The best thing you can have on your side when a survival situation occurs is experience, and experience only comes with practice.

So rather than throw out these everyday items save them and practice converting your everyday trash into something useful for you and your family.

Storage and preparation can both be pretty expensive. It would be a shame to throw away items that would save us money when you can turn your trash into treasures, but that’s what we do every day. Many items that we throw out can be used to create tools and even appliances that we could use in our storage, while camping and in emergency situations.

 

Soda And Juice Bottles

Soda bottles are great for storing water in, but that isn’t all they are good for. They can be cut into other tools as well. Just cut the top half off and turn it upside down and that soda bottle can become a funnel. You can also cut it into a scoop. The top can be used as the scoops handle. Use different sized bottles to get different sized funnels and scoops.

Twist Ties, Rubber Bands, And Grocery Bags

Sometimes we need to seal opened items in our storage. We use bucket and old oatmeal canisters (another good item to keep off the throw away list). When you don’t have those items available there are some temporary but quick fixes to sealing storage items. For items like an open flour or sugar bag, place a grocery bag over the top to of the open ingredient bag and slide a few rubber bands over the two, leaving plenty of space before the end of the grocery bag.

Items such as small open bags of rice or beans use twist ties to re-close them and them keep them in a tied grocery bag. This reduces the chance of creepy crawlies finding their way into your small open bags. Find ways to use these items before other items in your storage.

Candle Wax

That wax left over from candles can be used to water proof matches. You just melt the wax and dip the matches in. You could tie ten matches together and water proof them all at once, but I have found the water proofing is more complete when each match is dipped individually. Lay them out on wax paper to dry.

Jars

Candle jars are the best type of garbage to keep around. You can use them to sort nuts and bolts. You can use them as a resealable grease jar when saving drippings to make your own candles. They can be used for storing dry goods. All in all they hit the double use jackpot.

You can also reuse old food jars to can your next generation of food storage. You just need to clean and sterilize them. YouTube has a great video for this: How to Sterilize and re-use old glass jars for preserves and jam.

Boxes

Always save boxes. Boxes simply used as they were meant to be used is enough reason to keep them, but they can be used for other things as well. Boxes can be used for storage containers. They can also be used to transport storage items.

Boxes can also be used as the main body of a box oven. The best video I have found for instruction in making a box oven is on YouTube: Gourmet Cooking in the Wild- Box Oven Chicken. This video not only shows how to construct the oven, but also shows how to cook a chicken in the oven.

As DIY'ers we must make use of everything and knowing how to do so before we need to is a certainty. For more great tips visit our friends over at TheSurvivalMom.com