Gardeners and growers are the original re-users & up-cyclers of this world and have been doing it for decades, just take a look at your local allotment and you’ll see what we mean.
It’s a place where waste and imagination have no limits and inventiveness knows no bounds.
It’s not waste it’s a resource. A Gardener’s reason for re-using and up-cycling have quite often been to save money because growing food is supposed to be cheaper than buying. But by being thrifty, it often leads you to become highly inventive, creating whatever you need out of your own, or anybody else’s, junk. It’s not necessarily a make do and mend approach either, more a statement of knowing:
Whatever it is I need, I just need to keep my eyes open for it and it will come to me in some form or other!
Gardening and growing food has this curious way of pushing us into a more sustainable way of living and puts us in touch with the cycles of the natural world. So it’s no wonder we start to think about re-using and up-cycling, it’s an inherent part of our being.
However, although we have increased our recycling and re-using rates, in Britain we still throw huge amounts of waste into landfill. The cost of this is staggering to our purse and the environment, so long term the more we can keep out of landfill the better it will be for our future and generations to come. Recycling is a great solution to our waste problems but it requires energy and resources to collect, sort and process unwanted items. So re-using and up-cycling is a much greener way of dealing with your waste and finding new purposes for your unwanted items. You know the saying…. One man’s rubbish is definitely another man’s booty.
