I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability lately. With all the chaos of the world I’m trying to pick just a couple of things to care about so that I don’t burn myself out. For now I’ve settled on environment. I do trash walks in my neighborhood and local parks. I’ve been putting more effort into creating an eco-friendly garden. And I’ve been looking for interesting ways to repurpose our trash into arts and crafts.

This last is not a new idea to me of course. There was a time when my husband and I cleaned and shredded our plastics, hoping to use the sandwhich press we bought for the occasion to create new things out of HDPE plastic (the kind that milk jugs are made of). We stored that shredded plastic in large bins that we never did anything with and then one day we needed more space and decided to just toss it all. No one had responded to my Marketplace listing about the shredded plastic, so off to some landfill it went! The shredded nature of the plastic meant that we couldn’t put it in our recycling bin and I have a sneaking suspicion that our neighborhood doesn’t actually recycle anyway since all the recyclables go into the same compactor garbage truck with no sorting.

While plastic is probably the worst offender, it’s also the most high maintenance in terms of reusing for arts and crafts so I’ve turned my attention to paper and cardboard, and textiles. The paper and cardboard goes into collages and decorations and toys for the kids and all sorts of things. The textiles are a bit harder. For years I’ve been collecting a pile on the floor of my closet of clothes I will not be wearing again. I kept going back and forth on how much effort to put into this pile. Do I alter these clothes and wear them? Do I use them for fabric scraps for a handful of projects? Do I just donate it all and have someone else deal with it?

Considering that most donated clothes end up in the garbage, that last one never sat right with me, so the pile continued to grow and languish. Recently I was on a cleaning binge and finally bagged up the pile with the intent to donate all the clothes. I’m constantly balancing the tightrope of reducing and reusing, and “I don’t have to save every scrap that comes through my home.” It’s a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I want to do my part for the environment (I’m not going to dwell on the whole, individual actions don’t make much of an impact thing here) but I’m also trying to live a life that isn’t full of garbage that I barely can make time to process, let a lone use or store somewhere.

In terms of textiles I finally settled on this: I sorted through the clothes to find anything that somebody would actually want to wear. These are the things that are made of nice fabrics, are clean and unbroken. Those went into one pile (to sell or donate, still on the fence about that). The rest went into the trash pile. These are all the socks and shoddy t shirts. This trash pile will be repurposed for various projects, including t shirt quilts, patches, banners, etc. My current project is to tackle the socks. Donated socks and underwear always end up in the trash. Considering the sheer amount of socks we were trying to get rid of, I figured I better figure out a way to use them so that they don’t take up an inordinate amount of space in a landfill somewhere.

Remember: everything you have ever owned or touched still exists somewhere on this planet.

Isn’t that kind of a crazy thought? Everything you’ve ever broken and thrown away still exists, likely still mostly recognizable. Just in a landfill somewhere, polluting our home.

I didn’t want this for all those socks (even if they did come from my mother-in-law) so I shredded them all and started working on a braided coil rug.

Now, given that I’m not an expert at coil rugs, the thing is wonky and uneven and keeps curling up weird, but you know what? I love it anyway. It’s got charm. And I’m putting all these socks to good use. The braiding and all the sewing involved is my favorite kind of hobby: meditative. It’s relaxing to just sit in the quiet and slowly but surely make this rug larger and larger. If I’m lucky I’ll figure out how to flatten the thing out, but for now I’m not terribly concerned.

Obviously I get that I can’t tackled the entire worlds surplus trash sock problem. But I’m trying to make something beautiful out of something that would otherwise be taking up space in a landfill somewhere, contributing to a worse environment that my children will one day inherit. So instead, they will inherit this sock rug. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Maybe they won’t. But I hope they’ll at least repurpose it or give it to someone that has a similar style.

This is my tiny contribution.