The themed decorations, the plastic table cloths, the pizza and cake galore — and the real stars of the show: the goodie bags.

Sound familiar? That’s because they haven’t changed a bit since I was a kid.

And by that I mean: they are still single-use-a-paloozas.

When I planned my daughter’s latest birthday party, I was determined that this time would be different.

I am an Intentionalista, for goodness sake. If I can’t figure this out, who can?!

But, I’ll be painfully honest: I still struggled. A lot.

In fact, almost every parent does, at least in one way or another. And it’s not because we don’t have good intentions to reduce waste (I actually think many of us do). It’s because, without the right systems and incentives, it’s much harder to match intention with action.

Let me explain what I mean.

The Systems (or Lack Thereof)

Like it or not, we live in a linear world.

(Hope you read that to the tune of Madonna’s “Material Girl”, because I sure did).

We extract the planet’s resources to make products (like plastic tablecloths and cheap goodie bag toys).

We often use those products once (in the case of a kids’ birthday party, we use them for only about 2 hours).

Then we throw them away (and the resources are lost forever).

But let’s say you want to do better than that. Let’s say you want to use compostable plates and cutlery because you know they’re better for the planet.

That’s great. Now where’s the compost bin at the party venue you rented? Oh, right. There isn’t one. So might as well not spend more on compostable plates that will end up in the trash instead of the compost.

How about reusable plates? Love the concept, of course. But is it ever realistic to take home a dirty pile from a party and stuff them in my already-packed car?

Ok, and how about decorations? My daughter wanted a parrot themed party. Where on earth am I going to find parrot-themed decor that isn’t single use? It would take a lot of effort for me to drive around to lots of thrift stores or pore over lots of different peer-to-peer selling sites to (maybe) find two or three things that would slightly count as parrot decor. So I give up and look on Amazon or Target.

See where this is going?

It’s actually quite difficult. And that’s coming from someone who already goes out of their way to be better.

Sure, you might say, “then don’t have a party!” or “just have a party at home!” — but in my opinion, both of those options come with their own distinct challenges.

No well functioning system = no easy solution.

The Incentives

Trying to execute a perfectly sustainable party feels like someone giving advice like “you should use your car less to get around” when there are very few safe bike lanes, limited public transportation options, free highways everywhere and easy parking at the destination.

You might have intentions, even a strong desire, to use the car less, but when the incentives all point toward continued usage, that’s ultimately what you end up doing.

In fact, renowned investor Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.”

Incentives for parents throwing kids’ parties today include:

Following the path of least friction

When single-use items make party cleanup a breeze and a pre-packaged bundle of goodie bag stuffers saves parents time and energy, it’s easy to see why they win out over extra chores and errands.

Meeting cultural expectations

Providing goodie bags (or party favors) as the host is one of the most time-honored traditions — ask any toddler, and they’ll tell you it’s their favorite part of a party. Skip it and risk facing sad stares from three year olds and judging glances from Susan from PTA. (In other words, you can’t).

Mitigating risk

When returns are pretty friction-less, it’s easy to understand why we all overbuy items we may not even need “just to be safe”. Similarly, when we don’t want to run the risk of anyone going hungry at our party, we over-order pizzas and snacks (and then end up wasting a ton of leftovers).

Getting social validation

The desire to share photos and get tons of likes on social media can sometimes drive parents to go a little overboard with decor (though let’s be honest, it’s just the modern version of “keeping up with the Joneses” that has always existed). It’s also the same incentive that drives us to seek out a fresh new theme each year instead of reusing things more than once.

Buying inexpensive over lasting

If you know you’ll only use things like plates, cups and decor once, you are not exactly incentivized to make sure they’ll last. The dollar store and a random seller called XYBSKG on Amazon look pretty good when you need something for 2 hours max and can easily throw it all away when you’re done.

Being more intentional in a linear system

In short, there are real, systemic gaps and incentives that make it really easy to understand why a kids’ party in 2026 doesn’t look all that different from a kids’ party in 1996.

When the systems don’t change, the results don’t either.

And changing the status quo is an especially tall order when you’re up against two of the things consumers (and parents) care about the most: low price points and ease + convenience.

But despite all the headwinds, I’m proud to share that I made a lot more intentional choices this year to reduce waste — and the good news is, they’re all easy to replicate!

🎁 Gifts

Three out of five gifts we gave our daughter this year were secondhand, either from Rhea Lana’s consignment sale or Amazon Resale (all in like-new or gently used condition but at steep discounts).

🥳 Party Favors

I swapped out the traditional goodie bag for a more practical gift with no baggie at all (a watercolor set and a little parrot keychain). It’s definitely an example of progress over perfection, but I got multiple comments from parents on its usefulness and simplicity.

🎉 Decor

I reused one decoration from two years ago that I had saved (they were big leaves from her jungle birthday — goes perfectly with parrots!). I also went fairly minimal on the party decor at the venue (a paint-your-own art place which was already quite colorful).

🛍️ Wrapping

I used this cute reusable drawstring pouch “wrapping” for all of her birthday gifts (I picked a simple pattern that will grow with her over the years).

Shortcomings

And in the spirit of full transparency, here are some *less than perfect* things I did (gasp!):

• I used a single-use table cloth

• I used disposable paper plates and plastic forks

• I still bought two new things as gifts (one was a nail polish set - not really something you’d buy used anyway!)

• I bought a few new decorations for our house decor on Amazon (again, parrot theme, people)

Where to go from here

If you recognize the need (and have the strong desire) to reduce waste like I do, it can be really frustrating when the infrastructure doesn’t really exist around you to make it easy.

But I’m here to assure you that you’re not actually failing. You’re just caught in a flawed system.

So where do we go from here? Keep on partying like it’s 1996?

Or can we start to think about ways we can change the systems and incentives that have held us back for so long?

As it turns out, I’ve been mulling over some ideas to do just that. I’ll share more when I’m ready.

Stay tuned!

Until next time,
Jenny

[Insert full range of emotions here: 😬 🤯 🥳]

When I was much younger, I used to think getting to this age would feel really old.

It’s halfway to 80.

It’s the start of a decade that isn’t celebrated on any lists (no 50 Under 50).

And it’s an age when you have to start thinking about things like mammograms and colonoscopies.

But now that I’ve arrived, I can tell you with deep sincerity that I feel more excited about this age and upcoming decade than most ages I’ve turned before this one.

There is something kind of magical that happens around this age. ✨

You start to feel like you *actually* know yourself. What you’re really good at. What makes you come alive. What you don’t like at all.

And best of all, you start becoming unapologetic about it.

You shift from caring a lot about other people’s opinions and meeting societal expectations to caring a lot more about whether you’re letting yourself down.

Your priorities get clearer.

Your tolerance for things that waste your time gets lower.

And your inner voice starts to whisper a little bit louder, “Psst. You haven’t done that thing you said you were going to do by now. Remember?” (And you finally start to listen).

Turning 40 is a natural checkpoint along life’s highway to make sure you’re not just speeding by on auto-pilot. It’s like a bright, flashing reminder that you’re actually the one in control of the wheel.

In other words, it’s the start of a whole decade that represents exactly what I stand for: living with intention.

So to honor this milestone, I wanted to share four pieces of wisdom that I’ve found particularly empowering in this season of life — and I hope they resonate no matter what age you happen to be.

1. You’re Allowed to Take Up Space

When I returned to Amazon after my second maternity leave, my manager told me something that has stuck with me ever since: “You’re allowed to take up space”.

I had shared a thought with her in private that I didn’t voice in a meeting with senior leadership. She gave me a sideways look and said it was a great point — I should feel totally comfortable saying it live next time. She was absolutely right. I had somehow convinced myself that because I had been gone for the last 6 months that I shouldn’t speak without having full context.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t need to have full context. I just needed to voice my perspective based on what I did know and then ask questions about the rest. I belonged in those meetings for a reason — and it wasn’t to stay quiet.

I’ve carried that piece of wisdom with me into my late 30s and this new decade. It’s no coincidence that I only recently started this blog and started posting a lot more on LinkedIn. That’s me, acknowledging not only that I can indeed take up space, but that my voice is a powerful tool I can use to help other people and spread awareness of things I think are important for the world to know.

We’re all here on this earth with different points of view, different skill sets and talents. I wish I had learned earlier in life that it’s incumbent upon us to use our voice, “take up space” and share those gifts with others, even if it feels a little bit uncomfortable sometimes (especially for all the fellow introverts out there).

In fact, here’s another tidbit that makes it easier: no one actually cares about you taking up space as much as you think they do!

2. You Don’t Need to Wait for Permission

In a similar vein — the older I get, the more I’ve realized you don’t need permission to act. You can just go do things. And that has been a freeing revelation, as a former straight A student and natural rule follower.

I don’t mean you can eat ice cream for dinner (though you certainly can). I mean you can leave a job that isn’t serving you. You can even totally change careers later in life. You can also do things like organize a Swap Event at your kids’ school even if you’ve never done one before.

At this age especially, no one is actually telling you what to do or who to be. You might think that in your head sometimes, but in reality, you are the adult in the room. There is nothing stopping you from creating the life you want except your own limitations you’ve put on yourself.

Late last year, I felt the desire to write about and share what I was learning about the circular economy and living with intention. I started a Substack. And now I’ve written 17 posts. I envisioned writing a post called “Ode to 40”, and now I’m hitting publish.

There are so many things that work exactly like that. No one needs to give you permission to get off the sidelines. You’re allowed to get on the playing field whenever and however you want.

3. Focus on the “Rocks”

You may be familiar with the classic Rocks/Pebbles/Sand story. But just in case you aren’t, let me share it with you.

A professor showed his class four items on the table at the front of the classroom: a glass jar, rocks, pebbles and sand.

He poured all the rocks into the jar, which filled it to the top.

“Is the jar full?” He asked the students. They all nodded.

Then he poured in the pebbles and gently shook the jar, and the pebbles all trickled down, filling the crevices.

“How about now?” the professor asked. The students all nodded again.

Then he proceeded to add the sand, which further filled the remaining space in the jar.

“How about now?” he asked again. The students smiled and nodded again.

“This jar is just like your life,” the professor explained.

“All the rocks represent the things that truly matter. Your family, your health, your closest friends, your values and integrity.

If you just had those, your life would be full.

The pebbles are things that matter but are lower priority in the grand scheme of life. Your job, your side hustles, your coworkers or acquaintances.

The sand is all the other distractions in life that are completely meaningless. Your phone, TV shows, video games, gossip.

If you filled the jar with sand first, it would be too full to fit any rocks.

So make sure you fill it with your rocks first.”

In this decade, I am prioritizing my rocks and drastically cutting back on the sand that I allow into my life.

Giving less attention to things that drain my energy and leave me feeling unfulfilled. Not getting pulled into petty drama. Investing more in my health and sleep. Making sure my kids and husband know they always come first.

4. Someday is Here

Lastly, I like to think of this upcoming decade as the start of a personal capstone assignment. It’s the time when you can take stock of the impressive toolkit you’ve built — all the experiences, skills, knowledge and hard-earned lessons — and apply it to something truly meaningful you want to accomplish.

It might look like starting a business. Writing a book. Living in a foreign country. Running a marathon. Or whatever other big goal you’ve always had but haven’t yet acted on. Something that you’ve filed away to do “someday". Something you’d truly regret when you’re 80 if you never got around to it.

Because, at 40, it feels like “someday” is finally here. With any luck, you still have good health, your full faculties, plenty of friends and family to cheer you on and provide advice. You also have a proven track record of navigating a lot of hard things before and coming out the other side.

Sometimes at this age we tend to compare ourselves to others or even feel behind where we thought we’d be. But I think that is the whole point of this decade — to take it by the reins and change whatever’s getting in the way.

You’re not actually behind. You’re right on time.

If you’ve recently turned 40, what are some other pieces of wisdom that resonate most with you right now?

And if 40 is already long gone in your rear-view mirror, what do you wish you had known then?

Let me know in the comments.

Until next time,

Jenny

▶️ You’re sitting down to dinner at your kitchen table, and you pull out your phone to watch a YouTube clip for some light entertainment during your meal.

🥪 You’re extra busy at work, so you decide to take lunch at your desk to power through emails in between bites of your turkey sandwich.

🎥 You’re on the couch watching a movie with your spouse, but you’re also silently scrolling social media at the same time.

💻 You’re on your laptop to look something up, but a text message pops up on your phone and sucks you in, completely derailing your research.

Any of these sound familiar? I’m guilty of all of them. Like, painfully guilty.

You might also recognize what usually happens right after each of these scenes…

🤦🏻 You get up from the dinner table, not having registered what you ate or whether you’re actually full.

🤦🏻 You answer half of an email and get through only half of your sandwich.

🤦🏻 You lose track of the movie’s plot and ask annoying questions like “wait, who is that guy, again?” And then the movie ends without you actually feeling any more relaxed.

🤦🏻 You never actually research that thing you wanted to look up.

These scenarios are familiar to all of us because we live in a culture that glorifies multi-tasking. After all, doing more than one thing at once is often viewed as the only way we’ll ever have time to get it all done. As a mom of young kids, I know this all too well.

But according to a 2010 scientific study, only 2.5% of people are able to multi-task effectively. TWO. POINT. FIVE! (I’m clearly not one of them).

In an 2021 article by the Cleveland Clinic, Neuropsychologist Cynthia Kubu, PhD, explained, “we’re really wired to be monotaskers, meaning that our brains can only focus on one task at a time. When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once. We’re doing individual actions in rapid succession, or task-switching.”

Task switching increases our cognitive load, making our brains work harder (and get tired faster) from trying to cram too much in at once.

And it’s really hard to live with intention when you’re not even fully present.

The best advice I ever received as an antidote to multi-tasking came from a Jesuit priest back in 2008.

I can’t remember his name anymore, sadly, but I’ll never forget the three simple words he taught me when I was a senior at Creighton: Age Quod Agis.

It’s a powerful Latin phrase that translates to do what you are doing.

Back in college — and for many years thereafter — I would whisper “Age Quod Agis” to myself whenever I felt my brain actively pulling away from the current moment or task. Sometimes it would work, and I would listen to that little voice in my head.

But too many times, I would brush it right off and continue right on down the distraction rabbit hole. (Sometimes you just get sidetracked because you HAVE to know if that one Bachelor couple from three years ago ended up getting married, and then you need to find out what their kids names are, OK??)

So over the past year, in my quest to be more intentional about how I live and spend my time, I’ve experimented with some better tools and systems to help me reinforce this concept, rather than relying on the good graces of the voice inside my head.

Here are three simple things that have worked the best.

1. Defining Boundaries for Spaces in My Home

For me, there is nothing worse for focus than trying to accomplish something in a room that’s not intended for that purpose.

Like when I try to answer an important email in the kitchen, where my kids can start tugging at me to make them a snack. Or when I try to finish reading a thought-provoking article while my kids are climbing on me in the playroom.

What I’ve found really helpful is to define boundaries for different spaces in my home.

For example:

When I’m in the kitchen, I’m preparing food or eating.

When I’m in my home office, I’m working.

When I’m on the couch/in the family room, I’m relaxing and socializing.

When I’m in the playroom, I’m playing with my kids.

In other words, I defined what I should be doing in each space — and by default, what I should NOT be doing in those spaces (like eating in my home office or working while I’m on the couch). Simply defining it reminds me to be present in that space rather than distracted by something else.

Having these boundaries also triggers me to do things like putting my phone away when I’m at the table or playing with my kids, or walking to the kitchen for a snack instead of eating at my desk. It also helps me actually relax when I want to relax, and actually enjoy food and others’ company during meal times.

It’s not something I do perfectly 100% of the time (and that’s not a realistic expectation for anyone to have), but as a general rule, defining the boundary automatically gives me a quiet “do what you’re doing” nudge each time I feel myself drifting back into multi-tasking mode. And it works more often than not!

2. Using Brick

As you can probably tell from this post, there is usually a single culprit for all my multi-tasking woes: my phone. Oh, and my toddlers. But mostly my phone. I’m going to take a wild guess that it’s the same for you.

But since we need our phones for lots of useful things (not just distractions), the answer is not to avoid them completely. Like chocolate cake or Ben & Jerry’s — it all comes down to moderation.

One thing I’ve found to be really helpful for minimizing phone overuse and improving focus is an app limiter device called Brick.

Unlike focus modes on your phone, which can be easily turned off if you want to ignore them (ask me how I know), Brick is a small, square-shaped device that you can only override by physically tapping it with your phone.

You can customize which apps it can block, and once your phone is “Bricked”, you will get a popup like this every time you try to access it:

Don’t you just love the “Back to living” button at the bottom?!

The trick is to keep the Brick in a location far enough away from what you’re trying to focus on, so you aren’t tempted to un-Brick it easily.

I keep mine hidden in a cabinet in the kitchen, and most of my work is done upstairs. But I’ve even heard of some people Bricking their phone before they leave for work so they can’t un-Brick it until the'y’re back home. That’s commitment!

