Hi Cat like this. How's it going? Pretty good. This is a mini episode so I guess we aren't we're not going to banter very much to start. This one is our first mini episode. It is our first mini episode. Yeah, I decided to throw something quick in for people who don't have time to listen to the full ones yet, but want some quick tips on being a little bit more eco friendly. Awesome. So yeah, that's the name of our game. We are greening up my act. We come up with products, services or ideas on how to make your life greener and more sustainable. Cutting through all of the marketing green hooey that's out there and finding what really works is really sustainable and is affordable. Yeah, and we are marketing writers. So we understand what people use marketing fluff. So yeah, today I wanted to chat about something I am like, oddly passionate about, which is reusing jars. Yes. This is huge. So I want to plug our recent recycling episode was on glass recycling. So if you go back and listen to that, but this is something that we thought was worth pulling out because beyond recycling glass, you can reuse glass jars that so yes. Yeah. In your takeaway was that like, yeah, you can recycle and recycling glass is good, but reusing it is even better. So. Exactly. But it's funny because I I was always like, I feel like companies don't make it easy for us. I don't know if you feel this way. But yeah, getting those freakin labels off are is a pain in the ass a lot of the time. And yeah, just finding a good jar that's worth saving. And all of the things I was just always like, and also the smell. I don't know if you have struggles with like, salsa, there's still smells like salsa, eight months later. I have to admit, I have a new dishwasher. So it does wonders. Oh, that's Sorry to make you jealous? Because I know you don't. But yeah, my Did you know that mine is old. So yeah, yeah. So for anybody who has an old lady dishwasher, I have solutions for all of these things. So first off, a good way to reuse to incentivize yourself to reuse jars is to find good ones. So yes, knowing what companies make you put their stuff in decent jars is helpful. And I have two good examples you might know of other good ones actually have three but okay. So Green Mountain gringo salsa is it's in our grocery store. So it's really easy to find, but they use actual I don't know if it's mason jars or if it's another type of jar like that, but it's like a really legit jar that you would probably go out and buy a 10 pack for dollars. Yeah, really good. Their lids. Their lids are really good if I remember correctly, and the sauce is delicious. It's my favorite salsa by far, as far as like, you know your jarred varieties. Right. And then classico pasta sauce. I actually don't Oh, yes. Okay, I don't buy that much pasta sauce. But yeah, it's a great it's like a perfect size. It fits in your hand. It's kind of square. Yes, you can fit so much in it, too. It's big. Yes. And the lids are good. Yeah, exactly. The lids are made of metal. So and the other one I like is the bone Mamasan Yes, jelly jars, which is like the classic red and white checkered Julie wrench. Yes, yes. And so good to just the best. And I used to collect, I got into this habit of collecting mini ones because our local bakery every time I would get a croissant, I would have a mini jar with some jam in it. And it would last probably like three or four times, but I would always collect them. And Joe got so annoyed at me after a while. He's like, What are you gonna use these for? And I did finally, you know, I did find a lot of purposes for them, but not all. Yeah, that's fair. Those are great jars. Yeah. Excellent choices. Yeah. So it's kind of like, pay attention to your jars is a really good way to know. Well, I mean, the product has to be good. First off, but don't just buy it for the jars. tossing out salsa to use the throw in the trash and just reuse it. Yep. And another thing about Green Mountain gringo is that they have labels that just peel off really easy. Yeah, it's glorious. Okay, so if you want to reuse them, there are lots of I'm sure you have plenty of suggestions, but there are a lot of ways to reuse them. So you could store all sorts of food so where I mean yeah, soups, for sure. That's the number one thing is just use it for food storage. Yes, it's like plastic. Yeah. Leftover egg whites from a baking recipe. I wrote down a bright herb storage which is the thing I just tried with my parsley and it is no joke lasted three weeks. Do you put it out with a little bit of water in the bottom? And then just Yeah, well I filled it to make sure that it was touching the water and then put a baggie over it. And yeah, it's like three weeks later it's still going strong. So jars can do wonders with that. Ice