Waste Not, Want Not

 

broken bobbin

This morning I was scrolling through Facebook while drinking my second cup of coffee and the site began offering me videos of wood turners making amazing wooden items.

As I watched the lathe spinning, the tools gradually bringing unique forms out of blocks of wood, I thought about 'waste'.

Coils of wood were spiraling off the spinning block - the 'waste' created as the turner made things from the raw material.

And I thought about all 'creative' pursuits, and how each one has an element of 'waste' involved in the making.  Then I thought about weavers and how hard some of them work to create no waste at all.

Which is admirable, but honestly, do they sweep up every speck of flour when they bake bread?  Other examples occurred to me, but the bottom line is this.  If you make something out of raw materials, you *will* create 'waste'.

Now, our waste can, in some cases, be turned into someone else's raw materials.  For example, I 'save' all my thrums (the ends of warps) and hand them over to a spinner who then uses them to create new yarns.  But all the same, I do not keep every inch of thread/yarn.  The tie on portion of my warps gets tossed.  I create 'waste' when I serge the raw ends and the machine cuts off about .25 of an inch as it sews the overcast stitch.  

When a bobbin shattered while I was winding yarn onto it, I did not try to salvage the less than an ounce of yarn.  It went into the bin.  I *might* have stripped the yarn off and tossed the bobbin into the plastic recycling bin, but I don't remember.

I send my 'waste' paper to the paper recycling.  Vegetable peelings get put into the compost bin.  Plastic packaging goes into the recycling bin for that.  We created a 'recycling' area in our kitchen so it's easy peasy to put our general 'waste' into the appropriate bin.  And then walk the bins to the curb every second week when the recycling truck comes by.

But my yarn?  Mostly my yarn is 'natural' - cotton, mostly, some linen, some rayon (which is regenerated cellulose, therefore 'natural'), silk.  All of those fibres will degrade back into the molecules they are made of.

What I do avoid is anything made from petroleum.  I do have a very limited amount of that type of yarn in my studio, but very little, and mostly it has been someone passing their stash on to me.  So I keep those yarns to tie warp chains, weave headers, and such jobs.  

I applaud people who attempt to create less 'waste'.  But each of us has to come to grips with the fact that one of the results involved in the act of creation, whatever medium we use, will be to have 'waste'.  Choose what you are willing to 'waste' and how much effort you want to put into reducing that waste.

But get used to the fact that there *will* be 'waste'.  

Make things, anyway.