I have found this tool especially helpful when I am doing deep work that requires real focus. But I also use it when I am eating meals with my family, and before I head upstairs for bed (which helps me end and start the day more peacefully than I would with mindless scrolling).

The great thing about it is that you can get one Brick for multiple users, so my husband and I share one device. And not to worry — it lets you have five emergency unlocks in case you lose the Brick or need to access a blocked app on your phone urgently when the device is not nearby.

Total game changer.

3. “I am [doing X] right now”

On a fairly recent Daily Jay meditation called “Open Tabs” (read more about the Daily Jay and the Calm app here), author and former monk Jay Shetty talked about this exact phenomenon of trying to do too many things at once (and failing).

He shared a very simple but powerful mindfulness exercise to combat this.

Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you feel yourself losing focus, remind yourself “I am [doing X] right now” and gently pull yourself back to the task or activity at hand.

For example, if you are reading a book, but you randomly remember you forgot to fill out that one field trip form, say to yourself, “I am reading a book right now”.

Or if you are watching a movie on the couch with your spouse, and you reach for your phone to take a quick peek at social media, remind yourself “I am watching a movie right now.”

You can practice this by meditating (just closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing and the present moment) for a few minutes.

Any time your mind drifts off, remind yourself “I am meditating right now”.

Adding this simple sentence to my repertoire has helped me massively to be more present. It’s essentially Age Quod Agis, but repackaged and easier to pronounce.

I want to leave you with a quote from the Cleveland Clinic article I referenced earlier.

“People assume that a surgeon’s skill is primarily in the precision and steadiness of their hands. While there’s some truth to that, the true gift of a surgeon is the ability to single-mindedly focus on one person and complete a series of tasks over the course of many hours,” Dr. Kubu explains.

I, for one, am glad surgeons are not answering their texts during surgery!

But I also love that Dr. Kubu refers to single-tasking as a “gift”.

What you’re really doing by focusing on the present moment is being intentional about how you spend your limited, precious time. And to your spouse, your kids, your friends, and your future self, that is the best gift of all.

Until next time,

Jenny

Getaways are my happy place, whether it’s to the beach, mountains, desert, or a new city. You can take me anywhere! 🧳

There’s nothing like the feeling of excitement and anticipation in the weeks leading up to it.

And of course, who doesn’t love the fun of shopping for a vacation wardrobe?

Well, I recently returned from a vacation (hello sunshine withdrawal) where I did that last part a little differently. A little more intentionally than I have in the past.

In fact, I still shopped for vacation clothes — but I didn’t buy them.

I rented them!

Let me take you along for the ride. ✨

Why I decided to rent

I’d been planning this latest vacation for a while — it was for a milestone birthday celebration and a warm-weather getaway to escape the dreary Chicago winter.

When I was thinking about what I was going to pack, I knew I wanted some dresses that made me feel a little special for the occasion.

And most of the dresses already in my closet were…well, not.

To be fair, most of the new ones I’ve bought since 2020 have been maternity dresses. And the rest have been around the block too many times to give me that glimmer of excitement I was craving.

But, if you know me by now, then you know that for the past year, I’ve been laser focused on reducing my consumption and more mindfully curating what comes into my home and life — and a fun vacation wardrobe was not going to be an exception.

So naturally, it was the *perfect* time to consult my trusty Buy vs. Borrow Decision Tree. (If you haven’t read my previous post about it, you can check it out here)!

Remember this?

Here’s what my thought process looked like:

Do I actually need to get some dresses for this trip? Yes. Definitely.

Will I use them often? No. Looking for tropical vacation vibes, and unfortunately that’s limited to once-ish per year.

Do I need to own them? No, not necessarily. —> BORROW/RENT

Borrowing or renting makes a ton of sense in this case. It limits the cost associated with getting something I’ll only use a few times max, and it also prevents me from adding clutter to my closet. Renting also helps keep existing garments in circulation longer, which reduces both waste and the overall need to buy new things at all. Oh, and did I mention no dry cleaning costs!?

Evaluating the Options

About 5-10 years ago, the idea of renting vacation clothes might have seemed far fetched, or even borderline impossible.

But we’re living in a golden age of secondhand shopping and clothing rental, so thankfully there are several major players in the space, as well as some smaller up-and-comers. Since this was my first time renting vacation clothing, I spent some time evaluating all the biggest ones and went with the one that felt the most “me”.

Here’s a quick rundown of the main players I considered (all of which have a very similar business model):

Nuuly

Monthly price: $98

What you get: You can rent any 6 items.

Other things to note: Nuuly is owned by URBN, which also owns Anthropologie, Free People and Urban Outfitters, so this should give you a sense of the types of styles and brands they carry. They have a wide variety of vacation styles (and many other types of clothing), in sizes ranging from XS to 5X and maternity. They even have an adorable Mommy and Me section on their website so you can coordinate fun vacation looks with your kids!

FashionPass

Monthly price: $125

What you get: You can rent 5 clothing items + 1 complimentary accessory in each order, and you can do 2 orders per month.

Other things to note: Their sizes range from XS to XL and maternity. Like Nuuly, the FashionPass styles and brands also generally cater to a younger audience (primarily ages 18-45), but they are fun, youthful and vibrant. Despite its cost, I think FashionPass is probably the greatest value, given that you get the most number of items per month.

Armoire

Monthly price: Capsule memberships range from $89-$129/month, and Unlimited memberships are $249/month.

What you get: For $89, you can rent 4 items at a time and swap out new items every 30 days.

Other things to note: They offer a wide range of sizes (0R - 24W and maternity). They are best known for their personal stylist and AI-powered recommendations to curate the best selections for your preferred size, fit and style.

Rent the Runway

Monthly price: Ranges from $78 for first month ($129/month thereafter) for the basic tier to $165 for first month ($275/month thereafter) for the highest tier.

What you get: Basic tier gets you 1 shipment per month (5 items per shipment), and the highest tier gets you 4 shipments (5 items per shipment) per month.

Other things to note: Rent the Runway is the OG in the fashion rental space, though they are still best known for their designer gowns and cocktail attire. I have been a customer for one-off event (weddings, galas) rentals for many years! They have branched out into a much wider range of options, including vacation wear, and they have the biggest variety of brands available in the rental space. They carry sizes 00-22, in addition to maternity.

My experience trying FashionPass

I decided to try FashionPass for this trip, and I’m honestly a huge fan. I can’t wait to use it again for a future vacation or special occasion.

I’ll admit that I initially chose it because it had the lowest monthly fee with a sign up promo discount ($59/month for two months), but I also loved the great selection of clothes and brands for the type of trip I was taking, and I loved how seamless and straightforward the whole process was, from the moment I first peeked at the website.

Here’s how it works:

1️⃣ Sign up to join (you can pause or cancel your membership anytime).

2️⃣ Start shopping! Some of the top vacation brands include Farm Rio, Show Me Your Mumu, For Love and Lemons, Tiare Hawaii, and many others. I was primarily looking for dresses, and there were so many to choose from! But they have other vacation offerings besides tropical, such as city exploring and skiing.

3️⃣ Receive the pieces in the mail in 2-3 business days. Super quick + free shipping!

4️⃣ Keep them as long as you’d like, and send everything back in a prepaid bag when you’re done! You also have the option to purchase anything you love for discounted prices ranging from 10-90% off retail.

Here is everything I rented for this trip from FashionPass so you can see what I got! And I must give a shout-out to my “Insta” husband, who did his best not to groan (too much) when I asked for another photo of my outfits…

I absolutely loved all of these items and was so impressed by the quality and fit of everything I picked. It also felt really amazing to get $1,108 in value for the price of the $59 rental fee.

In full transparency, my daughter put in a request for me to keep the “rainbow cape” so she can “wear it when she’s older”.

I wore that cape almost every day of the trip and was so impressed by how it didn’t even wrinkle in my suitcase! It’s also the only item I received that is 70% off retail to buy it used. I think it’s meant to be. 🌈

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, mindfully curating your life (and wardrobe) does not mean refusing to buy things. It means renting or borrowing when there’s a clear case for doing so, and buying for longevity when you do choose to buy. It means choosing things that are higher quality, that fit you well, and that you’ll love to use again and again.

I really enjoyed renting clothes for vacation and plan for it to be my go-to from here on. It’s also great that it’s easy to pause or cancel any of these services, since I can’t justify the ongoing monthly cost. But when I need to turn it back on for a future vacation, I can easily peruse new style options without the “new” price tag, clutter or waste.

If you have an upcoming trip and want to try out FashionPass, you can use my code JENNY109L to redeem 2 months of FashionPass for $59/month. (I’m not affiliated with them; I’m just a fan who’s sharing deals with my fellow Intentionalistas).

Whichever rental option you may choose for your own trip — your wallet, your closet, the planet and future you getting lots of compliments on your outfits will thank you.

Until next time,

Jenny

But a few weeks ago, I scratched the itch I’d been having to go visit one, mostly to get to the bottom (literally, as you’ll see) of a place that is so integral to understanding how we treat — and ultimately reduce — waste.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s actually like behind the scenes of a landfill, you’re in luck. I’ll take you with me on a private tour…let’s go!

Welcome to the Landfill!

Welcome to the Zion Landfill in Zion, IL, just south of the Wisconsin border. It’s been operating here since 1970.

When you first arrive, you may notice how busy it seems. There is a near-constant stream of trucks coming in and out, which feels oddly depressing. It is a visual reminder of just how much trash we all produce. As the site manager says, “the trash never stops, no matter the weather”.

In the winter, this landfill typically gets 2,000 tons of garbage per day, whereas the summer months typically see 4,500 tons/day, with a max of 9,500 tons/day. The difference between volumes is mainly that construction and demolition projects are more prevalent in the warmer months, and those generate a lot more waste.

For a better frame of reference on just how much trash that actually is, I asked Gemini to translate these figures into the equivalent number of elephants (because for some reason it is always easier to grasp massive numbers like this in terms of elephants…am I right?)

2,000 tons is the equivalent to the weight of 333 African elephants or 150 empty school buses. 9,500 tons is equivalent to the weight of 1,583 African elephants, or 42 Statues of Liberty(!!!). That is A LOT of garbage. And remember, that is in ONE DAY.

But before trash gets buried in the landfill, how does it get there?

The Journey of Garbage

🚛 Picking up from your curb

After a garbage truck picks up your bin from the curb, its next stop is most likely somewhere called a Transfer Station. You can think of a Transfer Station as a local, central hub where lots of garbage trucks unload before going back out into the neighborhoods to collect more garbage.

Much larger-capacity trucks called Tipper Trucks then pick up garbage from the Transfer Station and transport it directly to the landfill.

Tipper Trucks can hold 20 tons, whereas regular-sized garbage trucks carry only between 9-10 tons, so there is a clear efficiency benefit to consolidating trash from many smaller trucks into a Tipper Truck — especially since landfills tend to be far away from most of the residential areas the trash is collected from.

👷‍♂️ Getting tipped onto the landfill

At the landfill, the Tipper Truck literally tips the garbage onto the giant pile using a really cool hydraulic lift. It’s pretty amazing how high up these things get! Check out the video below of a Tipper Truck in action.

🚜 Getting compacted down

When a fresh load gets added to the landfill, compactors then drive over the garbage to compress it down as much as possible. If you look closely, you’ll notice there are large spikes on the compactor tires, which help to crush down anything in their path. You are not allowed out of the car for this tour, because it is extremely dangerous to be anywhere near compactors. You’d be a pancake in about 2 seconds flat!

💨 Adding dirt and a cloth over top

At the end of the day, the landfill crews add a layer of dirt over the top of the pile and then cover the whole thing with a giant cloth. This is the best way to reduce the smell, limit the impact of wind blowing everything around, and keep it protected from animals and pests.

🔒 Closing up a landfill for good

Once a section of the landfill has reached its max capacity (it must be kept to a certain elevation), they do what’s called a “final cap”. This involves putting a layer of plastic over it, as well as laying 3.5-4 ft. of top soil on the top.

Once a section of the landfill has closed, no permanent structures can be built on top of it. Typically grass just grows on top of it, or in some cases, it can get converted into a public space like a park or golf course. The site manager said one of the most popular places to watch fireworks in Virginia Beach, VA, where he used to live, is called “Mount Trashmore”, a former landfill. Note, closed landfills remain heavily monitored and regulated for 30 years after they close to ensure the health and safety of the groundwater and soil.

🕳️ Digging a new hole

Now, for a tour exclusive. ✨ Here is something most people never see: the bottom of a landfill hole. It’s a bit hard to grasp the breadth and depth from this photo because of the snow, but this hole is 70 ft deep and 10 acres wide! When it’s at final cap, it will be 170 ft. tall (100 ft above ground level).

Once the hole is dug, the next step is to lay a thick plastic liner down on the bottom of it. You can see the rolls and rolls of liner in the photo below, just waiting on some slightly warmer weather before it gets laid out.

Can you guess how long it will take to fill a hole that’s 10 acres wide (approx. 7.5 football fields) and 170 ft tall?

The answer is…about 1.5 years. That is FAST. And really sad.

Leachate and Methane

Ok, now I’ve saved the worst for last. The final part of our tour is breaking down two of the nastiest by-products of landfills: leachate and methane.

First, you may have noticed these things sticking out of the ground in the videos above.

These are like giant straws that suck the “leachate” (think of it as garbage juice) out of the landfill. You’ll see these all over the landfill, even in areas that have been closed off, because the garbage juice keeps flowing as the materials break down over time. Once it gets sucked up through the “straw”, the leachate is hauled to a wastewater treatment plant so it can be reprocessed.

This “straw” mechanism — in addition to the thick plastic liner on the bottom of the hole — plays an important role in preventing the leachate from seeping into the groundwater and soil. It’s heavily regulated and subject to weekly inspections by the health department. No one wants to drink garbage juice!

And here we have the other kicker: methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that gets released as waste decomposes. Note, many other landfill sites have the ability to convert this methane to energy, but this particular site does not yet have the infrastructure to do so (though they are in talks to build it).

According to NASA, 60% of methane emissions are related to human activities, with fossil fuels and agriculture (mostly cow burps — yes, you read that right) as the leading two sources, followed by landfills in third.

Methane is especially dangerous because it is 80 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period (source: Clean Air Task Force). And of course, trapping heat in the atmosphere is what contributes to global warming.

Simply put, the more trash (especially food waste) we put in landfills, the more methane we emit, and the worse it is for the future of our planet.

Four Key Takeaways to Share

There was so much to take in on that tour and so much that will sit with me for a long time after seeing it. What about you?

Can we also talk about how many birds there were?! It felt like an Alfred Hitchcock movie — terrifying in more ways than one.

In all seriousness, it might feel like a huge mountain (literally) to climb to make any impact whatsoever on our massive trash problem. But I want to leave you with four of my biggest takeaways. And the good news is that all of them have actions you can actually control.

1. Plastic bags are an operational challenge. Again.

Plastic bags are so ingrained in our culture that Katy Perry even wrote song lyrics about them: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag…drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?”

Well at the landfill, they very commonly do drift through the wind. In fact, the site manager said plastic bags are their “number 1 killer”. And on really windy days, they even go so far as to shut the landfill down so they can prevent all the plastic bags from flying into the neighboring town! I was honestly stunned to hear that.

If you remember my field trip to the MRF, you know that plastic bags getting caught in the machinery can easily shut the whole operation down too. So it seems like plastic bags are just bad news all around.

However, there are three things you can do to help mitigate this problem:

1️⃣ Use reusable bags instead of plastic grocery bags. I also refuse bags altogether in cases where it doesn’t make sense (looking at you, milk jug or single bottle of Tylenol that somehow still comes with a 2 ft long CVS receipt).

2️⃣ Utilize store drop offs at your local grocery store for any plastic bags or soft plastic you do have. You can also use a paid service like Ridwell or Terracycle. Either option ends up the same way — with industry partners who down-cycle them into things like decking and lawn chairs.

3️⃣ The site manager said that if you do put plastic bags in the garbage, one helpful thing is to tie them together, so they are easier for crews to grab and they’re less likely to act as parachutes catching the wind and drifting far away.

By the way, if you’re thinking, “but I put my plastic bags in the garbage bag and tie it shut!" I thought the same thing. But remember those compactors I showed you that roll over all the trash? Their sharp teeth essentially burst all the trash bags wide open, which causes anything lightweight inside to become a blow-away risk. The more you know. 🌈

2. There are items even the landfill won’t accept.

You may be tempted to think of a landfill as a catch-all for anything we don’t want anymore. But there are a few things that even landfills don’t accept, including yard waste, compost, electronics, tires, paint and batteries. The catch, of course, is that a lot of people still put these items in their garbage bags, so they end up there anyway. All of these are harmful in different ways, so they require specialty services for disposal.

In an upcoming post, I will share what to do with some of these tough-to-get-rid-of items instead. Stay tuned.

3. Food waste is the biggest problem — and biggest opportunity for impact

The main reason yard waste and compost (food waste) are harmful in landfills is because organic matter decomposes relatively quickly, causing a faster release of methane — the harmful greenhouse gas I mentioned earlier. According to the EPA, food waste accounts for a whopping 24% of all landfill waste in the US and 58% of landfill methane emissions. But that also means reducing food waste has outsized potential for impact!

