On the Utility of Things

Today, the word "utility" is likely to indicate a reference to one of the public utilities providing power, water, sewer services, etc.  I think (especially given the frequently erratic quality of these services) that it is easy to overlook the fact that the root meaning of the word "utility" pertains to "usefulness."  Thus, one might speak of the utility of a particular object.*

I bring this up because one of the most popular phrases from the mouths of hoarders (and everybody else, really; we are talking about a continuum here) is: "I [Someone] might be able to use this someday."  We keep things we may not need at the moment because we expect some future utility out of the object.  This expectation may be based on the fact that the item in question had some utility in the past that it may not have in the present.

Case in point, for me: small paper bags.  Somewhere along late elementary school, it was understood that one brought lunch to school in a paper bag, not in a lunchbox like the little kids.  You could buy a package of paper bags, but my family never did this.  We lived across the street from a small, family-run grocery store, the kind that everyone nowadays laments the disappearance of, and my mother, in between trips to the larger supermarket, would go to this store nearly daily for some small thing.  These small purchases were the source of my small paper bags for lunch, and I was conditioned to save them when shopping on my own.  I suppose this need for a lunch bag existed all the way through high school.

Since then, I have had very little need for these little bags.  Either I wasn't carrying food at all, or I just stuffed the items directly into whatever purse or backpack or messenger bag I was hauling around anyway.  A few years ago, I bought a couple of nylon, insulated bags that are what I regularly use to bring my lunch to work, like the other grownups.

Nevertheless, I continue to save small paper bags.  You see fewer and fewer of them these days, thanks to the nearly ubiquitous flimsy plastic bag, but they are out there, and they do add up if you accumulate just a few a year for, say, fifteen or twenty years. 

This little collection was faithfully moved here to my new house.  Their previous storage location does not have a direct equivalent in my new kitchen, forcing me to ask myself why they are here and whether I was going to find a new place to put them. I resolved to dump 90% of them into the recycling stream as soon as I figured out what category (cardboard?  paper?) they were in. 

Then I read this article that pointed out that you can pop any popcorn in a microwave, in an ordinary paper bag.  Huh.  I tried it and got quite a few grannies, but I think I just need to adjust time & temperature some more.  So, these nearly-doomed items have a new utility for me.  In the reduce-reuse-repurpose-recycle scheme of things, it's nice to recycle, but better to find an alternate use for things if you can, since recycling takes energy. 

Here, let me explain why I prefer the term "utilize" to "repurpose" - when I hear the term repurpose, it evokes images of advice to punch holes in coffee cans to make lanterns, or how to turn an empty tissue box into a recipe organizer/dog toy holder/silk flower vase(!)  Do not get me started on suggestions for empty toilet paper tubes.  Obviously, "repurpose" has alliteration going for it, and not all repurposing ideas are uninspiring and/or tacky, but for purposes of this blog, I'm mostly going to stick with "utilize" when I find something I can convert from clutter into something useful.

*Ironically, I do work at a public utility.  As every day of top-down corporate ass-covering brings us closer and closer to a full-time live-action version of the Dilbert universe, I do have trouble remembering that we are supposed to be providing a useful service.