Boxes Too Good to Toss

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Eddie_T

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Some nice sturdy cardboard boxes seem too good to toss. For example 40 lb cat litter boxes. They are made of strong cardboard and plastic grocery bags make good liners.
I cut the long flaps off and cut pieces of them to glue to the short flaps to stiffen them and hold them erect. to place the grocer bag loops on. They are handy in the garage and utility room for trash and food scraps. They could be painted if desired.

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We found a plastic trash can for $.99 at walmart that walmart bags fit perfectly when I tie a knot in the handle. We have not bought a garbage bag in 5 years. The girl bagging my stuff when she does a double bag I tell her good job that’s two bags I wont have to buy. The smaller bags force me to take it out to the can more often and that is also a good thing. We have 4 of them going all the time. Two bathrooms and two under the sink one for trash and one for paper. The paper we toss one tied up bag in the fire pit to get the campfire going.

I don’t throw anything out that I can use. Problem I’m having is she works out with cross fit and she eats this protein powder that comes in these nice one gallon brown jugs with big lids. Nicer than coffee cans for stuff. The trouble is I have ten lifetimes worth saved up.
 
@Bud, it's great that you're giving those plastic grocery bags one more use before they go to the landfill. We do the same thing, use them as liners in the bathroom and bedroom trash cans.

But those ones you're filling with paper and starting fires with...do you mean to say you're actually burning the bag? That would be pretty nasty. Fumes, residue, smell, pollution. Hope you're not also burning treated wood!
 
I burn all my paper trash in grocery bags. There is very little plastic in them. I have read that rocket stoves do a good job burning plastic with little pollution due to the high temperatures reached and no smoldering. Their use is being encouraged in third world countries. My only rocket stove is my Watchman grill and I will burn no plastic there. I may fashion one of sorts for trash burning.
 
When you drive your car you are burning trash bags. It’s all petrochemicals. Paper is wood plastic is oil. We burn regular paper and cardboard is all. The amount of plastic in one of those bags is like a speck.



Now treated wood should be saved for the smoker the whole idea of smoking is to preserve the meat. OK I’m kidding.

I just found a good use for used motor oil the other day. I have been doing battle with carpenter bees for years and they are trying to eat my wood carport. I filled my paint gun with oil and fogged the whole ceiling with a thin coating of oil. They were gone in a couple minutes and haven’t come back in a week.
 
You can also have them collected at a local recycling center if you want to minimize your carbon footprint but I like your idea about using the cardboard boxes as bedroom trash cans and liners for the bathroom.
 
@bud16415: I don't think it's a good comparison (though I guess if you wanted to make one, it'd be like running your engine just to listen to the radio...IF your gasoline wasn't a highly engineered product designed to be maximally safe, and your car's engine wasn't a highly engineered machine designed to burn that gasoline with maximal efficiency); it seems weird to me to burn plastic on purpose, even in small quantities, when you don't need to. I'd say the same thing if you were dumping gasoline on your fire like I saw my neighbor do last weekend. It's not your fault if you don't know how to build a fire properly (it seems a lot of men these days don't) but why not at least take the paper out of the bag first?

We have a "bag of bags" and when it gets too full we take it to the grocery store to be recycled, on our way to do the regular shopping so it's never out of the way. Just about any major chain grocery store has plastic bag recycling bins in the entrance, in my experience. The recycling process does involve heating the plastic but, to my knowledge, not burning it, and I'm pretty sure there is a stringent process around managing the fumes.

Anyway that's a cool idea with the used motor oil. I don't think I'd ever spray it all over a ceiling (because doesn't that make the ceiling gross if you need to touch it later? And also sorta sticky?) but I wonder if it could work well as a spot application.
 
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What gets me about the plastic bagless stores like Costco and Natural Grocers is I have to travel 20 miles round trip to the recycle center once a month to get rid of the cardboard boxes, or pay the recycle service to come get them, along with ONLY #1 and #2 plastic because China doesn't buy #3-#7.

As far as the topic, I use plastic 5 gallon buckets from Lowe's that were $2 or so 7 years ago. They will never need to be replaced.
 
... about the plastic bagless stores ...
Bring some cardboard boxes back to the store on your next shopping trip. If someone left a shopping cart in the middle of nowhere near where you parked, that would make it a little easier to bring the boxes into the store

Cut the tape seams and fold cardboard boxes flat for storage and future use. The remains of the seam tape, especially if plastic, hold new plastic packaging tape very well.