You can help by putting yard waste into separate yard waste bags or bins, and by composting food waste instead of mixing these items in with your garbage. If you don’t have composting services in your area, try to minimize food waste by buying only what you need.

By the way, I know from personal experience that this one is much easier said than done and relies a lot on having the right systems in place to support it. When I lived in California, compost was collected weekly from the curb just like trash and recycling; but in Illinois (at least in the town I live now), that is not the case. I’m pretty ashamed to admit we currently don’t compost for this reason, but I’ll bet you can guess it’s at the top of my list to fix. How’s that for messy and transparent?

If you’re in Illinois too, you can go an extra step and contact your state reps about an upcoming Food Recovery and Diversion bill (SB 2852) that aims to divert food scraps from landfills. If you go to this link and scroll down, there’s a super easy form that you can fill out and send a message of support directly to your reps — without even picking up the phone.

4. Once something is in the landfill, those resources are lost forever.

There were so many items I saw in the landfill that could have been recycled or reused. For example, look at this fresh pile of perfectly good cardboard below — all gone to waste.

Think about the millions of pounds of perfectly good clothing, food, metals, lumber, and so many other resources that just get tossed without ever utilizing their full potential.

To illustrate this, A 2024 report by the Michigan Sustainable Business Forum included a chart that breaks down the state’s waste by material (Note: MSW = municipal solid waste). This is Michigan data, but let’s safely assume it’s fairly representative of other states.

Look how much of that could have been diverted! 11% cardboard that could have been recycled?! Holy smokes. 19% food waste that could have been composted? Textiles that could have gone in a Trashie or Retold bag? On it goes.

But here’s the really cool/crazy part — they also documented the lost value of these resources.

There is a LOT of economic potential here that will never be realized because these things are now buried forever.

Not only is this disappointing from a wasted resource standpoint, but it’s also frustrating from a space standpoint. Putting things that could otherwise be recovered, recycled or reused in landfill takes up valuable space and fills it faster than it otherwise would. The Zion Landfill only has about 12-13 years of life left in it before needing to expand the site into neighboring areas. According to a 2023 Environment America article, “seven states are projected to run out of landfill space in the next five years, and the entire United States will run out of existing landfill space sometime in the next 60 years.”

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the landfill should be the last resort, reserved for stuff that truly doesn’t belong anywhere else. Even “The Rejects” (those holey socks and ratty underwear) and snack wrappers have a better place besides the landfill!

It reminds me of a quote I recently discovered from Alex Steffen, a climate futurist:

The next time you go to throw something “away”, remember what “away” actually looks like. Consider whether that thing you’re tossing is actually at the end of its life (ok dirty tissues, we’ll allow you), or if you can help steward it to its next chapter.

Thanks for joining me on this tour (and this learning journey).

Until next time,

Jenny

It was a photo showing two different versions of a demolition site (below).

The first picture is a familiar scene of an overflowing dumpster filled with a bunch of mixed materials. It basically looks like every construction or demolition site I’ve ever seen. The second picture shows the same materials at the same site, but they’re organized by type and labeled to indicate where they should go next.

To be honest, I have no idea if the bottom photo is real or AI generated (it’s hard to tell these days!), but the takeaway is the same regardless.

The first photo makes it seem like all of the materials are purely garbage. They are dusty, tangled up and piled so deep that you can’t even see if there’s anything worth saving.

Any demolition site supervisor would look at that mess and feel overwhelmed by trying to do anything with it other than hauling it to the landfill.

But the second photo provides a much clearer direction. The bins not only help to separate the materials, but they guide people to find another purpose for them. Instead of getting tossed, these materials now have great potential for reuse, recycling or refurbishment.

It’s a simple shift that has the power to transform “waste” management into resource management.

Now, I think it’s a safe assumption that most of the people reading this blog (myself included) are not in the construction industry.

So why am I sharing it with you?

Because it is a perfect illustration of a system and mindset you can easily apply to your own household, much like I did very recently.

Take a look at this scene below. This is what my daughter’s closet used to look like not long ago.

There is a mish-mash of clothes, sheets, bathing suits, blankets, things that fit, things that don’t fit, things that might fit in a few months. Some random fairy wings and dress up clothes, and tons of wipes and diapers casually strewn about.

As you can imagine, this messy lack of a system has made my life much harder as a parent (especially one trying to be more intentional about our family’s consumption). It made it annoying to find things and time consuming to figure out what my daughter actually needed. And note — this is much cleaner than it used to be, since I had already gone through several rounds of clean outs when I took this photo!

For example, before I organized the Clothing Swap at my kids’ school last year, it took me many hours to sift through their drawers (not pictured above) and closets and separate their clothes into tons of little piles. Then, I basically went through the same exact exercise all over again when I decided to be a consignor with Rhea Lana’s.

I pushed myself to power through these tasks because I was really committed to experimenting with new ways to reduce our waste. But the average parent does not have the bandwidth nor the desire to go through all that effort with any regularity. Nor should they!

In fact, the number one thing I’ve heard over and over again from parents who *want* to participate in things like swaps and consigning (but end up not participating) is that they didn’t have enough time to prepare. Boy do I feel that in my bones.

But let’s go back to the demolition photo for a second.

What if the answer wasn’t spending more time (which no one has) on digging through our kids’ things constantly — but creating a better system to separate their stuff for its next purpose instead?

Ok, so now’s the part where you pretend we’re on The Home Edit on Netflix and it’s time for the big reveal…

Here is my daughter’s closet again, but with a simple new system in place:

Much like the “after” version of the demolition site, everything now has a label, a purpose and a destination. I can easily see what we have, what we need, and where it should go when I’m done with it.

Not pictured are two other bins in my own closet marked “The Rejects” and “Donate”. (Read my last post about “The Rejects” here).

I know, I know. Your inner Miranda Priestly might pause here and say, “Plastic bins? For organization? Groundbreaking.”

But let me tell you — it is a small shift that has made a big difference in my life as a parent.

I didn’t just put things in bins and reduce clutter. I gave myself clear direction and, most importantly, minimized friction in any future decision making.

Now, when I want to consign (which I’m doing as we speak), I’m ready.

When I want to go to a swap, I’m ready.

When I need to put aside clothes for my younger daughter that my older daughter has outgrown, I can do that super efficiently.

When I notice my own “Rejects” pile getting unwieldy, I can fill up a Take Back Bag. (Read more about those here).

When there are a bunch of things in the mend/repair pile, I’ll call up grandma to come for a visit with her needle and thread. 😂

Having this simple system in place has meant that I’m no longer caught on my heels, feeling overwhelmed about going through a constant cycle of clothes every three months. I’m now on the balls of my feet, easily able to make the intentional choice my default one.

While the initial setup took a small investment of time and energy, it is now paying dividends in the form of reducing my mental load. And that is as precious a commodity as gold bullion for parents as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve even started using separate bins for things like light bulbs, batteries and empty makeup containers so I can keep track of these things for responsible disposal instead of having them spread out in random places all over the house — but I’ll cover these in a future post!

So whether you’re a fellow parent of young kids, or just someone who has been avoiding cleaning out their closets like I had for far too long, here are a few takeaways for implementing a similar system in your own household:

✅ Figure out which categories align with your needs and goals. For my kids, this was Consign, Swap/Donate, Grow Into, and Mend/Repair. (As I mentioned, I also have separate categories for my own closet: Donate and The Rejects). But yours might be something like Donate, Sell, Hand Down. It all depends on your goals and needs — which are totally up to you!

✅ Define the destination and criteria for each category. In my house, anything gently used or like-new that has higher resale value goes to Rhea Lana’s consignment sale. Anything in gently used or good condition with lower resale value goes to Clothing Swaps or gets donated to a local charity. Threadbare items that are beyond repair (AKA my “Rejects”) go into a Trashie Take Back Bag (learn more about those here). If it helps, you can also make notes on the bin label itself with the criteria for each so you can clearly see it and remember.

✅ Place each bin in a location that makes it convenient to fill. I keep most of the kids’ clothes bins in my daughter’s closet, but I put my battery and light bulb bins in the laundry room (for some reason we’ve always kept extra light bulbs there — don’t ask), and my makeup bin in my bathroom cabinet. I keep separate Rejects and Donate bins for the adults in my own closet since that is the most convenient place for us to easily pop things in there.

✅ Monitor the bins on a regular basis. Once the bins are full, it’s a good forcing function to actually put it in your car and take it to the place it’s intended to go (instead of having it pile up in your closet). It doesn’t hurt to have extra bins in case of overflow for things that have set dates (like Rhea Lana’s).

I hope this simple shift helps make your brain and closets feel less cluttered. And more importantly, I hope it makes you feel more empowered to be intentional about what happens next to the valuable resources lying around your home.

Have you tried any other simple organization hacks that work for your family? Please let me know in the comments!

Until next time,

Jenny

I donated some. I consigned some. I handed some down to an expecting mom friend. I swapped some at a Swap Event. But even after all that purging, I’ve found that there always seems to be a sad little pile leftover in the corner that I still don’t know what to do with.

You know the pile I’m talking about…it has things like:

🩲 Ratty underwear that has seen better days.

🧦 Threadbare socks with a hole that fits your entire big toe.

👟 A single shoe with a giant hole in the rubber sole.

🩱A stretched out swimsuit that no longer fits your mom or dad bod.

👖Old jeans torn up beyond repair.

👙Used nursing bras I don’t need and regular bras that don’t fit me anymore.

These are just a few examples of what I affectionately refer to as “The Rejects”.

Donation centers and Swap Events don’t accept them.

You can’t hand them down.

Most of the time, they’re way past “gently used” or “functioning”.

And yet, if you’re anything like me, you still hate to throw them straight in the garbage. 🤦‍♀️

So for this post, I’m sharing some of the alternative options I’ve explored for getting rid of The Rejects in your life — and you might be pleasantly surprised at how many there are!

Before we dive in, let me first say that this post is only focused on clothing and textile rejects. I will do several future posts about other items that are notoriously hard to get rid of responsibly, such as batteries, light bulbs, paint, electronics, etc. (Make sure you subscribe to follow along!). But for now, we’re just talking textiles.

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Paid Mail-In or Pickup Services

There are currently four major players that gladly accept The Rejects in the form of paid mail-in or pickup bags/boxes. I personally gravitate to these options because they are the most convenient — they don’t involve separating items out by type or remembering a specific donation drop off date. However, I’ll also share some great free and item-specific options later in the post, too!

Here’s a rundown of how each one works, what they take, how much it costs, and what actually happens to your stuff after you send it in.

1. Trashie

Trashie features a $20 “Take Back Bag”, which you can stuff with up to 15 lbs of clothing and non-clothing textiles in any condition. This includes bed linens, towels, swimwear, underwear, blankets, socks, handbags, accessories, even single shoes(!), with some caveats here. They also offer separate cotton fabric scrap bags ($15) and kids take back bags ($10). You simply scan a QR code on the bag to produce a prepaid return label, and drop it off at a UPS store (very similar to an Amazon return).

They offer “Trashie Cash” rewards when you send in a bag — ranging from gift cards to familiar large retailers to donations to places like dots.eco, which supports vetted environmental impact organizations that are planting trees or saving sea turtles. (I had never heard of dots.eco before Trashie, but it’s a great concept!)

Their website indicates that 95% of what they receive is kept out of landfill. However, they don’t share many concrete details about their reuse or recycling partners, other than mentioning that “around 70% are reused globally, while over 20-25% are recycled into new fibers for uses like pet bedding and building materials.”

2. Ridwell

Ridwell offers a convenient $20/month porch pick up service for many different types of hard-to-recycle items, including a category called “Recyclable Threads”. This category covers things like worn out socks, underwear, rags, towels and blankets. They also have a separate category called “Clothes and Shoes” that is meant for reusable items.

Ridwell partners with a textile recycling company called Phoenix Fibers to convert The Rejects to “shoddy fiber” that is used to create insulation or fiber filler. Anything actually reusable gets sent to a partner called Cycla, which connects the items to wholesale buyers at thrift stores or sustainable fashion businesses. They also partner with four different bra reuse/recycle organizations that support victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence or homelessness.

You might recall Ridwell from one of my earlier posts (and I’m a big fan!), but unfortunately the “Recyclable Threads” category is only offered through their Pick Up subscription, which is not available everywhere. So as a Ridwell Mail-In customer, I sadly don’t have access to this feature. (Check if your city is one of the lucky ones here).

3. Retold Recycling

Retold Recycling is a Shark Tank alum that struck a deal with Mark Cuban! They offer a variety of mail-in bags (all made of compostable cornstarch), including their $15.50 classic bag, which holds up to 5 lbs of clothing and textiles in any condition. They accept everything from old underwear and socks to household linens and old dog blankets. They also have a separate Fabric Scraps bag for crafters.

Each bag arrives with a prepaid shipping label already attached. You simply fill the bag and drop it into any USPS mailbox. Like Trashie, they offer a rewards program, but Retold only partners with brands that are committed to sustainability, including ones like Blueland and Dropps. However, these incentives are structured as a perk for their subscribers rather than a one-off cash-back per bag system.

According to the Retold website, once the items are sorted, they “go to US thrift stores, charities, upcyclers or recycling companies, and fabric scraps bag go to a US downcycler to be transformed into reusable fiber.” But there isn’t a whole lot of detail beyond that about specific partners they work with.

4. TerraCycle

TerraCycle is the most comprehensive (and most expensive) option of the group. It offers Zero Waste Boxes for fabrics and clothing in three sizes — ranging in price from $160 to $379 — which are designed to hold any clothing, fabric or textiles, with some caveats listed here. They also have a wide variety of other types of items they will accept in Zero Waste Boxes or pouches (but you have to buy separate boxes or pouches for each type).

The box arrives with a prepaid shipping label. Once you fill it, you can tape it up and drop it at any FedEx location or arrange a FedEx pickup. TerraCycle does not offer any rewards for their Zero Waste Boxes. Based on the pricing and size of the boxes, it is best suited for businesses rather than individuals (but that’s my own two cents).

They are known for their transparency and their Recycling Guarantee, which states that they “guarantee to recycle all the accepted waste sent to us,” which amounts to 98.3% once contaminated items have been removed. After recycling the waste into raw material, it becomes filler for things like mattresses and pet bedding. They even sell products on their website that are made from the recycled material they collect from their other types of Zero Waste boxes, which I thought was cool!

Now, just in case your eyes are hurting from reading all that text and trying to figure out which one is best for you, I created a handy chart to compare them all side by side:

My experience trying Trashie

Well, I must complain about The Rejects too much, because I actually received Trashie bags as a Christmas gift from none other than my thoughtful husband (who knows that the way to my heart is through the recycling bin). ♻️

I also saved the gift label because it made me smile!

Since I have actually tried Trashie firsthand, I wanted to share some thoughts about my experience.

What I love about it:

❤️ I love that the bags get shipped directly to me.

❤️ I love the convenience of throwing most of my Reject pile into one bag and not having to separate things out by item type.

❤️ I love that I’m extending the life of items that would otherwise be garbage, down-cycling them into useful materials.

What I’m “ehhh” about:

🧐 I think it’s a bit tricky to offer rewards (especially gift cards for retailers) for this type of thing. It almost feels like promoting a guilt-free end-to-end shopping experience, since I can just dump everything in a bag when I’m done. To me, that mindset just perpetuates the cycle of over-consumption. (And I should be clear that I feel this way about any program that uses shopping rewards as incentives for clothes recycling — not just Trashie).

That being said, if you are mindful about how you use the Trashie Cash, it can be a nice perk and a way to recoup a small bit of the cost of a bag. I personally love the dots.eco option!

What I’d like them to improve:

🫤 The level of transparency. As opposed to Ridwell and TerraCycle, which are super clear about where your items end up, Trashie is more opaque. They provide high-level data about how much they divert from landfill, but they don’t provide a ton of details about their reuse or recycling partners on their website. Personally, I like to know what happens next so I can feel like I am part of a solution, so it’s a bit of a letdown that they don’t have more specific information readily available. This is an easy fix, Trashie!

My overall take:

Trashie is an easy and convenient way to get rid of my true “Rejects”, and I’ll continue to use it for those. I love that my sad little holey socks will be repurposed into something useful instead of sitting in a landfill.

However, I personally still prefer other methods (consignment, resale, handing down, swapping) for getting rid of clothing that’s still in usable condition (even though Trashie would take it), just because I don’t have a great sense of what they actually do with it. They mention it gets used “globally,” but that makes me automatically envision it going to countries that are already buried in our textile waste. Again, more transparency here would quell that (potentially incorrect) assumption!

Other Free Options

If you don’t want to spend any money to toss your Rejects (totally understandable!), I’ve included some great free options below as alternatives.

Your local municipality

Many cities or smaller municipalities offer free textile recycling drop off programs at specific times during the year. Some even offer other specialty item drop offs for batteries, light bulbs, etc. Check your city’s local government website for details.

