It all started with an underfunded art program in a Georgia public school… My art teacher probably had 100 students that she saw every day and it would’ve been impossible for her to purchase 100 paint palettes every time we wanted to paint, so we used styrofoam egg cartons…

My first payment for a mending job was a loaf of home-made sourdough bread. It was February 2021 when sourdough was at its peak, and still many months before I started my mending business…

Here’s how my story was born: A few months ago, I posted a busted coffee grinder for free on Craigslist. A woman named Cindy picked it up and said she'd fix it and give it back to me if I'd like. I was dubious. I'd already tried to fix it, and so had my engineer husband. We'd failed.

January is the month for taking stock of where we are and where we want to go in the new year (and we hosted a Reuse Roundtable on research last week…)  So we thought we would start off 2024 by sharing some reports documenting progress in the reuse marketplace in the past year. 

It will take many hands to shift our world towards reuse, to create a place that values our resources and uses them wisely and over and over until they wear out completely. You can’t get a lot for $5 these days, but you can make a monthly contribution to Reuse Alliance and make a big difference.

Have you ever bitten your tongue at the Thanksgiving dinner table as the conversation turned to holiday shopping? One solution is to avoid “difficult” subjects over the holidays. But a good conversation is an alternative to no conversation…

“The lightbulb moments are the ones we truly cherish. Watching a first-time customer slowly walk through our store, in awe of all of the low-waste products and refill opportunities, I can see her thinking about what containers she has at home to bring in and reuse.”

How scary? Imagine this: an estimated 7 million Halloween costumes are thrown away annually in the UK (according to this survey), where Halloween spending is around $850 million. In the US, estimated spending on Halloween is set to hit a record $10.1 billion, so it’s likely that 12 times as many costumes will be thrown out this November in the US! Can you visualize 84 million Halloween costumes going to landfills? And 83% of them are polyester (plastic)! Yikes!

Susan Chainey tells the story of her first visit to a Repair Fair.

The new Executive Director of Reuse Alliance, Phoebe Schenker, shares the many reasons to love reuse, and some plans for the future of Reuse News.