Reinvent Yourself: REUSING BEATS RECYCLING

McCormick's Sea Salt Grinder

I love McCormick's Sea Salt Grinder.

It's a pricey little bottle, but man, I love a coursely-ground salt sprinkled on salads, over popcorn, or on the baked potatoes (& broccoli) I've started to enjoy.

Yep. I've purchased a fair number of these little bottles over the years.

And always, when I'm finished with the product, I'm faced with something of a dilemma. How do I recycle the thing? It's glass and plastic. Is there a way to get the grinding cap off? It's not an easy task to do by hand. In fact, I'd already decided that it was impossible.

So this evening, as I was gathering up my recyclables, I decided I'd better find an answer to these questions for the sake of "proper" recycling.

And then it hit me! 

Why the heck was I taking another McCormick Sea Salt Grinder to the curb?

Market District Cypriot Sea Salt

Earlier in the month, I'd taken a chance and purchased some Market District Cypriot Flake Salt. I didn't notice it at the time of purchase, but when I got home I realized: it didn't have a grinder! It was difficult to hand-grind its hardened flakes to the consistency I prefer. And I had already regretted switching from my beloved McCormick's.

But you have to understand. The Giant Eagle Market District Cypriot Flake Salt looked so intriguing. It was crystalline & beautiful & exotic-sounding! ha So I took a chance, grabbed it off the shelf and didn't notice the lack of built-in grinder until it was too late.

Then thankfully tonight, the light finally went off.

Why not figure out a way to reuse the McCormick grinder with the Cypriot Flake Salt?

It'd save me a whole lot of hassle.

After a quick internet search, I found a very helpful page on how to remove the McCormick Sea Salt Grinder for proper reuse:

here's the link:  How to Reuse a McCormick Sea Salt Grinder

And it worked perfectly! (Click the link for DynoChick's (Jan's) technique.)

Which leads me to the real point(s) of my post: 

(1) I saved money ($3)

(2) by reusing a product (a salt grinder)

(3) that I've not only purchased many times already (??)

(4) but then always just mindlessly set it at the curb for someone else to recycle.

Yes. I know it's just a silly salt shaker. (With a super-sweet grinder!)

I know this doesn't change the world.

But how many other items are we throwing away or recycling at the curb that we could just easily reuse ourselves?

Could you save yourself more money than I did by retooling (and/or thinking of new ways to reuse) common items?

Give it some thought. The internet is a great resource for finding new ways to look at our old ways.

Perhaps next time, before we take the recyclables to the curb, we could do a quick search on Google to see if there's something cool we could do with them instead: 

"How to reuse a pop can"

"How to reuse newspaper"

Maybe we'll discover other useful, fairly obvious ways to reuse our junk without relying on someone else to do it for us.

We'll cut out the middle man. Keep more money in our pockets. And make less trips to the curb. ha

If you know of any great ways to reuse a product (especially the ones I keep buying over and over again! ack!) please let me know ASAP!

Thanks for letting me ramble. I feel better.

GTO