Drop offs at major retailers

There are actually some well-known retailers that will take your old clothing (even The Rejects!) in drop off bins at their stores. The only tricky thing here is to resist the urge you may feel to go shopping for something you don’t actually need right afterwards. 🙃

Here is a short list of some retailers who offer clothing drop off bins. Just call your local store to double check before you go, as this list may be subject to change in the future.

Zara - Accepts any brand of clothing, footwear and accessories (no voucher provided)

H&M - Accepts any brand of unwanted clothing or textiles (provides reward voucher)

J.Crew - Accepts any brand of swimwear — note: mail in only (provides $5 credit per piece)

Madewell - Accepts any brand of denim (provides $20 off new full-price jeans)

American Eagle - Accepts any brand of denim (provides $10 off new jeans)

Soma - Accepts any brand of gently used bras (provides $10 off new purchase)

Bra Recycling

The Bra Recyclers is a specialty organization focused on recycling bras and underwear to benefit organizations serving homeless individuals and domestic violence survivors. They are not necessarily focused on The Rejects, (they will accept bras in gently used condition), but I figured they were still worth a mention, since bras are definitely one of those things people don’t know what to do with — in any condition.

In fact, bras are the only thing I intentionally kept out of my Trashie bag because I was a bit unclear if they actually accepted them (it only mentioned sports bras on their website’s FAQs), so I plan to take my underwire bras to a free Bra Recyclers drop off location near me. Check out their locations here.

The Bottom Line

There are *plenty* of options out there for your Rejects besides the garbage can! While I’ve chosen to highlight the major players, there are quite a few more that accept their own branded items in-store for recycling, as well as some additional specialty mail-in services. Some require more planning and effort (and expense!) than others, but there’s bound to be one that works for your needs.

It’s also worth calling out that NONE of these services (even the free drop offs) accept anything wet, moldy, oily, greasy or hazardous, as these will contaminate the batch. Keep everything dry and as clean as possible.

Which method appeals to you the most? Let me know what you think!

Regardless of what you choose, I hope a much smaller (or non-existent) pile of The Rejects is in your future!

Until next time,

Jenny

I brought cash. He brought “the goods”.

As soon as we both confirmed we were the one, the stranger’s trunk hissed open, revealing what I’d been anticipating for the previous 24 hours.

It wasn’t a Top Secret silver briefcase or a sketchy manila envelope (sorry to disappoint).

It was a 5 foot tall Frozen castle.

The kind stranger introduced himself. He was a dad of two girls, 11 and 8, who had outgrown the castle but had loved playing with it for the past three years.

Only you could barely even tell they had used it.

Only one original piece was missing (and it was not something critical or even noticeable), and everything else was in immaculate, working condition.

It was clear their family had taken great care of it.

When I told him my two young daughters would be ecstatic to have it, he smiled warmly and started reminiscing about giving it to his own girls.

“It took me forever to build this thing,” he said fondly. “I still remember the effort it took to put on all the little stickers just right.”

“Thanks for doing the hard part for me!” I laughed. “We’re going to cherish it.”

I handed him the cash and we parted ways, vanishing back into stranger status once again.

Craigslist transaction complete.

As I drove home — still basking in the glow of my amazing find ($80 vs. $300+ retail) — I kept thinking about why a Craigslist pickup from a random stranger had oddly felt so special.

I realized it was because I wasn’t just handed a toy — I was handed someone’s memories.

And in a weird way, I felt a strong sense of obligation to make sure I took care of it in the same way that family had. In fact, I could easily envision myself back in a similar Walgreens parking lot four years from now, handing it off to another beaming parent excited to gift it to their daughter.

This simple, 5 minute experience made me reflect on a concept that is critical to the circular economy: item stewardship.

It means taking care of what you have so it lasts as long as possible, rather than treating things as trash-in-waiting. It comes with the understanding that the longer our existing resources stay in use, the fewer new resources we need to extract from the planet.

While anyone can be an owner of an item, it takes some conscious effort to be a steward.

Stewards realize that they don’t really “own” anything at all; rather, they are temporary guardians of items in their care.

To illustrate the difference between ownership and stewardship, take a look at the two images below.

Someone with a purely ownership mindset thinks of items as being useful to them in the context of their own life. They don’t necessarily give much thought to what will happen with the item when they’re done with it.

In contrast, someone with a stewardship mindset acknowledges that their usage is just one chapter of an item’s story, not the beginning nor the end. They recognize their responsibility to start, or in my case with the castle, continue the chain of care-taking so it lasts beyond their needs.

That father and his little girls had been excellent stewards of the Frozen castle. I mean, not even *one* little sticker was ripped off! A true feat.

Because of that, this beautiful (and humongous) castle is now going to get another life with our family — and hopefully many more lives after that.

Now, before you think I’ve gone all woo woo over a Frozen castle (has she officially lost her mind?! Last week she went gaga over a waffle maker, and now a plastic toy?), just think of all the ways you regularly experience this concept in your own life.

🏠 The house you bought: Do you keep up the landscaping? Maintain your appliances? Make sure the roof is in good shape?

🚗 The car you drive: Do you take it in for regular maintenance? Make sure not to bang up the doors on the garage wall?

💎 The heirloom jewelry your grandmother gave you: Do you keep it in its nice velvet storage box? Make sure it’s not tangled up with other jewelry?

How about things you “own” for a very short while:

🛋️ The Airbnb you rent: Do you put everything back how you found it? Do you tidy up your messes and make sure not to spill anything on the couch?

📷 The fancy DSLR camera you borrowed from your friend: Do you handle it with care? Do you keep it in its case when you’re not using it?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you already know how to be a steward, not just an owner — and I’ll bet you do many of these things instinctively (even without the threat of a bad review on Airbnb).

That’s because there’s a tacit understanding that these things have long-term value.

And that they won’t be ours forever.

We invest in them and keep them maintained so we can extend their life, or even resell or hand them down for someone else to enjoy.

But while it’s expected (and there are obvious benefits) for people to be stewards for the expensive stuff, the real challenge — and mindset shift therein — is to become a better steward for everyday things. Your kids’ toys. Your clothes. Your pots and pans. Things you might have a shorter-term attachment to, but that still have enormous long-term value.

However, I have great news 💥:

What’s been true all along for expensive item stewardship is also true for everyday item stewardship: the better we maintain these items, the higher resale value we expect to see. And the higher quality materials the items are made from, the longer we can expect them to stay in circulation.

This also means you don’t have to share my sappiness or feel compelled to take better care of regular, everyday objects out of the goodness of your heart.

It means there’s still something in it for you.

Benefits of Item Stewardship

Here’s a quick breakdown of the benefits of item stewardship, along with some simple ways I’ve been retraining my brain to think the exact same way about an $80 Frozen castle as I would for a $40,000 car.

1️⃣ Item Longevity. Taking good care of everyday items means it’ll be longer before you need to spend money to replace them. Just like your trusty Honda can last 200k-300k miles with regular maintenance, your kitchen gear, clothing and kids’ toys can last a long while too — especially if you buy good quality ones that you properly look after.

Retrain your brain: Buy (new or secondhand) items with longevity in mind from the beginning.

• Seek out durable, higher quality materials (just like you wouldn’t buy a house made of straw 🐷)

• Follow the care instructions (just like you’d follow your car’s recommended maintenance schedule)

• Repair or mend items instead defaulting to replacement whenever there’s a cost-effective, fixable flaw (you wouldn’t buy a whole new car just because of a flat tire, would you?)

• Support brands that pride themselves on quality craftsmanship (Hondas last a long time for a reason). Sidenote: I recently became aware of an awesome website called BuyMeOnce, which features brands and products that are built to last. It’s not super robust yet for the US, but the UK version is a gold mine of trustworthy brands and products.

2️⃣ Resale Value. Quality, everyday items that are well maintained can often retain their value too. With the explosion of resale platforms in recent years, there are opportunities everywhere to recoup a good chunk of your initial investment and keep items in circulation longer. Not to mention, if you know someone else is going to use it after you, you are more likely to take better care of it — if for no other reason than cashing in at the highest price.

Retrain your brain:

• Consider an everyday item’s resale potential before the point of purchase (just like you would consider important factors for resale when buying a house)

• Store your items properly when you’re not using them to protect their value (just like you would keep a designer purse in its dustbag)

• Keep the original box (if it makes sense to do so) and keep all the parts organized (though remember it doesn’t need to be in perfect condition to still have tons of value — my husband just sold a bunch of video games from the ‘90s for $400!)

3️⃣ Legacy. There are even some cases when taking care of your everyday items means you can pass them down to your kids one day. I’m not talking junky old gadgets from your garage. I’m talking dishware, high quality pots and pans, decorative items that will stand the test of time, and other durable home furnishings that your kids would not be embarrased by when their friends come over. It’s a form of quiet philanthropy that keeps giving over time.

Retrain your brain:

• Buy items you know you will cherish (just like you connect to the beauty and craftsmanship of your grandmother’s heirloom jewelry)

• Opt for timeless, always-useful items (just like a Rolex that never goes out of style)

• Share stories and memories with your kids about where and why you bought the item in the first place (or better yet, let them be part of the story)

To cement this mindset shift, I want to leave you with one final image.

Item stewardship is really about planet stewardship, just on a much smaller scale that’s actually in our control.

Right now, we’re just Earth’s current tenants. But how well we take care of it and leave it for the next ones to enjoy is up to us.

Until next time,

Jenny

You read that right — A waffle maker. From the library! A Mickey Mouse waffle maker, to be exact.

Before you dismiss me as a crazy person, just hear me out.

The other day, I was browsing my local library’s website to see if they had a book that I’d been wanting to read, and I stumbled on a page that I had never noticed before.

It was titled the “Library of Extraordinary Things.”

Cue an audible gasp. And an *immediate* click.

I had heard about a “Library of Things” in the UK from my circular economy course, and I thought it made so much sense.

But I had (very wrongly) assumed that it was one of those special things Europeans have that Americans don’t — there’s a long list of those.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept, a Library of Things is a place where you can borrow everyday items — like tools, cooking equipment, board games, even musical instruments — and return them when you’re done. Just like we’ve done for centuries with books and libraries.

Maybe some of you have even been doing this for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time I’m late to the party (ahem, consignment and resale).

But this was not something I had ever personally experienced.

And naturally, I needed to go see it for myself.

As I pulled into the library parking lot, I kept wondering why I had never noticed the Library of Things on previous trips there. It is something I would have explored sooner, if only I had known it existed!

Then I remembered that whenever I go, I’m usually in the children’s book section, struggling to pull my kids away from the giant fish tank before they press their entire face against the glass like the 150 other kids that did the exact same thing right before them. Ah…that’s right.🤦🏼‍♀️

But I digress.

I’ll also admit that my mental image of a Library of Things was a bunch of actual “things,” obviously standing out among the racks of books. That, surely, it would be an easy thing to notice. But, no. Turns out, that’s not actually the case. Once I was inside, I foolishly walked around looking for it way longer than I should have without asking someone first.

But I digress again.

When I finally found it, I realized why it had been a little hard to spot. It was more of a Blockbuster-esque experience, where you take a DVD-style box off the shelf and trade it in at the check-out desk for the actual item (though maybe other libraries are different).

BUT HOW COOL IS THIS!?

If you know me by now, then you know I cannot simply visit a Library of Things without checking something out.

So I decided it would be fun to test out the Mickey Mouse waffle maker (my kids LOVE waffles), and a veggie spiralizer (something I’ve always wanted to try but have never used).

Now, you might be asking, “why is Jenny so excited about this? Can’t she just go buy these things?”

Well, I could. We all could. But once you view the world through a circular economy lens, your soul starts to hurt a little bit every time you buy something new — and especially when you buy something you didn’t need to *buy* at all.

Of course buying something means spending money on it. It also means finding somewhere to store it. Maintaining it. And figuring out how to get rid of it someday. All annoying things, am I right?

But the real reason I’m so excited about it is because I see enormous potential with this concept at scale.

Potential to shift the way we think about “owning” everyday things.

Potential to inspire people to borrow more and buy less.

Potential to create less waste and clutter.

And the real, most impactful kicker: Potential to preserve more of Earth’s finite resources buy not manufacturing so many new products in the first place.

If you think about it, a library is one of the OG circular economy systems. It’s a place you can go to access an item you’ll typically only use once or twice. You use it, you return it, someone else can now use it, you get something else, and on it goes. A beautiful circle. The library even has a “circulation” desk — because it facilitates keeping books in circulation for as long as possible.

Why shouldn’t we expand that proven concept to include other types of items?

After all, we buy so many things that just…sit there. High up on a shelf. Buried in a drawer. Only to be taken out a few times a year. They cost money, they take up valuable space, and they add to our clutter.

And think: If you do that in your house (I’m just as guilty of it too, of course), zoom out for a second and realize EVERYONE does the exact same thing in their own house. There are millions of blenders. Millions of projectors. Millions of stud finders. Millions of waffle makers. All just…sitting there.

And yet, we keep using more and more of Earth’s resources to manufacture more and more of the exact same items for millions of people to buy and only use occasionally.

There’s gotta be a better way. And a Library of Things is an excellent start.

We just need a lot more people to know about it (and then actually use it)! So I’m passing it along to you, my friend.

Now, I can already hear what you might be thinking:

• But Jenny, I don’t have a Library of Things!

• But Jenny, I don’t want to bother going to a library for a waffle maker! I want it in my house so it’s there exactly when I need it!

• But Jenny, I don’t think I even need any of these things (or I already have them)!

I hear you!

However, a Library of Things is not a requirement for integrating a “borrow instead of buying” mindset into your everyday life. It’s just one of many ways you can practice the habit.

For example, last month I got invited to a holiday cocktail party. Remember those?! Between the pandemic and kids, I had forgotten what those were like. I tried on some of the dresses in my closet and wasn’t excited about any of them — and to be super honest, none of them fit my post-baby body quite right.

I had a choice: Do I buy a new dress that I know I won’t wear more than once or twice? Or should I try “borrowing” instead?

I decided to rent a fabulous one from Rent the Runway, and it was only $45 (instead of $330 retail). It doesn’t take up space in my closet. I don’t need to resell it eventually. I don’t even need to dry clean it. I also don’t need to worry if people will ever wonder, “gee, didn’t she wear the same thing last year? AWKKKWARD.”

Wise choice all around, I’d say!

There are plenty of other examples.

🛠️ When you have a DIY construction project in your house and you need some specialty tools you likely won’t use again: Will you buy those tools new? Rent them from somewhere like Home Depot Tool Rental? Or maybe even borrow them from a friend?

🍲 When you’re trying out a new recipe that calls for a kitchen gadget you don’t have: Will you buy it new? Borrow it from the library or a friend? Or maybe just give up and make a different recipe with gadgets you already own? (That would be me). 😂

📚 And whenever there’s a new book you want to read: Will you borrow it from the library? Buy it new? Or maybe buy it from Amazon, but in gently used condition instead?

Like me, you might be trying to ingrain this way of thinking into your own daily choices. But we all know it’s easier said than done.

So I created this handy decision tree to help.

At the end of the day, the goal is not to be a perfect (read: impossible) consumer that creates zero waste. It’s to be an intentional consumer.

It’s training yourself to pause in that split second before you instinctively buy something brand new, and asking:

How often will I actually use this?

Do I need it taking up space in my house when I’m done with it?

Would a used version of this item get the job done just as well as a brand new one?

It takes lots of mental reminders, as well as lots of trying and experimenting. But once you take one small, positive action, I guarantee more will follow.

Make sure to check if there is a Library of Things near you — you never know, you might have even walked right past it without realizing.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Mickey Mouse waffles turned out delicious!

Until next time,

Jenny

PS: This is my 10th post on this blog. 🎉 Are you enjoying the content? Have any suggestions? Please let me know in the comments. And thanks for being here for the journey!

That special time when we sneak into the pantry to finish *one last piece* of chocolate when no one is looking.

When the car music switches from “Rudolph” back to the Moana soundtrack on repeat (ok, maybe this is just my car…).

When we flip our crisp new day planners to the first, blank page.

And when we finally have a moment to pause and think about our resolutions for the new year ahead. ✨

Personally, I’ve always loved the act of making resolutions.

I view them as an act of hope — that future me will be better off than current me. That all the good habits I’ve dreamed about for a while will finally start to solidify.

But in the words of Jeff Bezos: “Hope is not a plan”.

(As a former Amazonian, I’ve heard this phrase more times than I can count).

In fact, according to Forbes, a whopping 80% of people ditch their New Year’s resolutions by February — and further research shows only 9% actually go on to complete them (Batts 2023).

You might be tempted to look at those statistics and say, “why bother setting resolutions at all? I’ll probably fail anyway.”

Or, like me, you could ask — What are those 9% of people doing that I’m not?

Maybe I’ve just been leaning too hard into the hope, and not enough into the plan.

What kind of magic could happen if I actually tried to set myself up to succeed for the long haul?

