Wasteful; wasted; wasteland; desolate; depleted; diminished; superfluous; worthless, exhausted; empty. In other words, Waste: something we no longer want or feel connected to, something we may have valued in the past but no longer value, something to be thrown away, to be made invisible. 

But is there another way?

Value is not the essential property of things. It’s what we give to them, what society gives them. Things wear out, we get bored of them, but they don’t necessarily lose their value, only their value to us. So, instead of simply discarding things when we’re done with them, could we creatively re-use them or even share their value with others?

In the July Sustainability issue, Eric Feinblatt and Rebekah Creshkoff pointed in this direction. Think, for example, of something common to all of us: food waste. It doesn’t take much effort to turn that waste into compost that naturally conditions our soil, helps it retain moisture, reduces water usage and runoff, and fertilizes our gardens and plants.  Or, adversely, we could send it to a landfill to emit toxic methane gas. Which makes more sense, has more value? Is it more balanced and transformative?

Of course, the best way to manage waste is not to create what will become waste in the first place. Easier said than done, for sure, especially if we live in a linear throwaway economy, which moves from raw materials to products to consumption to falling off that line into a final dead and deadly heap. But at what cost? Can we assume the Earth has an infinite capacity to absorb all our waste? 

Suppose instead, we think of our materials and products differently, as a circle, and everything that goes into that circle stays there, circulating. We only need to look out the window to see the best model of circularity ever created: our forests have no concept of waste. Together, the animals and plants of the forest create and use up each other’s waste in a perfect cycle. Why can’t we learn from them? 

Imagine being able to circulate our own things, locally, to people who can use them. No more falling off into the garbage for still use-able items. When your child outgrows his playmobiles, you can take them to the local swap shop and bring home the vintage soccer shirt she’s been asking for; off to the borrowing shop where they’ll loan you the reciprocating saw you need this week for that once-in-a-blue-moon project you’ve been putting off doing; and that lamp, which annoyingly no longer turns on, can take a trip to the local repair café for a quick fix by the retired electrician who’s there to help every other Tuesday. 

These may sound like pie-in-the-sky ideas, but they have their real-world models. Finger Lakes Reuse collects and sells, at low cost, everything that fills up our trash containers: building materials, furniture, tools, toys, books, clothing, electronics, you name it. They even have a job training and career pathway development program to help people gain the skills they need to find local employment. Or Berlin’s Leila Project, the “sharing economy” shop, in which neighbors can borrow anything from board games to wine glasses, fog machines to hiking rucksacks, juicers to unicycles because we don’t need to use most of our things all of the time—they just use up space—so why not share them with others and keep them centrally located? And Incredible Edible Milbridge, Women for Healthy Rural Living’s community garden and educational project that feeds on composted food waste and, in turn, feeds a local population in need by providing pick-your-own fruit and vegetables for free. 

But we don’t have to travel to the Finger Lakes or Berlin or Milbridge to get a whiff of that circularity because we have two repair cafés in our own backyard: in the Livingston Manor-Roscoe Library and the Repair Café Tusten in Narrowsburg.

Ulster County’s Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency is a few steps ahead of us but is a great place to begin to learn.  They are publishing a Reuse and Resource Directory, which connects Ulster residents with local organizations that help keep valuable materials—like food, furniture, clothing, and household goods—in circulation. “Whether you’re looking to donate things you no longer need or access local reuse services, the directory makes it easy to give, receive, and reduce your environmental impact. Every act of reuse helps conserve resources, prevent waste, and strengthen our community!”

An idea is all it takes. We spoke to the Callicoon Depot team about the number of outgrown toys we have stored away, and how much we would love another child to enjoy them. They jumped at the idea and are launching a community Holiday Season toy giveaway on December 7.

If we consider ourselves to be part of a system, we can imagine giving and taking and sharing as a community. As a community, we can decide what we have that we no longer need but someone else may. We can consider what we need that someone else can offer. When this simple exchange becomes a system, we have true circularity. 

Caroline Baillie is a professor of integrated engineering and the director of MESH at the University of San Diego.

Eric Feinblatt is a co-founder of Sustainable Sullivan.