Reuse Quotes

“A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.”
― Gloria Ng, Cloth Diapering Made Easy

“You mustn’t throw them away. Let me have them.”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“A maid’s yard, house, wardrobe, fridge, etc. sometimes also serve as her master’s dustbin or dumpsite.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith's trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones - and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“We can't achieve zero waste without reuse.”
― MaryEllen Etienne

“Reuse is the original green collar job.”
― MaryEllen Etienne

“She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalahari Typing School for Men

“Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York.
This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage”
― Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City

“We all have a massive transition to make.’
A massive – and I hope a joyful – transition.”
― Isabel Losada, The Joyful Environmentalist

“I’ll eventually replace my charity clothes with things I’ll buy for myself, but not until I’ve worn them through.”
― Jennifer Cody, The Trouble with Trying to Date a Murderer