My Approach in 2025

Last year, I did tweak my approach a bit from previous years. But not quite in the way I needed to.

Let me explain.

In January 2025, I discovered something called a More/Less List, which was first created in 2017 by an author named Julia Rothman.

I loved the idea behind it: to set overall intentions for the year instead of creating traditional resolutions (you know your Intentionalista loves a good intention). In the words on the back of Rothman’s newly released More/Less journal, it’s meant to be a “fresh, no-pressure approach to goal setting.”

It also seemed fun — and super easy.

So I tried it!

Here is my actual More/Less List from 2025:

I displayed this list on my desk in my office all year and would often give it a knowing nod after staring at it for a minute or two. Like, “ah, yes. Good reminder.”

But in looking back at this list a year later, it’s hard to tell if I was truly successful.

Some things were definitive — for example, “doing” over “overthinking”. I left my corporate job with nothing lined up. I started this blog (and I haven’t missed a week of posting since I started 8 weeks ago). I organized the first-ever Swap Event at my kids’ school. I finally toured my local MRF after thinking about doing it for a long time. I started posting regularly on LinkedIn. That feels like lots of doing and way less overthinking to me.

But then there were some tricky ones, like “joy” vs. “worry”. What exactly did I mean when I wrote that? I’m not entirely sure. I know there were *countless* moments of joy over the past year — and I was certainly more intentional about being present with my kids and soaking in all the childhood joys.

But I still did my fair share of worrying too. Have you seen the state of the world lately? I’d be worried if you weren’t worried. I did make a conscious effort to remove news alerts from my phone, and I almost never go on Facebook anymore. But I’d still call this one a toss up.

While I made some good progress in the right direction, I was still left with doubt as to how much.

Was I actually training myself to be objectively better at some of these things, or was I pretty much the same, save for a few minor victories here and there?

To be clear, there wasn’t anything wrong with the exercise itself. Or any type of resolution exercise for that matter.

It was the way I had gone about it — as if simply writing down my intentions would trigger the magical hope fairies to sprinkle some pixie dust and transform my life for the better.

I thought about how, if someone had shown me this list in a work setting and said, “Here are the things I am going to accomplish this year,” I would probably raise one eyebrow. And have some questions.

How are you defining some of these terms?

What is your success criteria?

Why did you choose these particular areas to focus on?

How are you quantifying “more” and “less”?

What is your accountability mechanism?

In other words, I would say “this is a good start, but come back to me with an actual plan”.

Why shouldn’t I hold myself to the same high standard I would have for a coworker?

My Approach in 2026

A few days ago, I did this exercise again to kick off 2026. Only this time, I tweaked my approach (again).

Here’s my new list:

For any readers who are already really good at some of the things on my list, you might look at this and think “gosh, these are the basics". And you’d be right. For too many years in a row, I haven’t been great at the basics (the pandemic and two kids are partly to blame, ahem). But I’m here on this journey in earnest, because I don’t want another year of wishing and hoping to pass me by.

And if you see yourself in this list, I see you right back. You are not alone, my friend.

Breaking Down the Takeaways

If you’d like to try making your own More/Less list this year, I put together the following takeaways (using my own lessons learned) to help guide you through the process.

✅ Make it measurable. Words like “joy” and “worry” are much harder to quantify and define than something like “daily steps” and “reading books”. What does “more” actually look like on a daily or weekly basis? Let success be objective, not subjective.

✅ Scale back to the most critical. Last year’s list had nine rows. This year’s has five. As you create yours, think about which ones are most important. In other words, which ones will have the biggest asymmetric effect on your life if you get them right?

✅ Make your “why” matter. Ask yourself, am I just setting this goal because it’s January and I know I should set new goals? Or am I trying to ingrain healthy habits so I live a long life and don’t miss any of my kids’ big moments? Meaningful alignment to a bigger “why” is what will keep the motivation alive.

✅ Create an accountability mechanism. Don’t wait until December 31 to revisit the promises you made to your future self. Set checkpoints to review your progress (and make any pivots) at regular intervals throughout the year. This year, my husband and I are doing monthly check-ins on the last day of each month, as well as quarterly reviews (just like I would evaluate that imaginary “coworker” I wanted more details from…).

✅ Create systems that support the “how”. In my list, I reference things like “bedtime mode”, “Bricking” my phone, and wearing a Fitbit. These are mini systems I’ve set up to automatically reinforce a desired behavior. Systems are the difference between setting intentions in January and being intentional year-round. Pair systems with an accountability mechanism, and magic starts to happen (no pixie dust required).

✅ Keep it simple. Notice how I didn’t include anything professional on my list? I could certainly do a whole separate list for work or other aspects of my life. But in my view, keeping it simple (just focusing on YOU) will naturally translate into improvements in other parts of your life.

✅ Come up with a theme word or phrase that connects all of your goals. My theme this year is “Putting my oxygen mask on first”. Now that my kids are out of the baby stage, I want to focus on reclaiming (some of) my time and renewing my sense of self. Think of your theme as a one-liner that can immediately snap you into focus and serve as a reminder of what you want to achieve. It’s also something my husband can say to me if I’m ever veering off course. Like a secret code. Shhh.

✅ Always Be Tweaking (ABT). This is a totally made up acronym, but I love it. Just because something didn’t serve you perfectly last year, doesn’t mean you need to abandon it completely. Tweak it for your needs. There are so many different goal setting techniques out there — just keep experimenting to find the one that works for you. And once you find one, keep tweaking to refine it further once you learn what’s missing.

Oh, and one last thing: You’ve got this. 🙌🏻

To being more intentional (not just setting intentions) in 2026,

Jenny

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PS: In case you missed last week’s post…

A quick note on what to expect from this blog in 2026:

As we begin the new year, I will be mixing in more intentional human content like this, in addition to my intentional consumer content of late.

I purposefully named this blog The Intentionalista to cover a range of topics under the “intentional living” umbrella (read my first blog post about that here).

So while you can expect to see *a lot* more posts sharing actionable, informative and inspirational nuggets of wisdom about the circular economy, you’ll also see more posts about being intentional in one’s life and career, setting personal goals, and creating systems to achieve them. All through the lens of my own transparent, down-to-earth (and hopefully entertaining) learning journey on the path to personal growth in both of these areas.

You can think of it as reducing “waste”, holistically: reducing physical waste by being more intentional about how we consume (and how we design things better from the start), and reducing time waste by being more intentional about how we live and work.

I’m so excited to have you along for the ride. Let me know what you think in the comments!

When a lot of people started baking sourdough bread during COVID lock down, I started learning how to meditate.

In preparation for giving birth to my first baby, I even did a “21 days of Calm” series where I meditated every day for three weeks straight before she arrived.

You might think that’s impressive. But truthfully, that hasn’t been the norm.

For the last 5 years, I’ve mostly gone through waves of sticking with meditation for 2-3 times a week, and dry spells where I might miss a whole month or two.

Ever since I started using Calm, I’ve considered it to be a tool I could reach for if I was in the mood for it, but it wasn’t something I baked into my days in any sort of structured way.

I would try to get to it when I could — but that meant a lot of times I didn’t get to it at all.

When I stepped away from my corporate job earlier this year, one of my personal goals was to change that.

I wanted to focus more on embedding meditation into my life, since I knew it had always been a powerful, positive force whenever I had taken the time to prioritize it. It noticeably improves my focus, my general outlook, and my patience during stressful moments.

I also wanted to be intentional about how I was spending my time. Not just letting days pass me by, but actually creating systems that put me back in the driver’s seat of my own destiny.

Calm seemed like low-hanging fruit I could optimize on the path to achieving both of those things.

How 2025 Started…

To be clear, I started off this year using Calm much like I had in prior years.

Here’s a picture of my meditation history from January 2025 for reference:

But throughout this year, I have tried a few different systems to increase my consistency and actually embed it into my daily life.

The following section is a breakdown of those different systems and what I learned from each.

Note: All meditations I refer to below are typically anywhere between 7-12 minutes long, if you are new to Calm or meditating in general.

📋 System 1: The To-Do List

The first system I tried was adding Calm to my daily to-do list. I am a big to-do list person, so this is usually how I’m most comfortable keeping track of things I want to accomplish.

How long I tried this system: February - May

Meditation time of day: Varied (morning, midday, before bed — whenever I could fit it into my schedule on a given day)

Meditation location: Varied (couch, bedroom, comfy chair)

Meditations I listened to: During this time period, I usually defaulted to listening to a meditation called The Daily Calm, which is a slow-paced, traditional meditation that includes a “body scan” and lots of built-in silence.

Average weekly meditations using this approach: ~2.5

Analysis:

• Since to-do lists are already part of my day, I was generally pretty good about remembering to add it. But there were some days I would flat-out forget, or some days where life just got in the way, as it often does as a mom of two young kids.

• Having it on a to-do list meant I was giving myself leeway to get to it whenever I had time during the day, rather than during a set time, which meant it was always something I had to fit in, instead of something I could reliably predict.

• It was something I knew I should do (kind of like flossing), but it often fell off the list if something more urgent or “important” came up.

• Slow-paced meditation made me relax, but I often felt my brain wander too much during the periods of silence.

• It was better than no system at all, but it was clear that it wasn’t effective.

🌙 System 2: The Nightly Wind-Down

Next, I tried doing it at a consistent time and consistent location, as well as mixing in some different types of meditations. (Side note: I know you’re only supposed to change one variable in an experiment, but this is how I roll).

How long I tried this system: May - September

Meditation time of day: At night, right before going to sleep

Meditation location: Laying in bed

Meditations I listened to: A mix of the Daily Calm, The Daily Trip and the Daily Jay. The Daily Trip is a little more “active” feeling, and doesn’t typically include things like a body scan but is still fairly low-key. The Daily Jay (led by famous author and former monk Jay Shetty) is the most “active”, meaning almost the entire session usually takes the form of a story or lesson.

Average weekly meditations using this approach: 3

Analysis:

• It was, quite literally, a calming way to end the day and clear my cluttered mind before sleep.

• However, there ended up being quite a few nights where I was so tired that I’d actually fall asleep while listening to it. I realized this meant I wasn’t actually absorbing most of the content.

• I liked trying a mix of different meditation styles and found myself choosing different ones based on my mood or alertness level.

• I learned that I really loved The Daily Jay’s style and content the most, but I struggled with it at night, since it requires more active mental participation. Because of this, I usually reverted back to the lower-key meditations.

• As tough as it was sometimes to stay awake, I did think having a consistent time and location was helpful, as I found that the action of getting into bed and winding down was a natural cue for the habit.

☀️ System 3: Post-Morning Drop off

At the end of Q3, I decided to shake things up again. I realized night time was not really serving me anymore, since I noticed my dedication was starting to wane. However, I wanted to continue to capitalize on having a consistent location and time of day, since I thought that part had worked well.

How long I tried this system: September - present

Meditation time of day: Morning, right after my husband leaves with the kids for school drop off.

Meditation location: Comfy chair in my bedroom

Meditations I listened to: Almost exclusively The Daily Jay

Average weekly meditations using this approach: 4-5

Analysis:

• An empty house after school drop off has been a pretty reliable trigger. It’s a time when I am awake and alert and in a mindset to start my day on a good note.

• This time of day allows meditation to be the first thing I do before I start any other concrete tasks. In fact, I create the day’s to-do list after I’ve finished my Calm session, so I don’t get distracted beforehand.

• I absolutely love The Daily Jay and find myself thinking a lot about the stories and lessons well into my day. It’s upbeat and feels less like I am actually “meditating” — just learning how to be more mindful instead.

• I think the combination of doing it in the morning and shifting away from the more silence-based, traditional meditations has been the biggest unlock for me.

After just a couple weeks of trying it this way, I noticed my consistency tick up naturally. I started to really look forward to it as a part of my routine, rather than something to check off my daily list.

Pretty quickly (mid-October), I decided to add a journaling component to the end of each session. I was getting so much value out of the stories and mindfulness tips that I wanted a better way to remember them and reference them later.

I typically just jot down a few thoughts about how the story applies in my own life, what inspiration it gives me, or follow any other prompts from the meditation itself.

Since I’ve done that, I’ve seen a TON of benefit in my own life, ranging from increased desire to meditate regularly to a tangible uptick in my patience levels and inner peace during my kids’ tantrums (if you know, you know).

It’s been a worthy investment of my time, and I would recommend meditation (and specifically The Daily Jay) to anyone looking to be more intentional in 2026.

In summary, here’s what has helped me integrate meditation and mindfulness into my daily life this year:

✅ I meditate at the same time every weekday morning. I currently don’t meditate on weekends because my life is more hectic with kids around, but I’ll keep experimenting with that.

✅ I meditate in the same location every day to minimize distractions and mentally arrive in the space more seamlessly.

✅ I use a meditation format that gives me energy and inspiration and aligns with my style and goals, rather than relying on the default, traditional format.

✅ I write a handwritten journal entry following each meditation, which helps me absorb what I just heard and tie it back to my own life.

✅ I wait until after I’ve done my meditation before writing out my daily to-do list, to minimize the temptation to get started on other shiny, “urgent” things first.

I would encourage you to test your own methods to find what you like the most, since there are many different types of schedules, meditation preferences and locations that could work better for your needs than the ones I’ve shared above!

How 2025 Ended…

Now here is my December 2025 calendar, after having the right system in place for a while. Pretty different, right?

While I’m thrilled with the results, I will confess that I was pretty frustrated to miss a day.

Especially because I knew this was something I wanted to write about in this blog! 😂

I was *really* tempted to start fresh again in January so I could share a completely filled-in weekday calendar instead of one with a gaping hole in the middle.

But as I thought about it more, I realized that sharing the gaping hole is exactly what this blog is all about: Progress over perfection. Personal growth. Experimentation. Grace.

I’m not here to claim guru status; I’m here to be authentic.

I’m here to be vulnerable about my own intentional living journey (and missteps) so more people feel empowered and comfortable starting their own.

The day I missed — Christmas Eve — was the first non-school day for my kids in a while, and there was a LOT going on that day. I was hosting guests for dinner, cleaning my house, looking after two small children who were bursting with excitement and bouncing off the walls, baking batches of two different types of cookies, and generally creating childhood magic.

Remember my system? My trigger is an empty house post-school drop off.

Well, that didn’t happen that morning.

It threw me off, and I got caught up in the busy-ness of the day. While I was conscious that I had skipped my meditation, I kept reminding myself at least not to forget before going to bed.

When I finally finished preparing the scene for a memorable Christmas morning and started getting ready for bed, it was nearing 12:30 am.

It was already tomorrow. I had broken the chain.

I felt defeated — and really tired.

I’m sure there are lots of lessons in this story about creating backup systems that trigger when your usual trigger doesn’t exist — and I’ll figure those out — but my main takeaway is that I’m still a work in progress, and that is totally fine. Making magic was more important to me that day.

I’m also REALLY proud of how far I’ve come.

I made a concerted effort to improve — and I did.

I think my genuine frustration over missing a day shows how integrated it has actually become in my day-to-day life.

It was a noticeable miss. And that means something is working. ✨

This morning’s Daily Jay was fittingly titled “Small Wins”. I’ll end by sharing a little snippet that I loved, which I hope will resonate with you too.

A quick note on what to expect from this blog in 2026:

As we begin the new year, I will be mixing in more intentional human content like this, in addition to my intentional consumer content of late.

I purposefully named this blog The Intentionalista to cover a range of topics under the “intentional living” umbrella (read my first blog post about that here).

So while you can expect to see *a lot* more posts sharing actionable, informative and inspirational nuggets of wisdom about the circular economy, you’ll also see more posts about being intentional in one’s life and career, setting personal goals, and creating systems to achieve them. All through the lens of my own transparent, down-to-earth (and hopefully entertaining) learning journey on the path to personal growth in both of these areas.

You can think of it as reducing “waste”, holistically: reducing physical waste by being more intentional about how we consume (and how we design things better from the start), and reducing time waste by being more intentional about how we live and work.

I’m so excited to have you along for the ride. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Cheers to this year’s progress, and next year’s possibilities.

Jenny

Mama was hunched in the glow of her screen, with 48 tabs open for gift ideas she’d seen.

The kids were dreaming of plastic toys and foam, of doohickeys and play sets to fill up their home.

But Mama paused briefly, a hand to her head, as thoughts of the landfill filled her with dread.

I want to be intentional, Mama said with a sigh, but I’m busy and tired, and Christmas is nigh.

She opened up marketplaces, scrolling with care, in hopes that a secondhand gem would be there.

She searched Beni and Craigslist and had luck on those sites! But the tech gadget she needed was nowhere in sight.

She wrestled her conscience—to wait or to click? The shipping clock echoed, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick.

She paused and she breathed, letting guilt drift away, realizing that progress happens day by day.

Her cart had gently used toys and FSC wood, and she’d done for the planet the best that she could.

Then what to her wondering eyes should appear, but great Amazon deals of the day — oh dear!

She clicked “Place Order” and her shopping was done — a mix of secondhand and brand new, but everything fun.