(If you are not into eBay and you accumulate cardboard too quickly, alas, you will have to dispose of many. But the boxes folded and stacked first are easier to transport.)
 
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I also use cardboard and sometimes plastic bottles to help light off my brush piles (less pollution than using old tires like the farmers do). Also keep some cardboard on hand for starting fire quickly in fireplace when power is out.

The most demonstrable impact of carbon footprint reduction is its direct relationship to thickness of the wallet.
 
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When you drive your car you are burning trash bags. It’s all petrochemicals. Paper is wood plastic is oil. We burn regular paper and cardboard is all.
Lots of pesticides are also made primarily from petrochemicals but that does not make them safe. Plastics and pesticides both have additives that make them much more toxic when burned. Burning of plastics releases dioxins, furans, and polychlorinated biphenyls (aka PCBs) into the atmosphere, and poses a threat to vegetation, and human and animal health.
 
If you have mostly cotton clothes and towels and need firestarter material, use a golf-ball-sized clump of laundry lint. I keep two large ziplocks of the stuff: one by my clothes dryer, one in my tinderbox. One bag fills up as the other depletes, then I switch them when the bag in my tinderbox is empty.

The most demonstrable impact of carbon footprint reduction is its direct relationship to thickness of the wallet.
I don't know if "carbon footprint reduction" is the right metric since I think more in terms of "reduce waste and noxious pollution" but I find that reducing [whatever it is] saves money and makes your wallet fatter. Case in point, my neighbor who must have poured about $10 worth of gas into his fire pit getting it started, vs. me who starts fires with free laundry lint and twigs I found lying around my yard.

Thus why I'm a fan stuff like at the top of this thread, repurposing an old sturdy box into a trash can rather than spending $20 on one at Home Depot.
 
I live pretty close to Drakes Well in Titusville Pa and it is not to hard to imagine a world without petrochemicals as the museum depicts the world before Drake discovered oil pretty well.



For all the bad things oil can be life without it wasn’t so great as well. The average lifespan and the quality of life and food supply and just about everything oil has touched.



We can go back to that if we want and if today’s people could handle working that hard and doing what it would take to feed ourselves.



A lot of the bad things a brought out but the efforts to keep us safe with the risks is never talked about

It is funny the discussion of starting fires was just brought up in another forum I belong to and the dryer lint thing was talked about. It seems oil based lint is the lint that really works best as a fire starter.
 
Yup, I think petrochemicals are great. Wouldn't want to go backward. But I don't think it's good to burn them in open fires for no good reason. Not knowing how to build a fire properly doesn't qualify as "a good reason".

Oil based lint..is that like from polyester clothes or something?
 
Yup, I think petrochemicals are great. Wouldn't want to go backward. But I don't think it's good to burn them in open fires for no good reason. Not knowing how to build a fire properly doesn't qualify as "a good reason".

Oil based lint..is that like from polyester clothes or something?
Correct.
 
Well I've never had trouble lighting cotton-based lint, in fact it's a well-known fire hazard as any clothes dryer instruction manual will stress repeatedly. So once again, if you can avoid burning petrochemicals in your fire pit you should.
 
When you drive your car you are burning trash bags. It’s all petrochemicals. Paper is wood plastic is oil. We burn regular paper and cardboard is all. The amount of plastic in one of those bags is like a speck.



Now treated wood should be saved for the smoker the whole idea of smoking is to preserve the meat. OK I’m kidding.

I just found a good use for used motor oil the other day. I have been doing battle with carpenter bees for years and they are trying to eat my wood carport. I filled my paint gun with oil and fogged the whole ceiling with a thin coating of oil. They were gone in a couple minutes and haven’t come back in a week.
And you could have just bought one of these. Best Carpenter Bee Trap They work amazingly well and eliminate all of the carpenter bees each season in about 1 week.
 
And you could have just bought one of these. Best Carpenter Bee Trap They work amazingly well and eliminate all of the carpenter bees each season in about 1 week.
I have an older, smaller one (about 5 years old) and I caught about four this year in May. That was it. No more carpenter bees since then. They seem to go the way of least resistance if they find a hole already bored into wood.
 
I have been filling carpenter bee holes with steel wool and plastic wood. I also found that a ⅜ dowel is a fit for their holes. But I have plenty of scrap wood so I am going to make a bee trap.

I had to laugh at this presentation on you tube. It was overkill all the way even to router rounded corners. But if you have the tools why not use them (and show the wife why you have the shop).
 

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