The glorious burden of stockpiling little glass jars

“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”

Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars.

Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling.

Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B ?”

When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.

More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”)

People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility.

The satisfaction of stashing

Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza , said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters.

And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”

Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores . She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”

“If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time.”

Monica Chavez, content creator, House of Esperanza

Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.

While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.

Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later.

Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.

“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science , told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”

Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirl...

Indexed and credited by AIPROPX. Originating outlet: Vox. Open at source →