For many people, an excess of plastic medicine bottles would mean a full trash can, but for one family, it simply meant more storage space.
The shovel
TikToker Brooke Prince (@brookprince_) posted a video showing her father reusing the orange plastic bottles.
“If you grew up with a chronic illness, or any illness at all, you might be able to relate to recycling your medicine bottles,” she says in the video.
She walks into her dad’s work area and shows him screwing several of the white bottle caps to the underside of a shelf. He then fills the orange bottles with various work tools – screws, wrenches, hot glue sticks – and places them tightly into the assembled caps. And voilà – now he basically has floating storage.
@brookeprince_ Pill bottles = great containers for building/crafting supplies. #Crohn’sDisease #Crohn’sDiseaseAwareness #IBD #chronicIllness #IBDAwareness #chronicIllnessAwareness #chroniconline #pillbottles #reuse #recycle ♬ What a wonderful world – Hana
How it works
Pill bottles, while useful, are annoying pieces of plastic. According to GoodRx, most of them can’t be recycled through traditional curbside pickup, meaning you’ll likely need to take them to a special facility to ensure they’re properly recycled.
Or you can simply reuse them and extend their lifespan so they don’t end up in the landfill. Some people have shared tricks for using pill bottles to carry single servings of salad dressing, pack matches for a camping trip, and even carry small amounts of laundry detergent so you don’t have to lug whole bottles to the laundromat.
You can even donate the bottles to organizations like Matthew 25: Ministries, which distributes them to places around the world where they are needed (and where they are far less plentiful).
Given that the world is already drowning in plastic, anything that keeps plastic out of landfills is a step in the right direction. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, nearly half a billion (460 million) tons of plastic are produced each year. These new plastics are piling on top of the existing ones, leaching toxic chemicals into landfills, rivers and oceans, threatening nearly every link in the global food chain.
What our users say
Since most people have had the problem of throwing away a used bottle, commenters were excited to have a better idea of what to do with it. “This is so clever!” raved one.
“Great way to reuse things,” agreed another. “Another option… mason jars, pasta sauce jars, pickle jars, even baby food jars (the old fashioned glass kind) work too. Screw lids under workbench/craft shelf and voila!”
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