Breathe new life into old things
Posted
Dec 24 2007, 03:39 PM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
We live in a disposable society. We've gotten so used to everything being so cheap that we often think about replacement before we think about refurbishment. That's great for companies but bad for our budgets and our environment.
I experienced this firsthand a month ago when I pulled out my coffeemaker to make a cup of coffee.
About a year or two ago I took advantage of a Gevalia free coffeemaker offer that gave me two little bags of Gevalia coffee, a travel mug, and a 12-cup programmable coffeemaker for only $5. It was the first coffeemaker I had seen that used little cone-shaped coffee filters, and I thought they were a custom shape you had to buy from Gevalia.
I used up the coffee and the filters and put the coffeemaker on the shelf. In the interim, I used instant coffee. (Oh, the horror!) Well, a month ago I went to Costco and picked up a unreasonably large container of coffee thinking it was instant. It wasn't.
So, with a container of ground coffee, I got out the coffeemaker and tried to make some coffee. I didn't have any of the little cone-shaped filters, but I did have regular filters, so I made do for a few brews. Most of the time it worked fine. Sometimes the filter folded and I would discover a minor coffee disaster.
I was just about to throw the whole thing away when I decided to try to find the special Gevalia filters online and see if they were cheap enough to buy. Lo and behold, I discovered that cone-shaped filters are pretty common. A quick trip to Walgreens netted me a huge package of non-bleached recycled-paper cone filters for $3. Very green.
The end result? I could've tossed the coffeemaker and picked up another one that uses "regular" filters for about $20, when I just needed the right filters. So, the landfill has one less coffeemaker and I still have my $20.
Other articles of interest at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity:
"7 personal-finance lessons from the poker table"
"Having a goal helps you be frugal"
"One man's trash: Free televisions and computers"
