Moving, Scaling Back

I'm moving at the end of this month. My new home will be considerably smaller and so my husband and I are forced to get rid of some of our stuff. A lot of the furniture and clothing and other still obviously useful items will go to Value Village. The trouble is, what do you do with things that have no obvious use anymore?

For example, I recently broke my laundry hamper's frame. This is a product made of metal tubes and held together at the corners by plastic corner pieces. I broke the plastic corners on two corners. Now I have a series of metal tubes, the bag, and a piece of mesh material. I can see keeping the bag, maybe. I thought about trying to repair it. New connections could be made from metal at my husband's shop, but this isn't ideal. I could look for new plastic connections or improvise something. If anybody reading this has any ideas, please do comment.

What do people do with old keys? The locks on my apartment building were recently changed and we were told we could just throw out our old keys. I'm pretty sure a thorough recycling program would mean these keys and the metal tubes from my laundry hamper would go to scrap somewhere. When I lived in Europe you could load your car up with various types of "garbage" - non-organic, that is - and take it to a recycling depot where your car was weighed before and after dumping and they would look after the details. Most North American cities aren't quite so efficient still. You could even recycle Styrofoam in my local community over there, and we had compost pick-up twice a week. (Regarding compost, my city here is still "weighing its options" (i.e. putting off spending money while ridiculous amounts of nutrients go to waste while global soil degradation has apparently reached catastrophic proportions).)

For now, my old keys remain on the key ring and my hamper lays in pieces in my storage room. Countless other little bits and pieces have already been thrown in the garbage, their only plausible home being the landfill. I never wanted to have this much "stuff," in the first place, and now it's a chore to get rid of it without feeling guilty.

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