Reader Sky submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:
I know I should recycle, and I donate unwanted things to a local charity on a regular basis. Sometimes just tossing something in the garbage is easier, but I feel guilty doing that. So clutter “hangs around” until I can dispose of it “correctly.” Can you help? I feel like I’m using my desire to recycle as an excuse to keep stuff.
Deciding exactly how to purge your clutter can be a difficult process. Do you trash it, recycle it at a recycling center, recycle it by repurposing it into something more useful, sell it, or donate the item to charity or to someone you know who wants it? And, like you suggested in your question, recycling, repurposing, donating, and selling items can be an excuse to hold onto clutter if you’re never actually following through and recycling, repurposing, donating, or selling the items.
I try to use the following guidelines when purging items:
- Trash the trash. If something is trash, it should be trashed. You can compost the environmentally friendly items, but if a product needs to go to the dump, by all means take it to the dump. And, if something is a hazardous material, be sure to take it to your county’s hazardous waste facility. Trash is clutter and you shouldn’t hold onto it a minute longer than necessary.
- Recycle what can be recycled, but do it now. People who live in city’s with curbside recycling pick up have it the easiest — put your recycling on the curb and be done with your aluminum, glass, paper, and plastic products. If you don’t have curbside pickup in your area (or have larger items, like steel beams) you’ll need to drive to the closest recycling center to make deposits. I recommend incorporating this errand into your weekly schedule so the recycling never builds up beyond seven days. For other recyclable items that aren’t accepted at most recycling centers — eye glasses, electronics, clothing for rags — only recycle these items IF you’ll recycle them in the next seven days. If a week passes and the items are still lingering, trash them. Schedule the recycling action items on your calendar (research to find where you can recycle the item, boxing and shipping of the item or dropping it off), as well as the deadline for trashing the item if you fail to recycle it.
- Only sell, repurpose, or give an item to a friend if you do it now. You can sell, repurpose, or give an item to a friend, but only do this if you’re actually going to follow through on the action. Similar to recycling, schedule the action items on your calendar and a deadline (I give myself two weeks) for when it will be out of your house. If it has been two weeks and you still haven’t rid your home of the objects, trash them.
- Only give good items to charity. As Peter Walsh so aptly stated in his book It’s All Too Much:
Goodwill receives a billion pounds of clothing every year. Ultimately, they use less than half of the clothes they get. Clothing is cheap, and the cost of sorting, cleaning, storing, and transporting the clothes is higher than their value. If you wouldn’t give an article to a family member, it’s probably not good enough for charity. Sure, it’s great to get the tax deduction and it makes you feel like you didn’t waste money buying the clothes, but if you’re truly charitable, be sensitive to the needs of the organization. Charities aren’t dumping grounds for your trash.
Like the two items before this one, set a specific time on your calendar to take your good items to charity (maybe make a regular errand for charity donations on the 1 and 15 of each month). If the charitable donations are still lingering around your house two weeks later, throw them in the trash.
In short, if clutter sits in your home for more than a week or two after you’ve decided to purge it, you should trash the item. It seems like a harsh statement, but the short deadline is usually enough motivation to get you to handle the items quickly and in the preferred manner (recycle, repurpose, donate to charity, etc.). If you know you’ve set a firm deadline for yourself, clutter won’t hang out in your space because you’ll actually deal with it.
Thank you, Sky, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Be sure to check out the comments for even more suggestions from our readers, and good luck!
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