Staring down a stack of canvas totes
A post about repurposing, and getting organized without organizers
There are a lot of canvas totes out there.
For years, clients and readers have asked me how to best organize their collections of reusable bags within their smaller homes. (Spoiler alert: Step #1 is to stop acquiring them in the first place.)
Despite the clusters of canvas pegged behind doors, shoved into car trunks, crammed inside closets, and spilling from entryway organizers, I still see a disturbing number of plastic “disposable” bags filling arms, carts and bins near our home in Florida, where plastic remains the default bagging option at checkout counters. What good are our environmentally-costly mountains of reusable totes if we don’t actually use them?
(Related post from France: Living with co-stewards in a lower waste community)
Sure, some shoppers really just don’t care about avoiding single-use plastics. But what if some folks fail to bring their totes along because of a minor storage hiccup? It is, after all, easier to look away from that precariously balanced pile of goods than to grab a bag from the middle of the unsteady stack during the juggling act on the way out the door. But even though storing somewhat bulkier items in a small space can pose a challenge, there are usually numerous clever and straightforward ways to put untapped space to improved use.
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