Japan's Mottainai - "What a Waste"

I was trained to be a recycler long before it was a "thing". My parents grew up during the war in Germany and my mother in particular didn't let anything go to waste. We kept and reused old jars, bits of string, bent nails (to be straightened later), boxes, paper bags, rubber bands, wrapping paper and Christmas tinsel. Nothing was wasted. And while it might sound like we could have been hoarders, we weren't. That strong German streak meant everything we reused was incredibly well organized and easy to find.

That early training has stuck with me and I still keep the sturdy rubber bands that encircle broccoli!

We have a big cardboard box in the closet which contains a number of smaller boxes... ready to hand when we want to mail something.

A childhood Christmas tree

We have a little cache of paper bags in the hall closet. Ready for any purpose requiring a paper bag...

And while we don't keep wrapping paper anymore... I still get twitchy every time I rip open a wrapped Christmas gift, instead of slowly easing a sharp knife under each bit of tape so the paper could be saved for next year (and the year after that).

Luckily... we have had cats the last 20 years or so and we don't decorate our Christmas tree with tinsel! How does one reuse tinsel? Well... instead of tossing it willy-nilly over the tree... you hang it in little clumps on the tips of the branches and then gather them carefully off the branches and store them neatly for next year (and the year after that).

For a while we were eating yogurt by the bucketful (4 litres) and we have a nice stash of buckets in our shed, useful for oh so many things in the garden. Even regular sized yogurt containers (750 ml) make a great addition to the garden supplies.

Our garden shed before we moved in...

I was quite happy to learn that we are on the cutting edge of a Japanese concept called Mottainai. It's a tricky word to translate and can mean many things... but the basic gist is a flavour of frugality which can come out as "waste not, want not", "enough" or "what a waste". Mottainai is kind of the Japanese version of the four Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle and respect.

Most of our garden has been built with Mottainai. When we moved into the house 7 years ago, there were some old 2x12s under the deck, probably the joists from the old deck. We used those boards to build our first garden beds. They weren't pretty but they worked. Only now are they rotting to the point where we really need to redo the beds.

Original shed from Kijiji

When we moved in, our garden shed was a ramshackle affair with solid posts and a metal roof, but only three walls, and those were made out of cedar log-sides... the gently rounded bits that get cut off the side of a log and are covered in bark. The shed was very breezy and there was no real protection from the elements for our garden tools.

Our first winter here, I came across a posting on Kijiji. A guy was trying to get rid of his old wooden shed. The cedar shake roof was toast but the rest of it was pretty secure. He thought that someone might come and lift the whole thing onto a flat deck and take it away. There was no way we could do that... but... I was coveting the ship-lap cedar siding and the door...

Our garden shed with the front of the old Kijiji shed

We contacted him, went over there with our tools and within six hours, we had the thing dismantled and most of it moved to our house. He did help us move some of the bigger pieces, like the interior frame, with his trailer.

Those pieces became the framework for our greenhouse. The cedar siding went onto our shed and the whole front of the guy's shed, with a few tweaks, fit perfectly onto our shed - complete with door. All for free... and all part of Mottainai.

The frames of the Kijiji shed repurposed for
our greenhouse

We've turned into regular salvage artists and joke that our favourite price is free. We've gotten a few things for free over the years: fire pit ring, metal arbor, lumber, concrete pavers, heather bush and two uprooted lilac bushes lying by the side of the road with a sign saying "Free" (we took them, pampered them with feline manure and they are thriving).

Most recently... a new house is being built around the corner and the builders leave piles of debris at the edge of the sidewalk - small off-cuts of wood, etc. It's all free for the taking and... there were some short 6"x6" landscape beams in there. They were of various lengths - 3 feet, 4 feet and 5 feet. I hauled them home and they are now serving as mini-retaining wall edging around a new garden bed along our property line. Sometimes we do have to buy things new, like fence posts and fence boards. But... overall... we have gotten a lot of things second-hand.

We have found so many cool and useful things second-hand for which we have paid a few dollars: compost bins, pavers, concrete builder blocks (sooo useful), plants, garden tools, lawn mowers, lumber, garden furniture, garden pots, black lawn edging, etc. Not only is it all much cheaper than buying new... we are practicing Mottainai. My only bit of advice would be this: be careful with second-hand appliances. We bought a small freezer off of Kijiji and the compressor was failing. It was cold when we looked at it (yay) but when we got it home, we realized it never reached freezing temperature. Buyer beware! We then got a second-hand freezer from an appliance repair place... a bit more reputable.

Rethink - Beyond the 4-Rs

I do have to say that, during this time of Covid-19, we are missing garage sales and thrift stores. They are all about Mottainai and it seems that some are slowly starting to reopen.

We do, however,  keep our eye on Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace and have regular discussions about what we find there. Do we want/need it, or not? Is it worth the time and effort?

We are so used to being able to dispose of unwanted items via thrift stores that now... we are being forced to re-evaluate what we have and how we can best put it to good use. Even more so than normal!

I also have to say that I rather like the Rethink diagram here... it shows that there are more options than the traditional Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. We take a fair bit of pride in being Salvage Artists... It might not make a huge difference, but anything that we can keep out of the landfill and put to good use is a win for us and for the environment.