also store like rice and beans like dry foods and then a ton of stuff for my kid just like beads or god knows what little fruity things. I store all that type of thing. Yeah, anything that comes in a bag that you'd have to use a clip to reseal just put it in a jar. Right? You're airtight it keeps it from going stale. Yeah, and a little goldfish crackers or cereal even. Ya know if your jar is big enough or you don't have that much. Yeah. And it takes up less room in your and you can see clearly how much is in it because it's a clear jar. Mm hmm. Brilliant. Yeah, you're probably going to hear Charlie's crying in the background. Oh, speech. She just heard goldfish crackers and she needs to agree. It's been a rough night. That's fine. So I also store like sewing supplies, like seeds. If you're if you have leftover seeds from that you're planting. You can also make gifts and put homemade gifts in them or use them outdoors for candles. Yes, you could do makeup as well if you make your own lip balms with those little mini Jarmo you can make your candles again that's if you make candles. That's one way to do it. Again. You can't recycle a jar after you put a candle in it just because the oils so you can't wash it. It depends. I mean if you can, I don't know if you want to put wax down the drain. I mean if you can scrape the wax out it's just usually candles have oils in them that make them you know we're talking about essential oils are really hard. You can't recycle a jar that's had essential oils and right yeah, it's probably the same idea that I saved my spice jars. The glass ones that the plastic ones unfortunately I tried to buy hnbr locally to be in Central Market have glass spice jars. So you can if you buy like a baggie of spice like in bulk, I like to buy like my cinnamon and stuff in bulk and just go refill the jar. Yes, or I make for Christmas or holidays. A spice mix and give that out. You know, that was my holiday gift last year. I don't know how excited people were but I made a golden milk spice which is just I bought a bunch of Tumeric cinnamon, I put red chili instead of pepper, and a little bit of salt and like nutmeg and stuff. And then you just add like a you know, shake it up. Add a teaspoon of that to more milk and some honey and you've got a really nice spicy drink for the winter that has no caffeine and reduces your inflammation levels. So that's awesome. Yeah, that's a really good gift. Yeah, I love it. I don't think anyone used it. Everyone's like, what is the receiver? Yeah, we all want to be turmeric milk drinking people. And it's like you forget i i only have it once a week. I'm like, oh, I should have I should have golden milk tonight. And then I remember but yeah, absolutely. I've never even tried it. Yeah. But yeah, herbs, you know, if you want to make an herb mix or a spice mix, yeah, there's there's all kinds of things you can do with. Yeah, I do the same thing with spices. I will say it is so much cheaper. Bulk spice. Yes. Yes. I can't even tell you how many times I've gone in to buy a spice and it doesn't weigh anything. So they just hand it to me for free. Yeah, it's something that would have cost me otherwise like five to $10. Yeah. They're like I'm showing up so yeah, I guess we one time ordered. It was a little Thai chilies for we were making like kung pao chicken, I think. And we ordered our groceries at the time through Instacart. And they couldn't do less than a quarter of a pound. Sweet a quarter pound of Thai chilies which is basically a soccer ball. Or a rugby ball. It lasted we gave those away for sure. For like Merry Christmas, everyone. You get Thai chili, because we needed to two little ones that we had a quarter pound anyway. So that's hilarious. Yeah. If we had just gone to the store, they would have been like whatever. Right? Yeah. Well, they don't maybe probably wouldn't sell that. But yeah, but yeah, it's it is amazing. I've gotten like free or almost free cinnamon sticks. And yeah, if you only need two or three and you buy them from the bulk aisle. Yeah. Yeah, there's so much cheaper for sure. It feels like I'm robbing the store. But McCormick and chick are not happy about Right Shokri Okay, so if you want to know how to get the smell out, I found, well, I found a trick, but also Nancy kind of told me, so we'd like to talk a lot about Nancy birtwhistle. She's the winner, one of the winners of the Great British Bake Off, and she she has a really awesome Instagram account and a bunch of books about green living. So this is her recipe. I think I had just done this before, and I got it from somewhere else, but she says us, okay, well, this is my adaptation. Okay. My child screaming. No, I can hear it. Okay, good. This is my adaptation. Take like one teaspoon ish of baking soda, one teaspoon