packs.

This is often good, because when you reuse something, you keep it out of the waste stream. It benefits us only because so many of the things we make (like plastic bags, plastic sheets, and more plastic things) are dead-end products. They have no acceptable "death" that won't make us (or the environment) sick. This is totally contrary to the natural world, where there is no such thing as waste, and keeping something out of the waste steam means losing a chance to fertilize the soil.

In other words, when we use these things, we keep them out of landfills or piles of burning basura. The questions therefore is, how long until we figure out what to do with them? What happens when you are tired of people making fun of you for wearing a hat made of Zesto packs? What happens when a jeep whose seats are stuffed with Stork wrappers meets the end of its useful life?

In one more possible instance, reusing products can actually affect the waste situation in a negative way. This usually happens when you are keeping something out of the recycling stream.

For instance, I was once in a composting seminar in the States, and the lady told us to put everything in your compost pit: phone bills, phone books, old love letters, newspapers, everything! Years later, after sharing this incident with a fellow composting Filipino, I got a stern counterprescription. "Ibigay mo na sa mga recycler yan. Pararamihin mo lang yung pinuputol na puno,", he said. "Kung gusto mong carbon sa compost mo, dahon na lang ang gamitin mo."

So, if stuff can be recycled, or if destroying them can result in even more consumption of materials, don't reuse them. For example, you smash a jar in just so you can tie broken glass to your kite and kitefight (as the kids here do). Your mom then has to go out to Divisoria to buy a new glass container for her homemade burong mangga.

Even if the bubog magically ends up being recycled (and it probably won't), we'll still need additional energy to transport it to the factory, wash the pieces, make new glass with it, and distribute it to consumers. Add to this the energy your mom spends going to Divisoria. So, although glass (unlike paper and plastic) is one of the few materials that doesn't suffer from degradation when recycled, you could have just not broken it, and caused any more energy expenditure or consternation, you naughty boy!

Here's another example. This man is making plastic decorations out of old soft drink bottles (with flowers made of old straws). Just a pity to think that if he were alive two hundred years ago or in another place, he would not be scavenging around for bottles and straws, but using readily available renewable plant resources.


I have his contact details, if you want them.

While he is proving himself to be an amazingly creative person, he is actually keeping the bottles from being recycled. In a sense, he is "trapping" the material in a certain state, when it would actually be most useful as input for a new bottle. As a result, more plastic will have to be created.

Creating softdrink bottles requires importing a lot of resins, sheets, and etc. The production process itself creates a lot of industrial waste, of which only around 10% is recycled back in. Recycling requires a mix of both "virgin" and recovered material.


Probably out of a Pepsi bottle.

True, it is probably better to make a softdrink bottle into an ornament, rather than a repository for cigarette butts in your dorm room. And true, the man doesn't probably even register as a blip in the whole materials scene. But please nobody take his business model and go crazy with it.


Probably out of a Sprite bottle.

While it's fun, buying re-fashioned materials made of trash may not always be the best thing to do (especially if they are non-biodegradable at the end of their useful life). It only draws our attention away from the scandalous fact that some companies are allowed to make and distribute products that don't break down in nature. In a way, it helps keep us from realizing the true extent of our waste problem.

Furthermore, people's livelihoods become dependent on resources that aren't even supposed to be around in the first place. It gives birth to business models that rely on the continued production of trash. At best, it's a stop-gap measure.

Reduction pa rin.