What to do with the 'box of doom'?

On the after-life of blister packs, broken machinery and brutalised baby books

Do you have one of these? It’s the contents of a container I keep in our upstairs airing cupboard and slowly fill with the standard, hard-to-recycle, in-need-of-fixing, bits-missing detritus of a domestic life shared with two small children. It’s the sort of stuff many people might sigh at and then chuck into a dustbin and forget about. Alas, not me, which is why we’re here.

Inside, there’s a fancy dress princess outfit with a ripped sheer overskirt that could be given the sort of non-invisible mend I’ve spent hours watching someone else doing in the decorative darning demonstrations that Instagram now spams me with. There are also multiple retired kids’ bamboo toothbrushes (I have read ideas for disposing of these but still can’t get my head around them – there’s literally no way to fully remove the nylon bristles, right? And only so many gardening projects that can make use of an old toothbrush as a plant label, especially in an urban outside space that only measures about 3m x 3m). Also, two flimsy little plastic clapping toys in the shape of hands, one broken, the other a couple of plays away from joining it. Various lift-the-flap books our toddler son has partially destroyed, possibly with their missing flaps pressed between the pages, patiently awaiting Sellotape, or possibly without missing flaps because every time I see one in the safe space I left it, I forget to reunite it with its book and the job remains undone.

There are other similar boxes around the house, which generally is filled with drawers and cupboards harbouring equivalent collections, some with a less kid-focused theme. For example, in a cupboard in the utility room (a space I’d fantasised would change my life when we renovated a few years ago because I imagined cupboards filled with neatly stacked bulk buys and a well-ordered spot for cleaning equipment – ha!) there’s a small steam cleaner that stopped working about 18 months ago, and which I often think I’ll take to my local Repair Café. Over in a hard-to-access corner cupboard in the kitchen there’s a broken Nutribullet, more of which another time as that’s a story in itself). Upstairs, an entire drawer in our bedroom is filled with blister packs I intend to recycle at Superdrug and, somewhere, I forget where, I keep encountering my mother-in-law’s impractical cheese grater and retired spectacles (she’d been about to drop both items into her kitchen bin, I had to stop her. Do you see where this is going?).

I resent the sustainability movement, and my dogged obsession with supporting it. This is what’s ruined the Sunday night clean sheets-level feeling of wellbeing I used to get after a good clear-out. Something I’d do a few times a year with a gusto that definitely threatened my relationship more than I realised when my (now) husband first experienced it.

While I’m not quite a hoarder, I’m definitely a person who clings to objects with the hoarder’s black bin bag-swerving mantra of “but it might come in handy”, or “I’m going to fix it” or “I’ll find the missing part”. But will it, and will I?

And if I don’t, what do I do with all this stuff? I can no longer sweep it into the wheelie bin or cart it to miscellaneous – aka, destined for landfill – container at the tip. I just can’t. So I need answers. And this is where I’m going to search for them, with you.

So tell me: do you have a box like this? Do you have landfill-swerving solutions to share? Do it! And do it in the comments below…