The screen faded dark as she leaned back in bed, while visions of getting sleep danced in her head.

She shut down her laptop, her heart feeling light, no longer a victim of holiday plight.

Then she yawned through a whisper, as she turned out the light: “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

This poem pretty much sums up my holidays — can anyone relate?!

I have spent the better part of 2025 taking small steps in my own life to be a more intentional consumer and human.

I completed a 7-week course on the Circular Economy, held a Swap Event at my kids’ school, discovered the joys of consignment at Rhea Lana’s and secondhand shopping using tools like Beni, visited a MRF to get a behind-the-scenes view of what actually happens to our recyclables, started diverting my own plastics via Ridwell, and immersed myself in lots of reading, experimentation and learning.

I am trying new things, getting out of my comfort zone, and even broadcasting my journey to all of you on this platform!

And all of that is in service of trying to make the world a little less wasteful, a little more intentional. One small action and mindset shift at a time.

But now we’re at the point in the year where things get real: the holidays.

It’s basically the Intentionalista Olympics.

A true test of my strength and stamina to maintain my intentional behaviors even when there are millions of daily temptations to revert back to the familiar. The easy. The over-consumption habits that society tells us are required to make us and our loved ones happy.

The truth is that being intentional takes some work. And time. And repeated effort.

Like the poem suggests, I had some great success with being a more intentional consumer this year (and I’m really proud of the positive changes I’ve made!), but I’m still not “perfect”, nor is that the goal.

I almost feel like I could add a new ornament to my tree this year that says “Intentionalista’s First Christmas” — a celebration of how far I’ve come, but a reminder that I’m still in my infancy.

So in the spirit of experimentation and transparency, I thought I’d share some of the ways I have *tried* (and sometimes failed) to maintain my Intentionalista spirit this holiday season.

Spoiler: I allowed grace and personal growth to peacefully coexist.

Testing Reusable Gift Wrapping

One of the holiday experiments I loved trying this year was using reusable gift wrapping. I started small, just for close family friends who attend our annual holiday party — but it was pretty simple and fun!

It’s a little easier to show than tell, so I’ve included a little step-by-step photo guide if you’d like to try it too (there’s still time)!

PS: I used wrapping fabric that I got from a Michigan-based shop on Etsy (BENEStudio). There are tons of sellers who make wrapping fabric in lots of cute patterns and colors. But you could theoretically use any type of fabric you want and not have to spend a dime.

If you don’t have a safety pin (or if you have kids and don’t want to use a safety pin for obvious reasons), you can also use a method where you tie the corners together, like the example below:

Here was the end result from our holiday party!

The pros:

✅ Super easy. I’m no Meghan Markle, but I thought it was a breeze to make it look nice, or “elevated” as she might say...

✅ A lot less waste! This was noticeable when I was cleaning up from the party at the end of the night. Even though we had lots of other gifts from other party attendees, there was still a lot less to toss than in previous years.

✅ No scissors or tape (which I usually have to replace at the end of the season).

✅ It felt special for the recipients since it’s so rare to receive a gift in reusable wrapping. I even tailored the patterns to my guests as best I could (I bought tartan plaid for our two friends who love Scotland, for example).

The cons:

❌ Requires more advance planning.

❌ Per con above, I didn’t have nearly enough extra scarves or fabric scraps laying around that I could repurpose for the rest of my gifts, so I’ll still be using some of the gift wrap I already have.

❌ Since it’s reusable, it’s a little awkward to decide if you should let the person receiving it keep it, or if you should ask for it back to use again (since it’s not cheap). I think it’s ideal to let them keep it and pay it forward to someone else with a different gift!

Overall, I loved using reusable fabric wrapping and will have to plan it out better next year so I have enough supplies handy. I also want to keep experimenting during other gift-giving occasions to see if there are other methods that work just as well. I’ll report back.

Giving More Intentional Gifts

In addition to more intentional gift wrapping, I had other some great successes this season that I’m really proud of. Mostly, I was trying to optimize for fewer brand new things and less waste, but I also balanced this with prioritizing higher-quality materials and item longevity whenever buying something new.

Here are some of my favorite wins:

🎁 Buying my kids’ main gift (a 5 ft tall gently used Frozen Castle!) off Craigslist

🎁 Gifting a book I loved (and already owned) to a friend

🎁 Gifting Ridwell Mail-In starter packs to several family members

🎁 Gifting my kids some hand-me-down books from my sister-in-law (you’d never even know they weren’t brand new, so neither will the kids!)

🎁 Gifting my younger daughter an awesome learning toy from Lovevery Pre-Loved

🎁 Gifting my older daughter a cute Hanna Andersson outfit I found from Beni

🎁 Gifting myself high-quality stainless steel pots and pans that I’ll never have to replace. At least that’s the brand promise…

🎁 Gifting an Italian friend an adopted olive tree in Italy that comes with the gift of 2L of olive oil.

🎁 Ordering our holiday cards from Paper Culture. They plant a tree for every order, use 100% recycled paper, and offset their carbon footprint. I love what they stand for!

Overall, I think intentional gift giving means thinking about the other person’s needs, wants and overall experience when receiving the gift (with any environmental benefits as an added bonus, of course).

Is this something they actually want and will use?

Is this something that will last a while, not something they’ll be burdened to get rid of?

Is this something thoughtful that shows them I care, rather than something I could have given to a random stranger?

And if they don’t want or need anything, is there a shared experience you can gift them that will create memories or time together?

Where I Struggled

At this point in the post, you might think “wow, Jenny really has her act together”. But let me assure you, there were plenty of places I still struggled. Remember my little poem at the beginning? Learning means lots of “failing” too.

Here are some of the areas where I was not so successful this year:

❌ Stuffing the stockings. Stockings are basically made for little tchotchkes (and kids enjoy those so much - who wants to steal joy?!). I’ll admit I still fell for buying a couple silly things that will probably break or get lost within days, as well as those nostalgic plastic candy canes filled with candy. But I did mix in some more utilitarian stocking items this year, like fun boxes of Bandaids (does anyone else’s child LOVE Bandaids?!) and warm socks, so not all was lost.

❌ Still buying new things. One of the hardest parts for me has been falling back on the convenience of places like Amazon and Target. It’s *really tough* to beat same-day shipping or fast curbside pickup when you’re a busy mom. Discovering the joys of secondhand shopping has been a delightful experience for me this year, but it does take a bit more time and advance planning — sometimes it’s easy to find what you’re looking for, and sometimes it’s not. I definitely spent less this year than I typically do by finding some gently used gems, but I still spent more than I needed to on new things.

❌ Not using reusable napkins. My mother-in-law — a loyal reader of The Intentionalista — lovingly called me out for having disposable paper napkins at our holiday party. Busted! 😂

It’s not perfect, but it’s real progress.

Some noticeable changes, yet still a little messy.

But then again, doesn’t that describe everyone?

I’m really pleased that all the little mindset shifts I’ve made throughout 2025 have resulted in ending the year with a more intentional (and slightly less wasteful) holiday season, and I look forward to continued learning in 2026.

I also hope you give yourself grace on your own journey to becoming more intentional — wherever you may be on that path.

However you celebrate the holidays this year, I wish you a joyful season with loved ones.

Until next time,

Jenny

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Well unfortunately, if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d notice a whole bunch of things in our lives as modern consumers that don’t “end well” at all.

For instance, take a look at these beautiful seasonal arrangements below — they are all the rage in my neighborhood every December. There are houses nearby with 5 or 6 of these lining their front porch and driveway. They add a gorgeous touch of holiday cheer! I totally get it.

But now let’s fast forward to January, when the seasonal decor comes down. Here’s how these “end”.

Side note: Yes, I actually took these photos at the end of last season (January 2025) out of curiosity to learn what people do when they’re done with these. The result was exactly as I suspected.

A sustainability-minded person might be tempted to judge the owner: “Ugh, they should have composted those branches!”

But I happen to think that would be missing the *actual* problem: that we don’t design most products with the “end” in mind. We make the consumer do the guesswork to figure out what to do with it.

And let’s be honest. Introducing guesswork or friction of any kind to the average person means it goes straight to the garbage. Not because they’re bad people. But because we haven’t made it easy for them to do the right thing.

This lovely holiday decor was simply made to get thrown away and then replaced next season. Is it any wonder that’s exactly what happened to it?

The sad truth is that the vast majority of products we buy “end” the exact same way: with hard to get rid of as the default setting.

Replace seasonal decor with [fill in the blank] item laying around your house or garage right now, and you’ll see what I mean. Those old shoes with worn out tread, that cardboard-ish box with a clear, hard plastic window that your kid’s toys came in, your stash of old power cords and chargers. We have no idea what to do with them, so we either let them take up space and collect dust, or we put them on the curb to let someone else figure out what to do with them. Am I right?

But now let’s imagine that same holiday decoration was made to “end well” instead. What if it came with simple instructions at purchase so the customer knew which parts were compostable (belongs in yard waste bin or bag) and non-compostable (garbage or recycling bin, depending) and how to easily separate them? Or what if it even provided ways to repurpose the non-compostables into other decor? Or even *came with* a complimentary brown yard waste bag for those who don’t have compost pickup?

Wouldn’t that make you feel even more jolly? 🎅

I am a huge proponent of making it EASY for people to do the right thing at the end of a product’s (or packaging’s) life. And I strongly believe that most people would — if the process was clear, convenient, and simple.

On my journey to become a more intentional consumer, I am always on the lookout for products, services and companies that share that goal. If there is one thing that competes with my passion for reducing waste, it’s customer experience. So I wanted to highlight a company I’ve long admired that does both things exceptionally: Ridwell.

I first learned about Ridwell a few years ago from a coworker on my sustainability team at Amazon (shout out to Cody if he is reading this!). Their flagship program is a porch collection box and biweekly pick up service for hard-to-recycle items that don’t belong in the curbside recycling bin.

If you read my post last week about the Material Recovery Facility (or MRF), you might remember some of these hard-to-recycle items. For example, soft plastic (e.g., stretch wrap, plastic grocery bags, produce baggies, etc.) was one of the main problematic materials that can’t be processed in traditional recycling streams.

Well — as a surprise to no one — there are lots more things that fall outside of the traditional recycling process, from batteries and light bulbs to prescription pill bottles and latex paint.

Ridwell saw this problem and decided to make it easier for people to part with these items in a responsible manner.

For years, Ridwell’s porch collection service has been available only in select cities (and since learning about it, I haven’t lived in one of the cities it serves). But earlier this year, Ridwell rolled out a program called Ridwell Mail-In, which allows anyone in the US to participate via USPS! It’s like music to my Intentionalista ears. 🎵

I was really excited to finally test it out and share my takeaways with you (TL;DR: I’m hooked)!

Trying Ridwell Mail-In

When you start out with Ridwell Mail-In, you receive a starter pack ($30) that includes a Plastic Film bag, a Multi-Layer Plastic bag, two hanging bag clips, and some handy instructions with examples of what goes in which bag.

You can hang up your bags in a place that makes sense for you (for me, that is the pantry). And then every time you come across one of the categories of items that go in the bags, just drop it in! It’s really that simple.

A Quick Note: The Ridwell Mail-In starter pack only comes with these two bag types, but you can order additional bags to get rid of things like prescription pill bottles and corks. The flagship porch pick-up version of Ridwell (not the mail-in version, unfortunately) also lets you get rid of things like old clothing, glass, batteries, lightbulbs, kitchenware, paint, and lots of other rotating categories throughout the year.

The only “hard” part about it has been retraining my brain that a lot of what I used to throw in the garbage can now get “Ridwelled” instead. Things like snack wrappers, chip bags, Amazon bubble mailers, or that annoying plastic that wraps each individual Kirkland paper towel roll from Costco. 🙄 I still catch myself (or one of my family members) putting stuff in the garbage accidentally, but it has quickly become second nature to fish it right out.

Part of this retraining has also involved facing certain cases where I was not sure which bag stuff belonged in (or if it belonged at all).

But Ridwell knew to plan for this and created a really cool AI-powered companion app called Sortwell to help you figure it out. You just take a photo in the app of the packaging you aren’t sure about, and it spits out a response about where it belongs in about 10 seconds. It will also say “Not Applicable” if something doesn’t belong in either bag. So. Helpful.

Here’s a quick look so you can see what I mean:

Once you fill your bags, you can arrange a next-day USPS pickup from your porch if you don’t want to drop them off yourself at a Post Office. I do the USPS pickup, and it works like a charm.

Ridwell texts you to let you know they received your bags, and then your stuff is off to its next life!

What exactly is its next life, you might ask?

The stuff you send into Ridwell is used by industry partners that repurpose them into other useful things. For example, they send all the plastic film they collect to a company called Trex, which transforms it into high-performance, wood-alternative decking.

And the multi-layer plastic? That goes to a company called HydroBlox, which uses it to create commercial and industrial drainage solutions.

Their list of industry partners goes on and on. But one place I know all that plastic doesn’t go is the landfill. Or the ocean. And that makes me feel like I’ve done a really good thing for the earth.

They *even* have a really fun and super transparent dashboard that shows you how much of what you send in actually gets recycled — including breakdowns by city. (How cool is this?! I love a good dashboard.)

I am thrilled to be a part of the Ridwell movement, and I am delighted at how great the customer experience has been.

If you’re interested in testing out Ridwell Mail-In (or if you are lucky enough to live in one of the major cities where they operate their flagship porch collection program), check out their website and give it a try! I have three 50% off promo codes for Mail-In starter kits that I can share as well - just drop me a message if you’d like one of them. 😃

To make sure “all’s well that ends well” with this post, I want to leave you with a summary of what I believe makes the “end” actually go well for products and packaging.

✅ Make it clear. Provide simple, fool-proof instructions about what to do at the end of the product or packaging’s life. Don’t make the customer guess how to interpret things like plastic type or assume they know which bin to put it in if you don’t tell them explicitly (spoiler: they don’t).

✅ Make it easy. If the instructions require disassembly, then make disassembly a breeze. If the instructions require mailing something in, make it seamless to arrange a direct pick up. Minimize friction wherever possible throughout the customer’s journey, or it won’t get done right (or done at all).

✅ Make it transparent. If your packaging or product is being repurposed after it’s collected, shout it from the rooftops! Let customers see their impact and feel like they play an important role on the journey. People are more likely to be good stewards if they know there is actually a rewarding next step.

What is something in your house that you’ve had a hard time getting rid of lately? Tell me about it in the comments!

Until next time,

Jenny

Well unfortunately — as someone who is a passionate believer in the circular economy — it’s something I can’t get out of my head. No, not the song, thankfully. But the concept of where things come from and where things go.

It can be quite a conundrum, especially living in a developed or higher income country, far removed from where most resources are extracted, where most products are manufactured and where they end up at the end of their life.

Because of this luxury, we tend not to dwell too much about our place in the life cycle of most (if not all) products we use. We tend to buy an item online or off the shelf of any store, use or consume it for a fairly short amount of time, and then send it (and its single-use packaging) on its merry way into the garbage can or recycling bin.

Then it just goes away.

Out of sight, out of mind.

But for this post, I want to propose a twist on that phrase. How about “in sight, in mind” instead?

I remember reading something many years ago that has never really left my brain: Every toothbrush you’ve ever used still exists on the earth.

It’s crazy to think about, right? Even that Care Bears one from 1995?! Yes, even that one. (Read this interesting article from National Geographic if you want to do more research on this topic).

But then of course you naturally start to wonder…what else that I’ve used still exists on the earth? (Spoiler: A LOT).

Take a look at some of these photos and you’ll see what I mean:

When we throw something “away”, this is what “away” actually looks like.

These photos are obviously quite depressing.

But — and I mean this sincerely — they also give me hope about the glaring opportunities that are right in front of us.

I guess you could say it feels like the classic opener of a Shark Tank pitch: “There’s gotta be a better way.”

Great ideas aren’t built on perfect systems. They’re built on flawed ones filled with gaps.

We just need more people to be aware. To see the problem. To feel the impact.

To realize there isn’t an “away”.

And then to take action to improve the system.

“Nice speech, Jenny. But don’t we have to understand the current systems before we can change them?”

Ah, I’m so glad you asked. Come with me…

Touring a Material Recovery Facility (MRF)

About a month ago, I joined a tour of a local Material Recovery Facility, or a MRF (pronounced Murf, like Smurf, not M-R-F) so I could get a firsthand understanding of our most prominent existing system to recapture and repurpose waste: recycling.

The first thing I’ll say about it was that I had found *my people*. The tour was supposed to be an hour, but the 10 or so of us ended up staying almost 3 hours (and could have stayed for much longer, asking our endless questions). The person running the tour actually had to kick us out. 😂 We were a passionate bunch, what can I say?

With that, I’ll give you a glimpse into some of the tour highlights and then share some reflections and tidbits I learned along the way.

🚚 Step 1: The Tipping Floor

Remember all that stuff you put out in your recycling bin on the curb last week? Well after it goes onto the recycling truck, here’s where it ends up next: in a GIANT pile at your local MRF. It’s called the Tipping Floor because it’s the place where the recycling trucks literally tip their contents out.

