Living with my wife for 14 years has taught me the value of “waste not, want not,” an adage I genuinely couldn’t make sense of in my youth.
It’s true I grew up with a father whose primary pet peeve was throwing away food, which makes good sense for a number of reasons: “there are starving children,” “money doesn’t grow on trees,” “if we weren’t going to eat it, why did we buy it?” My father’s exclamations were always understandable. But when the brussel sprouts are yellow, it’s time to admit you win some, you lose some. It was common enough to see my father rummaging through the refrigerator, testing the food with all the senses God gave man, and finally deciding, “Just pick IT off, or eat around it; it’s still good.” My mother and I would look at each other and think, We’re not eating that. But my father always would eat the questionable food…and he thought it was having four kids that gave him stomachaches.
My wife, on the other hand, will admit when food is bad (and grudgingly toss it), but she takes waste management to another echelon in other areas. Just the other day I got a new checkbook case that came with a plastic flap meant to stop carbon copies on other checks from transferring. But my checks don’t use carbon copies, and the flap was in the way, so I sliced it out. After years of being married to my wife, I knew better than to throw it out and asked her, “Do you want this?” She swiftly filed that plastic (and otherwise useless) flap away for safekeeping.* Had she declined it or thrown it out, she’s just the kind of person who, 20 years from now, would curse me or herself for throwing it out because she’d have some obscure but perfect use for it.
(*Note from wife: I DO have a perfect use for it. To stop pencil lead from transferring from my drawings to my hand, and visa versa.)
Over the years, I’ve come to not only share in my wife’s meticulous waste management but admire it. Today, you’d say we’re a couple of savers, not wasters, finding valuable uses for everything from scraps of fabric for sewing projects to old yogurt cups to store our dog’s monthly supply of homemade food. And what we can’t put to reuse, we recycle.
I’ve come to realize, though, that manufacturers don’t necessarily share our view of product control.
One of my wife’s biggest pet peeves (and mine) is the misuse of product packaging. You ever order Chinese take-out? Those restaurants know how to fill up the container. The boxes barely close over the bursting fried rice or Szechuan pork (and in some cases, stables are employed) and the bags are reinforced with cardboard box cutouts for extra support.
Ever buy vitamins?
The other day I was sent to the store with a list. On it was a bottle of Vitamin D. I searched the vitamin section for the best deal. Found a “buy 1 get 1 free” deal for 200 pills, totaling 400 pills for $12. Not bad. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized probably $10 of that $12 went to packaging. Turns out a Vitamin D pill is about the size of a BB. The bottle they came could hold about four fluid oz. The pills, all 200 of them, barely covered the bottom of the bottle. The darned bottle could have held 2,000 pills. Expectorants are similar, too, but a little different in terms of packaging waste. Whereas the pills fill up more of the bottle (about half), the box the bottle comes in is big enough for two bottles side by side, which begs two questions: Where’s the other bottle, and why package the bottle in a box in the first place?
Maybe it’s just because I work in newspapers that I can’t tolerate open spaces (open space in a newspaper is a very bad thing) other than outside, but every time I open a package and see the gaps, it drives me semi-batty. It’s like politics. It packages nicely but usually there’s a lot of air inside.
