Reuse

From my personal experience, I find REUSE is a green art.  Just try to rethink, waste can no longer be a waste, and can be given a useful life again.  In September 2000, I joined a workshop organized by Green Power for the kindergarten teachers.  They were given a wide variety of so-called rubbish, like newspaper, plastic bottle, cardboard, drinks container, toilet paper roll, plastic foam and plastic bag, and were asked to design a new useful thing.  So amazingly, every group did make some very interesting final products, like stationery, plant pot, set of tea pot and cup, drawing stand for kids, and even musical instrument.  It strongly reveals that REUSE of waste is possible and can be very funny.

Design of waste into a useful thing may need some time to work out.  In daily life, we may not have so much time to do such art.  But it does not imply that REUSE of waste is not feasible.  We may not need to redesign the function of waste.  We can just stick on the original function of the waste, and try to reuse it as many times as possible so as to extend its life as long as we can.  Plastic bottle is a good example.  We do not need to throw it away immediately after finishing the drink.  The bottle can be used as water container in our daily life.  If the bottle is glass, it can definitely be reused without any processing.  Just refilling the bottle, a new drink can be sold again, like Vita soya-bean milk and Coke.  So if you can resell the bottle to the retailer, then to the manufacturer, after finishing the drink every time, you have already helped on extending the life of that bottle, and avoiding an extra exploitation of resources from our environment to produce a new bottle. 

Another example is plastic bag.  A used plastic bag can actually be reused again, as long as it is not broken.  So for those who desperately want newspaper bag can keep the one today and use it again tomorrow and day after day.  Then, an abundant amount of plastic bag will be saved everyday.

One more common example is gift box.  For wrapping gift, gift box is sometimes unavoidable.  If we throw the box away, it will be quite wasteful.  Indeed, the box can be reused as a memo-pad box or other stationery box.  It will be a good decoration for your working desk.  X'mas is becoming soon.  When opening gift, let's stop for a few seconds and think how to REUSE the wrapping materials before throwing them away.