Seeing the sheer magnitude of an entire community’s worth of stuff is astounding. This particular facility, located in the Chicago suburbs, sorts 30,000 pounds of materials per hour. But an even larger facility, like the one in Chicago, sorts 1 million pounds per day.

It was really interesting to take a closer look at all the things that ended up on the Tipping Floor. Lots of appropriate and expected things, like cardboard boxes and soda bottles. But also some shoes. And old power cords. And an exercise mat. 🤔

⚙️ Step 2: Machine Sorting

All the stuff from the Tipping Floor then gets fed up a conveyor belt into various sorter machines that can detect what material it is, either through magnets (which attract things like tin cans) or fiber optics (advanced sensors that can detect differences between plastic, paper, etc.). This step is basically an automated first pass at separating the materials by type — and it is super cool to see in person.

One of the *real* reasons (besides our chatty tour group) that our tour ran for almost 3 hours was because the main sorter got jammed by some soft plastic sheeting. That one jam shut down the whole operation for more than 30 minutes, so we had to wait around a while before we could see everything spring back to life.

It was a good lesson that throwing things in the bin that aren’t actually recyclable can have a huge negative impact on the equipment.

Once it was back up and running, we got to see an Optical Sorter up close. If you look closely, you can see some materials going up, some going down. This particular sorter ejects PET plastics up to a plastics conveyor, sends fiber (paper) down to the paper conveyor, and lets the rest (non-recyclables) pass to trash.

👷🏽 Step 3: Manual Sorting

After the machines do their initial sorting, the materials then pop out onto new, separate conveyor belts according to material type. At this point, workers manually monitor the belts to catch and remove any anomalies that the machines may have missed. It was really fascinating to watch this part in action, so I included two video clips below so you can see it too!

The cardboard conveyor belt:

And the paper conveyor belt:

By the way, can you imagine how fast this person’s eyes and brain have to be moving to constantly process all this information?! I have so much respect. If it were me, I think I’d look more like Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory.

📦 Step 4: Making Recovered Materials into Bales

Once the sorting is complete, you can get a much clearer picture of what made the cut (or got “recovered”) and what didn’t. To use a bit of an outdated reference, it’s kind of like the good egg/bad egg meter from the original 1971 version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

It basically goes from this — a mountain of “good egg”, freshly sorted aluminum cans:

To this — a nice bale of aluminum cans all ready to move on to their next life:

Here are some other examples of the finished bales below.

Now, here is the “bad egg” pile (in the photo below), which unfortunately goes to the landfill. Our tour guide said that typically only 20% of materials at this facility are residual (landfilled), which is honestly a MUCH better rate than I would have expected!

Once the bales are finished, industry partners and reclaimers, like mills and factories, buy them to transform them for use in manufacturing new products. If you’ve ever noticed the term “made from post-consumer recycled content” on one of the products you’ve purchased, those materials came from a MRF.

Key Reflections and Takeaways

The first thing to note is that nothing I mentioned in the four steps above involves actual recycling. That’s because a MRF is a sorting center, not a recycling center. The industry partners and reclaimers who buy the finished bales do the work of actually processing the materials, cleaning them and recycling them into pellets or other usable raw materials for manufacturing. It’s a big distinction — and one I didn’t fully internalize before going on my tour.

Another thing that kept nagging at me was that a MRF tour should be required for all companies who produce physical products and packaging. Especially companies whose stuff ends up in the “bad egg” pile. Not necessarily as a chastisement (I’ll be honest, my former employer’s packaging was a glaring culprit 🫣), but to spread awareness and provide motivation to think differently when designing products and packaging. To think about “the end” right from the beginning. Again, in sight, in mind.

I also kept thinking that we have to make all of this easier. And by “this” I mean, clearly communicating what actually belongs in the recycling bin, establishing more take-back programs at retailers for hard-to-recycle items, and obviously, making products and packaging that create a lot less waste in the first place.

It shouldn’t come down to the person working the conveyor belt, because clearly it’s impossible to catch everything in an imperfect system. It should be on all of us collectively to redesign our systems to serve our world’s changing needs.

Actionable Tidbits

I want to end by sharing some other quick hits I learned from my time at the MRF. These should generally all be applicable no matter where you are (in the US), despite there being some inconsistencies across regions.

✅ “Liquid Gone, Cap On!” For bottles and jars, remove liquid and keep the cap on, since anything smaller than a fist runs the risk of falling through their screens.

✅ A little bit of residue is fine. One of the questions I asked was “how clean do jars and cans actually need to be?!” According to our tour guide, a quick rinse is generally all that is needed and that '“you shouldn’t waste 5 gallons of water cleaning a peanut butter jar.” I find it helpful to remember that the MRF is just the sorting stage — all the materials get thoroughly cleaned at the next stage before manufacturing, so it’s not critical to worry about making everything pristine.

✅ Flatten your cardboard and rip off any tape that’s easy to remove. The shipping labels are fine to leave on. If you remember back to the video I shared of the cardboard sorting belt, having the cardboard already flattened helps it fit through the sorters and lets the workers clearly see anomalies that don’t belong.

✅ Don’t pre-crush your cans. The machines are trained to identify cans in their original 3D shape, so it helps them recover the item more effectively. It’s not the end of the world if they are crushed, but it’s not worth going through that effort when the machines prefer them as they are.

✅ Soft plastic is the main source of contamination. Think plastic grocery bags, cling wrap, produce baggies from the grocery store, etc. They clog the machines and go straight to landfill, so they don’t belong in the recycling bin.

✅ Keep your recyclables loose in the bin (never in a bag). For safety reasons, MRF crews will not dig through garbage bags (especially black bags) and are required to dispose of them instead of emptying them out. Remember the Tipping Floor? It is good to keep it loose so everything flows nicely on top of the pile.

✅ Aluminum is really easy to recycle. Glass, not so much. Aluminum is pretty much infinitely recyclable and a very straightforward material to work with. However, something I learned was that there aren’t great systems for glass recycling in the US. This particular MRF (and I assume many other US MRFs) recycles glass by breaking it, which is a little controversial. They also don’t profit from glass or have reliable customers for recycled glass. In contrast, South America has easy systems for returning glass, sanitizing it and making it into a new bottle, which is a much simpler process. Food for thought!

Well there you have it.

If you couldn’t tell, I really enjoyed my tour. 🤓 You might have also figured out by now that I get easily excited about a lot of things related to circularity and reducing waste. But I’m telling you — once you see the glaring need for circularity everywhere, you simply can’t unsee it. And that’s my goal in sharing — to help more people see it too.

Until next time,

Jenny

Holding a Swap Event at my kids’ school made me feel really proud, and leaving Rhea Lana's with my $97 worth of great finds made me feel like I had hit the jackpot.

Taking these actions felt like a step in the right direction toward reducing my impact on the planet. But so far I had only focused on kids’ stuff. The low hanging fruit.

Eventually my husband or I would need or want to get something new. What would I do in that case? Would I be able to maintain the excitement — and do the hard work — of seeking out secondhand with any actual regularity?

I’ll admit that it seemed a like a big departure from what I was used to. Especially because I’m someone who tends to be a brand loyalist and a bit of a stickler when it comes to things like sustainability certifications and higher quality materials. Even at the Swap and Rhea Lana’s, I was the crazy mom discreetly checking tags for brands I already trusted. Was I really up for doing that every time (or even most times) I shopped?

Channeling my inner Carrie Bradshaw…I couldn’t help but wonder. Had I actually changed my behavior for good, or were these just fun, one-off experiments? How could I make secondhand feel more second nature?

Like any behavior shift, learning to shop secondhand with more frequency will take time to…well, shift. There is a lot of research out there about the practice and dedication it takes to change a mindset or develop new habits.

According a 2024 Scientific American article, “a landmark 2009 study on habit creation found that habits typically develop in a range of 18 to 254 days,” depending on the type of activity. Something like eating a piece of fruit with lunch takes an average of about 66 days to reliably incorporate into your life, whereas developing an exercise habit can take new gym-goers six weeks of exercising at least four times a week.

The bestselling book “Atomic Habits” also talks about four laws of behavior change to build a good habit: Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. So far, I had gone totally out of my way to shop secondhand, so the “easy” part still felt especially out of reach.

But I decided to give myself some grace. I have been buying new things my entire life. I knew it would probably take a while for anything else to feel natural. But I also knew that I had to keep trying, even if it was messy and I didn’t know quite where to start. The actual goal was progress, not perfection.

Then one afternoon, not long after riding high from my first wave of secondhand shopping, I listened to a Selling Circular podcast episode about a company called Beni. I remember my mouth kind of falling open as I listened, like this episode was meant to find me when it did.

If you are not familiar with Beni, it is a free extension you can install on your web browser, e.g., Chrome, Safari. Whenever you visit a product detail page on an shopping website like Nordstrom, Anthropologie, Ugg, etc., the Beni symbol will pop up on the right side of your screen, and it will show you where you can find the exact same item (or very similar) secondhand. It does this by automatically scraping more than 40 resale platforms like ThredUp, Poshmark, eBay, The RealReal, Patagonia Worn Wear, Vestaire Collective, etc. in order to find you the lowest prices on that item. I had to try it.

Here is an example of it in action:

This tool is a total game changer for the world of resale, but especially for shoppers like me who are actively navigating a transition between “the old way” and “the better way”.

It makes the process of buying secondhand feel effortless, because it literally meets me where I am: on a site I’m already comfortable using.

The Beni popup acts as a gentle reminder that the exact thing I’m shopping for already exists in thousands of other closets. It’s like a tap from a little Intentionalista angel on my shoulder saying “are you sure you need that brand new?”

It’s the same item I already want. The same brand I already love. Just secondhand. Talk about an easy way to make the habit stick.

In fact, if we compare Beni against the “Atomic Habits” laws for building a good habit from earlier — it is actually kind of amazing. ✨

‼️ Make it Obvious - Whenever I shop online, there’s now a little yellow popup I can’t ignore.

👀 Make it Attractive - What is more attractive than seeing the same item and brand I already want, just at a lower price somewhere else?

✅ Make it Easy - I click a link to take me exactly to the secondhand item I want on a third-party resale platform site, totally seamlessly.

🙌🏼 Make it Satisfying - Buying secondhand gives me immense satisfaction, knowing I got a great deal and that I did my part to reduce my impact on the planet.

Needless to say, it has become one of the newest default tools in my intentional consumer tool belt. I am currently in the middle of building a “Thrift Wishlist” on Beni and am using it for some holiday gifting this year. I will report back with some of my finds later this month!

Now, in case you’re brand loyal like I am, but you’re still hesitant about using third-party resale platforms, I have *another* great tidbit to share with you: there is something called branded resale. And it’s currently exploding. 🚀

Let me explain what I mean.

What started out as third-party platforms popping up here and there as places to buy and sell used items (starting with eBay as the real pioneer in 1995), has now grown SO MASSIVELY to the point of needing a Beni-type solution to aggregate all the platforms and make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

At the same time, this growth has also caused another market shift to happen — a shift where brands themselves are starting to see a huge opportunity to bring resale in house, recapturing revenue from secondhand sales of their items that would otherwise take place on third-party sites.

According to an June 2025 article on Retail Brew, a well-known retail industry publication, the first brand to take the leap into resale was Eileen Fisher in 2009 with “Eileen Fisher Renew”. Then it took a whopping eight additional years for the next brands — Patagonia and REI — to set up their own branded resale programs (Worn Wear and Re/Supply, respectively).

As of October 2025, according to ThredUp’s Recommerce 100, which tracks the number of brands with in-house resale programs, there are now…155(!!) that offer their own resale programs.

Source: ThredUp’s Recommerce 100

Pardon the expletive, but this quote from the Retail Brew article I referenced above summarizes the state of affairs quite well:

“Brands are like, ‘Well, sh*t, if this is going to be part of what my customers are going to do for the rest of their lives, we should probably pay attention to this,’” [ThredUp CEO James] Reinhart said.

Some of my favorite brands have already entered the in-house branded resale arena. For example, did you know that Hanna Andersson has “Hanna-me-downs”? (Um, adorable). Allbirds has “ReRun”? Even Lovevery, a non-apparel children’s toy brand I love, has Lovevery Pre-Loved. Chances are becoming pretty good that other brands you love are starting to invest in their own resale too.

And the cool thing is, these types of programs allow you to SELL or trade in your branded stuff too. It’s not just about buying!

Here’s a look at Allbirds’ ReRun page:

So if you have never been a secondhand shopper before, or you are tempted to try it but don’t know where to start — this is truly the perfect time to dive in (or even just get your feet wet). There are more ways than ever before to participate: in person, at consignment shops, online, at Swaps, at your favorite brands — wherever and however it works best for you.

You could even start with just selling your existing stuff, getting some cash, and giving other people more opportunities to find secondhand gems.

I want to leave you with this quote from “Atomic Habits”. It is a wise reminder that all meaningful changes take time, and that wherever you are on your own journey to becoming more intentional, you just have to keep going.

Before this year, I had never gone thrifting.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve used tons of hand-me-down clothing and household items that I’ve gotten directly from friends and family over the years, but until recently, I had never expressly sought to purchase secondhand items (except for maybe my used cars).

For many years now, I have been what I’d describe as a conscious consumer. I buy products that have sustainability certifications; I seek out sustainable brands (I even worked on the Amazon Private Brands sustainability team, helping to make the Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials brands more sustainable); I drive a hybrid car; I am a discerning reader of labels and ingredients; I bring my reusable tote bags to the grocery store; I default to buying organic produce; and I generally try to do less harm for the planet. But even as a sustainability-minded person, somehow buying secondhand items was never really part of my repertoire.

Let me first say that I think it’s a really positive sign that I felt ashamed to admit that — it means that the cultural tide, along with any former stigma that may have existed about secondhand shopping, is starting to turn. Thanks to Gen Z and to a large extent, social media, a growing number of people now proudly document their latest finds from thrift stores or resale platforms. It’s even becoming more common to see in traditional media, like featuring a main character who loves thrifting in the latest Christmas movie, “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” on Netflix.

Of course, plenty of people still proudly promote their fast fashion hauls from Shein and Temu…so we have a ways to go! But overall, secondhand has gone mainstream in a big way, and it’s here to stay.

According to the 2025 ThredUp Resale Report, which has captured trends in the resale market since 2019, the U.S. secondhand apparel market is expected to reach $74 billion by 2029, growing 9% annually on average. In 2024 — which saw the strongest annual growth since 2021 — it grew 14%: 5X faster than the broader retail clothing market.

Two other eye-popping stats jumped out at me from the report:

Source: 2025 ThredUp Resale Report

Apparently a LOT of people in my generation and younger are already participating in this revolution. Clearly I have been missing out. 🤦🏼‍♀️ And as a budding circular economist, I clearly needed to try it for myself.

As it turns out, the first opportunity to try it firsthand fell into my lap in a fairly serendipitous way.

When I pitched my idea for the Swap Event to the head of my kids’ school (read my last post on that topic if you haven’t already!), she told me the idea reminded her of Rhea Lana’s. To be perfectly honest, my first question was, “What is Rhea Lana’s?!” I had never heard of it, but it seemed like it would be right up my alley if it was being compared to the Swap.

She said it was a pop-up kids and baby consignment event that happens twice a year, and that everyone who knows about it gets really excited for it. Sure enough, I looked it up immediately after we talked, and there was one too not far from me that had an event coming up a few weeks later.

I was still new to the world of consignment at that time, so if there are any others in that same boat, let me quickly explain the concept. Consignment is a process whereby a seller entrusts a third party retailer to sell an item on their behalf. The seller (called the consignor) only gets paid if and when their item is sold. The retailer retains a fee or takes a cut of the sale in exchange for providing the selling platform. In the case of Rhea Lana’s, if an item doesn’t sell, the consignor can choose to take the item back or opt to donate it to a local charity.

For Rhea Lana’s or other consignment shops to function, they need a two-sided pipeline: consignors to sell their items and shoppers to buy them. I decided to take on both roles (as the overachiever that I am) to see what the experience was like from each side.

My Experience as a Consignor

As a first-timer, I started by spending a lot of time on my local Rhea Lana’s website reviewing guidelines and watching tutorials on how to consign and prep my items. I generally found the process to be pretty user friendly — that being said, it will be SO much easier my second time around now that I have the hang of it.

Here is a rundown of the 5 main steps in the process:

👕 Decide what you want to consign. Rhea Lana’s, like all consignment shops, has guidelines around what they will accept (e.g., certain brands, gently used but great condition, nothing that has been recalled, etc.), so start by going through your stuff and making a pile of items that meet the criteria.

💻 Enter your items into the database. Once you know what you’re consigning, you enter each item into an online database with information like size, item type, brand and price. I found this part to be the most tedious because I had to set my own prices. They do have a suggested ballpark percent of full retail that your item should be (depending on brand), but it’s still quite manual to look up full retail prices and estimate your own price. I think this step could be better automated by AI in the future, but overall it was pretty straightforward.

