Chatterbox: In This Month's Issue

Old Cricket Says 

Nowadays we recycle to reduce the material sent to landfills and to save major resources. But during the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, people recycled because they needed to. Without much money coming in, family members did what they could to reduce expenses. They reused what they had, even saving bacon grease to make soap. My friend Ruth Kelley told me that her grandmother often said, “Waste not, want not.”

Families who were lucky enough to have a few chickens, a goat, or a pig recycled their kitchen garbage into animal feed and fertilizer for the vegetable garden. String that came on packages was saved to be used again. Sometimes strips of cloth cut from worn-out or outgrown cotton clothes were sewn together and crocheted into rag rugs. The usable part along the sides of old sheets was dyed and recycled to make a colorful rug border.

Flour came in large cotton sacks, which were recycled into dish towels or made into clothing. Many people sewed dresses and other clothing at home because making things was cheaper than buying them. The scraps of material left after cutting out dress patterns weren’t thrown out, either. They were sewn together into quilts! Cloth diapers were washed and used over and over. When they finally wore out, they made fine dust rags. Milk bottles, too, were sanitized by the dairy and reused. These one-quart glass bottles had two parts. Two or three inches down from the top, the bottle narrowed. Milk back then was not homogenized, so the cream rose to the top, above the narrow part. It could be skimmed off and used on cereal or in coffee. Since mot people were making do with iceboxes, not refrigerators, the milk or cream sometimes soured, but instead of throwing it out, it was used to make delicious cakes and cookies. So “Waste not, want not” sometimes meant “East well, yum!”

What do you recycle?