You wake up in the morning, groggy.  Were you really dreaming about a world without waste?  Such a nice dream.  It’s cozy in the bed and you don’t want to get up, but life calls.  To stay in bed, keep reading. To get up, skip to paragraph 3.

As the biggest shopping day of the year approaches once again, here is a shopping guide fully in line with our mission of promoting reuse (and featuring some of our favorite reuse enterprises). 

From the Foodie to the Techie to the Clotheshorse we’ve reuse ideas for everyone in your life.

A lot of people stop by Mannequin Madness in Oakland, CA this time of year, looking for body parts…

When Lela Means and Christina Gilyutin thought up Strange Exchange, it was about the stuff. But it didn’t take long to realize they were tapping into something bigger than merely stuff.

Samantha Nunez had never seen the inside of a computer before Sam Berg, Computer Science Coordinator for the Oakland Unified School District, hired her to oversee student interns in the OUSD tech repair program three years ago.

I stand at the kitchen trash can overthinking what to do with my garbage, while my husband endearingly performs his rendition of Jerry Seinfeld's comedy routine - "all things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage." I need to hear this to snap out of my guilt trance and literally let it go - whatever I'm holding - into the bin.

Humans are storytellers. Passing information around is how we stay connected. But what makes a story go viral? Sometimes it has social capital (being in the know about something cool makes you seem cool) or practical value (news you can use!). The 2024 Reuse Awareness Campaign checks both these boxes.

In 1972, an anxious bunch of outdoorspeople arrived at a Southern California parking lot at 6 a.m. hoping to spend the day buying and selling used outdoor gear. They shared coffee in the early morning hours as they waited. The Mother’s Day swap meets organized by outdoor retailer Adventure16 quickly became annual affairs.

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.