🏷️ Get your barcodes. All the items need to have barcodes for checkout. Once everything has been entered into the database, you can generate and print the barcodes yourself or pick them up at your local Rhea Lana’s in advance of the sale.

🧷 Hang and/or label your items. Next is getting the supplies for hanging and labeling the items. In this case, I needed safety pins, labels (for the barcodes), masking tape and kids’ hangers. Again, lots of easy tutorials for how to put the barcode on the label and how to hang the items in their specific way. They also recommend doing whatever you can to make the items look their most presentable (e.g., ironing, bundling matching tops and bottoms, etc.). The better you present the items, the more likely they are to sell, so it’s worth it to put in the effort. It’s easy, but it just takes a lot of time and care!

👋🏻 Drop your items off! This was the easiest part of my Rhea Lana’s experience. I opted for the curbside drop off option, and a few people came up to my trunk and unloaded everything super efficiently for me. I just signed some paperwork, and off I went! The whole thing took less than 3 minutes.

Summary and Reflections:

In the spirit of full transparency, I ended up earning about $150 (I tried to look up the number of items I sold, but I can’t access the database anymore - I believe it was something like 28 out of 37 items). Many people can make much more than that by selling higher-ticket items. For context, I mainly focused on clothing and some smaller baby gear this time around.

Looking back on it, one of my favorite things about consigning with Rhea Lana’s was the deadline aspect of it. There were certain dates you had to hit for your stuff to be included in the sale (and it only happens twice a year), so that was really good motivation to power through some of the more tedious and time consuming steps in the process. For some reason, if someone told me I could drop off my stuff at any point in the year, I probably would have more difficulty finding the time to do it! #busymomlife.

I also loved during the actual sale that I could see in real time on the portal which of my items had sold — it was a fun little distraction and game to guess which item would sell next!

It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to do it again next season. Good thing I’ve already got all my leftover safety pins and tags ready to go! (Says the girl who had never tried it before and now feels like a pro).

Have you ever seen so many sizes of safety pins in your life?!

My Experience as a Shopper

One of the other great things about being a consignor at Rhea Lana’s is that you get early access to shop the event! The sale to the general public lasts about a week, but consignors get in a couple days early, which I thought was a cool perk.

I didn’t know quite what to expect, but I went in hoping to discover some good finds at a great value. Going through the consignment side made me realize how good of a deal people were getting on my stuff, so I was optimistic that I’d find similar gems from others (spoiler: I did).

Funny enough, I actually went in hoping to buy some books, but I came out with $97 worth of clothes and not a book in sight. 😂 As an aside, my gripe with the books is that so many of them were in gallon-sized Ziploc bags with 4-5 bundled books in one bag. A lot of times there would be only one book in the set that I’d actually want, so I didn’t want to buy the whole set. But that was truly the only disappointing thing about the experience.

I ended up getting several winter coats, some ridiculously cute tutus, some holiday outfits (including matching dresses in two different sizes - score!) and some adorable top and bottom sets. Most notably, I was able to find lots of brands that I already buy and trust, but at a fraction of the price (for example, I got a kids’ Patagonia jacket for $15, which retails brand new for $89). Some other items I got even had tags still on! I felt smart (but also stupid for not doing this sooner), and I felt like I had won the jackpot.

Part of my haul! Hanna Andersson, Patagonia, North Face and Carters were among the great brands I found.

Other takeaways

🧸 It was definitely interesting to see lots of the same item (e.g., toys) with different prices — which gave me a taste for the thrill of the hunt (which one is the cheapest?!), as well as intel that maybe I had priced certain items too high!

🧐 I also loved the in-person nature of Rhea Lana’s — as someone who does the vast majority of my shopping online, it was refreshing to go and look at things in person. In all honesty, I also found this especially helpful for secondhand, so I could take a closer peek at the condition and material tags/care instructions.

👩🏽‍🎓 I also really appreciate that Rhea Lana’s goes all the way through teenage years, because I plan to keep consigning and shopping as long as I have stuff to give (and buy) — which is always, for the next decade plus.

I hope this post inspires you to check out consignment shops in your area (Rhea Lana’s or otherwise). You can find all the Rhea Lana’s locations on their website. I am not getting paid to promote this, by the way — I just loved it and wanted to share.

If you’re an experienced secondhand shopper, let me know your favorite place to shop in the comments below!

As I started to tackle the mountain of baby gear and clothing that my daughters have outgrown, I kept thinking about how all parents inevitably face the same challenge of purging their kids’ stuff - and yet how, as a society, we don’t have great systems to enable them to get rid of it responsibly. Sure, there are many people who save their stuff to pass on to a new niece/nephew or close friend. But in our situation, like that of many others, we don’t necessarily have a “village”, nor do we live within short driving distance of good friends who are pregnant. (Let’s face it, we are also getting old, so most of our friends and family are done having kids).

There’s also the option of dropping things off at Goodwill or local charities (and I occasionally do), but I so often hear that those types of organizations are overwhelmed with donations, and depending on the item, it might end up in the landfill anyway. What’s an Intentionalista to do?!

(PS: I know all my Pacific Northwest friends reading this are probably thinking, “ahem, you forgot about consignment!” You are ahead of the game, and I will get to that in the next post).

To me, baby and kids stuff is one of the clearest use cases for the circular economy and a great gateway into understanding its benefits. There’s a sheer magnitude of stuff, often used for a short amount of time, in mostly great (sometimes tags still on!) condition, and there is always a robust market of other parents who need and want it. Environmental concerns aside — from a cost perspective, it also just makes sense not to spend a small fortune on brand new things that will be used just for one season.

But to make that transition on a societal level, we need to create better systems (and spread awareness of existing systems) for keeping what’s already out there in circulation.

As I was thinking about how I’d approach some of the topics I knew I wanted to cover in this blog, I came across this great piece of inspiration from my “Something to Think About” calendar:

I am already naturally optimistic and responsible, but I wanted to challenge myself to take more initiative to solve the problem I was seeing all over my house. The bottom three phrases in the image above perfectly captured how I felt earlier this year (and also how I felt when I decided to start this blog)!

In the circular economy course I took with Vojtech Vosecky in the spring, I remembered learning about the circular transition strategy he helped create for the City of Prague. He mentioned that the city held Swap Events, since one of the tenets of the circular economy is to keep existing resources in use as long as possible. If you’re not familiar with a Swap Event, it’s exactly like it sounds - it’s an event where people can exchange items they no longer need for items they want.

I thought holding a Swap at my kids’ school would be the perfect opportunity to take action.

I reached out to a good friend and former colleague from Amazon who had recently held a successful Work Wear Swap at her office in Singapore. She gave me some pointers and encouragement, and I decided to take the plunge!

The rest of this post is a behind-the-scenes look at what I did, along with some helpful considerations and lessons learned if you are thinking about doing a Swap Event yourself. Note, Swaps are not limited to kids and baby stuff - this can apply to so many other types of items! I’m basically giving you a “Swap in a Box” blueprint below, so you have all you need to just go for it.

How I Ran a Swap Event

Getting buy-in from participants

👩🏽‍🍼Parents: Once I had the idea for a Swap, I first gauged interest with other parents. I texted a few friends: “Would you be interested in participating in a Swap Event to exchange gently used clothes, toys, books and baby gear if we held one at the school?” I got positive affirmation from everyone I asked that something like this would be fun and much needed. That helped take a little bit of the initial fear out of the equation.

🏫 School leadership: Then I pitched the concept to the head of our school (with some parent buy-in already under my belt). She was very receptive to the idea as long as it was well executed and someone could volunteer to take the lead on logistics. We also discussed dates that would make sense for the school calendar and agreed that she would send out my emails via the school-wide email list. I came back to her a week later with a project plan (a simple spreadsheet with key dates and tasks) for her visibility and got her official sign off.

Planning and communication

📋Format: Our school (and I) had never done one of these before, so I wanted to keep the format simple: “bring what you want, take what you want”. Some organizations and schools run this type of event very successfully as a fundraiser and therefore put price tags on items, but especially for the first time around, I didn’t want to over-complicate it or put up any barriers to participation. Everything was totally free!

📅 Event location and time: Our school does not have an indoor event space, so we chose to do it outside in the parking lot. I would definitely recommend an indoor event if it’s possible at your location - I was definitely a little stressed in the lead up hoping for good weather. Thankfully we had sunshine, but it was super windy, so all the clothes kept blowing off the tables! We chose to do early September so we’d have warm temperatures, but if I could do it again, I’d do late September so parents have a little more breathing room (and time to clean out their closets!) after the hectic start of the school year.

👕 Types of items: You’ll want to make it very clear which types of items are acceptable to bring. We wanted to offer enough variety that people felt like there was something for them no matter their kids’ age, but we also didn’t want to deal with bulky items like car seats and cribs due to the lack of indoor storage space (not to mention those types of items can also be riskier for safety/recall reasons). We decided to limit acceptable items to clothes, books, diapers, formula, toys and small baby/kids gear, and I thought that worked out really well.

🧑🏼‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Recruiting volunteers: Don’t attempt this on your own! We had only 6 volunteers and managed just fine, though 6-8 people is probably the sweet spot. Before I recruited volunteers, I had developed the project plan and had a solid understanding of where I needed help. Highly recommend this before you engage volunteers, so it’s just plug and play. The main buckets for volunteer help needed were 1) getting display materials (i.e., supplying the collection bins, tarps, tables, clothing racks, etc.), 2) sorting the items 3) setting up/tearing down on day of event, and 4) transporting leftover items to local charities.

We only held two virtual volunteer meetings (30 min each): one kickoff meeting to discuss overall event vision/logistics and assign people to tasks and one status meeting the week before the event to check in and troubleshoot wherever needed. We coordinated everything else via email and a shared Google Sheets spreadsheet to keep the time commitment reasonable for busy parents!

📣 Communication: I created a digital event flyer and had the head of school email it out along with a call for volunteers. We also posted physical flyers on the doors to every classroom. Our initial event announcement went out about seven weeks beforehand, and then we had about four follow-up emails and reminders leading up to the day. For an event like this that requires parents to prepare ahead of time (and especially a new type of event that we’d never held before), I felt that over-communicating and sending multiple reminders was definitely necessary and beneficial.

📦Leftover items: Lastly, you’ll need to plan what you’ll do with any leftover items at the end of the event. I asked Gemini to create a spreadsheet of local charities that accepted the types of items we were collecting, and this worked like a charm! We just had a volunteer call each place to confirm the information was accurate. I also recommend asking your volunteers if there are specific places near and dear to them that they’d like to support - one mom on our volunteer team worked at a nonprofit that provides interim housing, so a lot of our extras went there (and it wasn’t on Gemini’s list)!

Week-of and Day-of Event

🛍️ Item collection: Our event was the Friday after Labor Day, so the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before, we had bins set up in one of the storage rooms inside the school for item drop off. We asked parents to pre-sort their items into the bins (which were labeled by item type) to reduce the amount of sorting that needed to be done by volunteers.

Thankfully, the clothes were the only item that took any real effort to sort (I took them home and sorted them in my living room, but if your school or organization has the space, you can and should sort it all there). We also provided parents with masking tape, baggies, safety pins, Sharpies and Post-its next to the bins in case they needed to keep toy pieces or clothing pieces together or write a note to the future owner.

⛺Display materials: We didn’t buy a single new thing for this event! Volunteers (and in some cases the school itself!) provided the bins, folding tables, tents, tarps and clothing racks. One volunteer went to Kohl’s and was able to get a bunch of hangers donated as well! We did not worry about table coverings - we just cleaned the tables down first. One recommendation is just to make sure volunteers put their name on their display materials with masking tape, because a lot of tables and bins look alike!

📱QR code sign ups for Whatsapp group: During the event, we had a flyer on one of the tables with a QR code to join a private Whatsapp Buy/Sell/Give group. Think of it as a Facebook Marketplace just for the school! It’s a great way for parents to swap or sell their bulkier and higher value items that we didn’t accept during the event.

Post-event

🧐 Be transparent: Once the event is over, we sent out an event recap with photos and information on where the leftover items went, so people could feel their impact. We also re-shared the link to the Whatsapp group to encourage people to engage in swapping throughout the year.

🗳️ Send a survey: Lastly, we sent out a survey as part of the event recap to assess if there was interest in holding it again next year - we got a resounding “yes”! I also took the opportunity to get feedback on things like format and timing since it was our first rodeo.

Phew, well there you have it. I am happy to provide any further info to anyone interested (including my project plan template). I hope this was a helpful starting point and that you feel empowered to start Swapping.

Have you ever participated in a Swap before? Tell me about your experience! If you’ve never been to one, keep an eye out for one near you - I promise your closets, your wallet and the planet will thank you!

There’s a lot to unpack there, for sure (we’ll cover some of that in future posts!) – but suffice it to say that this year has involved a lot of learning, research, experimentation and following my insatiable curiosity where it leads me, and I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity.

Just as I suspected it would, learning about the circular economy in particular has lit a roaring flame in my heart. If you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry. I have found that while the circular economy is really picking up speed and becoming mainstream (about time!), it’s still a term most people outside the sustainability bubble are not familiar with. Let me briefly digress.

The best way to explain the circular economy is simply to contrast it with the economic model we’re all familiar with.

Our existing economic system is linear - where we extract valuable resources from the earth, use those resources to manufacture products, use those products for a relatively (or very) short time, and then discard them (and therefore the valuable resources they were made from) at the end of their “useful” life. Most often, discarded products and their packaging end up in a landfill, an incinerator, or worst of all, polluting waterways like rivers and oceans.

In contrast, a circular economy is a closed loop instead of a straight line. It encourages reuse of existing resources, reimagines “waste” as useful feedstock for new products, and most importantly, designs products with the end of life in mind, ensuring each part of a product can be reused, disassembled for remanufacturing into a new product, repurposed, recycled or otherwise be made to last a long time.

I first heard the term “circularity” a few years ago when I was at Amazon, since it was occasionally part of broader conversations related to upcoming regulations or the company’s long-term sustainability strategy, but it wasn’t something I directly touched in my own work at the time. All I really knew about it was that it minimized (or ideally eliminated) waste through intentional design – and I was fascinated.

As a California native and ocean lover, I have volunteered at many beach clean ups – I even used to carry extra doggy poo bags on my dog walks along the SF Bay Trail to pick up any trash I’d inevitably encounter. Anytime I ever hear of a whale or other sea animal washing onto shore with large amounts of plastic in its stomach, it makes me really sad and frustrated. If there was a system to create less waste in our world, I wanted to be a part of it.

Walking my dog Corona along the SF Bay Trail. Not pictured: all the extra doggy poo bags in my pocket for picking up any trash I’d find.

When I took time off from corporate life, I wasn’t exactly sure what I would end up doing next. I just knew I needed the time and space to figure it out. I started with the low-hanging fruit: I took a 7-week Circular Economist course led by Vojtech Vosecky (highly recommend); read books ranging from “Cradle to Cradle” (one of the OG circular economy books) to “The Portfolio Life” (a great guide on being more intentional in your career); listened to many different podcasts; and devoured content from circularity and intentional living experts on LinkedIn. I met with lots of interesting people – folks working on cool startups, fellow members of my 100-person cohort from the course I took, and even other people on career breaks like me exploring what a different path could look like. Most fun of all, I challenged myself to 1) take direct actions to be more circular in my own life and community and 2) implement new systems for productivity and personal growth.

Then suddenly one day a little light bulb went off. Something I kept noticing in my conversations is that when I’d ask someone if they had heard of X, Y or Z cool thing I had learned about from a different conversation, podcast or personal experience, I was very often met with “No, I’ve never heard of that! Tell me more!” I loved the feeling of sharing a link to a podcast with someone, or telling them about a product, service or resource that I’d recently discovered. It occurred to me that instead of quietly keeping track of the interesting things I was learning and doing, maybe I should try to share them with a wider audience. If my experiences can help bring more people into the circularity or intentional living fold, that can only be a good thing!

Starting a Substack was not necessarily on my 2025 Bingo card, but it makes me super excited and hopeful for the possibilities. I’m not someone who typically posts on social media or likes to be in the spotlight, especially when it involves being vulnerable about my own learning journey. But if the small actions and mindset shifts I’m doing can inspire others to do the same, there could be some amazing ripple effects for the world – and that is worth venturing outside my comfort zone. (Fun fact: I even made my blog logo a little water ripple to remind me that those ripple effects are the ultimate goal of this passion project).

I chose the name “The Intentionalista” because it speaks to my desire to be intentional about as many aspects of my life as I can. Just like a fashionista knows all about fashion and a TJ Maxx Maxxinista knows where to find all the best deals, an “Intentionalista” is someone who is intentional about how they consume and live. (In case you are wondering, yes, it’s a totally made up word and yes, I am kind of obsessed with it). 💃🏻

Since deciding to start this blog, I’ve already caught myself thinking “what would an Intentionalista do?” in various situations. It’s who I aspire to be – and who I hope to inspire along the way.

Thanks for joining me - stay tuned for more later this week!