Why the Danish Cookie Tin Never Has Cookies

On Tiktok, a mother cuts up plastic clamp boxes that once held berries to use as storage for her kids’ crayons. Other videos encourage you to transform T-shirts into totes or to use a candle jar to make your overnight oats. “The most sustainable container is the one you already have,” one caption reads.

“You can have many fancy words in the era of sustainability,” said Shirin Jaiswal, a law graduate from Madhya Pradesh. “But Indians or the wider subcontinent have been living with the idea of reuse for ages.” Your parents did it because their parents did, and now you do , too. After all, you never know when you might need that grocery bag, yogurt container, or Danish cookie tin. Even presidential nominee Kamala Harris is familiar with the practice. In a cooking video with Mindy Kaling, she fawns over how both their families saved Taster’s Choice coffee jars to store spices. So where does this compulsive need to save packaging and containers come from?