ish of vinegar, which I never measure. I just throw splash. Yeah, put the lid on, shake it around for 30 seconds, and then wash it and the smell is probably going to be gone. Yeah. And you'll be amazed how well it works if you haven't tried this, because I was always like, I would love to save this pickle jar. And yet it smells like pickles. And then I use that. And I was like, Whoa, it smells like. Yeah. And I've used it on salsa jars on pasta sauce. But she does have Nancy says if there's a stubborn smell that won't go away, you can make a paste from a sprinkle of water in baking soda and spread it around inside the jar. Leave it for 15 minutes, minutes and then wash and then the smell is gone. It's just like when you put baking soda in your fridge. It absorbs smells. Yeah. Or in your laundry or whatever. And you can do the same on your lids if your lid is the culprit of the smell. Yeah. Have you ever tried this before? I have never had a problem with smells in my jars. Oh yeah. Cuz you have this fancy dish. Dishwasher. Or I just don't sniff jars before I just randomly throw my brown rice in them. But yeah, no, that's that's kind of interesting that the dishwasher works though. It's good. My magic dishwasher. Yes. But before you put in the dishwasher, have you ever put a jar in with a label on it still in the dishwasher? Yeah, it gets everywhere. Yeah, that's what the you got to clean your filter out, ladies and gentlemen. Right. Yeah, I've had paper just stuck to every Yeah, just and it's stuck to every glass in there. Yeah, you just so the next three weeks? Yeah. So you have to remove these labels, which can like I said, be a pain in the ass if they're not Green Mountain Gringo, which failed to the Lord's because they're, I feel like companies need to be doing this to make it easier for us to reuse stuff. But I don't know. There's just not the pressure for it. Yeah, I mean, because our glass recycling in the United States is so overwhelmingly Great. Haha. Oh, I was like really? No, I that's what they're trying to sell us. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, it's frustrating. But if you don't want to use like Google on, which I actually have Google on and I have learned that it's kind of terrible. Yeah. Beware the Google on. Yeah, I don't know what exactly, but just not great. So I tried. This is, I think this is also from Nancy's book, but I tried cooking oil and baking soda. Just scrub like, spread the cooking oil all over the jar or all over the label whatever's residue, and then scrub some baking soda on top of that and let it sit for a few minutes. And then if you use a soft cloth, or scrape it off with a plastic scraper, then it should come off. And I did this and I did this for one that wasn't super intense. Like it was minor, but it did work. Because ball oil dissolves glue. So that makes sense. Yeah, and having a mild abrasive. It's just like, oh, when you think about it like the Yes. Yeah. Thanks. Funny. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you just, I mean, you'll have to wash the oil off, obviously. But then the end, you might need a little bit of elbow grease. But let's be honest, you have to use elbow grease with those off too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So yeah. And then you have a jar that's ready to be used. So that's all I have for this one. But I hope that some of that is useful for folks. Yeah, I hope that inspires people. That's great. It's really fun, actually. And you'll find probably that you have too many jars. Yeah, I mean, we have I know we have a hoarding problem. But right. Oh, and one other thing you can actually buy if you have jars, most of them are pretty standard size. Not all of them but a lot of them are. You can buy if your lid start going to pot, you can buy canning lids for regular mason jars and they fit on a lot of jars that you bought from the store. So I did that to a great hack. Yeah, because some of them are small. earned some are bigger so you can size them correctly. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. That's really good tips. I'm really I'm inspired to organize my pantry. Right? Yeah. And it doesn't have to be Instagram worthy. They don't have to be the same stupid jar. You don't have to go to Walmart and buy 100 of them all of the coffee in my cabinet that's in bags and jars right now. Right now. We have a coffee, coffee hoarding and glass hoarding problem and this. Just marry the two. Exactly. They work well together. Perfect. All righty. Well, thank you. Yeah. We'll try to also try to take a picture and put that on Instagram for everyone. So follow us on Instagram. If you don't we are at greening up my act. Yes. Thank you so much for listening. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Bye.