Creative Recycling

Choosing to be frugal often means tapping into our creative selves to find ways to meet our needs and solve problems in original, creative ways without spending much money or any money at all. It involves using the resources that we have readily available to us and recycling and refashioning them into objects that meet our needs and solve our problems.

A few years ago I needed a new way to store my clothes pegs. Up until that time, they had been stored in a sturdy plastic bag and pegged to the clothes horse. This had worked out fine for years, but as we had finally moved out of our apartment and into a house that had an actual clothes line for the first time in years, I wanted something more durable and user friendly. After letting it stew for a while this is what I came up with.

The empty cordial bottle is the perfect size to fit my pegs and so convenient. The plastic is very stury, especially the handle. I cut the handle so that I could hang it on the line, and punched holes in the bottom so that it can drain in the rain. The first one lasted two years before the plastic broke down and fell apart. If I brought it in out of the weather rather than leaving it in the rain, and hung it on the shelf in the laundry, it would have lasted a lot longer.

Of course, it’s a little plain and boring. The last one I made, I peeled the labels off, but this time I just needed functional in a hurry. If you wanted to make it look better, a bit of paint would jazz the peg basket up or if you kept it inside out of the rain, then you could use coloured papers, fabrics etc to decorate it to your liking.

The great thing about this solution is that it is free. It cost me nothing to create a functional peg basket to last me years, and it only took a few minutes to cut the bottle into the shape that I needed with a pair of kitchen scissors. Better yet, that is one less thing to end up into landfill, the bottle has been recycled and I haven’t purchased more plastic in the form of a commercial peg basket, that will also end up in landfill.

Please feel free to leave a comment or a question.