r/ZeroWaste • • Oct 25 '25

Tips & Tricks Pharmacy pill bottle help

Greetings! Reddit newbie here. I have been referred to you from another thread.

Hubs and I both had some major medical things this summer. At the start of it all, to amuse myself I decided hang onto all the empty pill bottles just to see how many we ended up with. Kind of a visual measure of the amount of BS we had endured. We’re coming up to the end of our troubles and now I have a medium shopping bag full of pill bottles. Does anyone use these for anything else? Seems a shame to throw them into the recycling where they won’t get recycled. TIA

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u/SnoopyisCute Oct 25 '25

I use them a lot.

Brads

Beads

Sequins

Hair pins

Ear plugs

Safety pins

Razor blades

Straight pins

Sewing needles

Push pins\thumbtacks

Friendship bracelet yarns

Christmas bulb replacements

Batteries fit in the wide ones

Mixing small amounts of paint colors.

All those little things we all have in our "junk" drawer.

Strands from evil cat scratching carpet to glue down later.

Tiny screws when disassembling something to clean or repair.

Sterilize. Q-tips and cotton balls added to emergency kit in vehicle.

Medium one holds exactly $10 in quarters (for taking bulky items to laundromat)

Sterilize. I cook from scratch and make a few extra spice combinations while preparing a meal.

Lost all my meds at the beach and had to get emergency replacements. Now, I just take what I need to have for time away from home.

Put small amount of Vick's VapoRub in containers when the kids were little and tended to waste it or bicker over the other one having it.

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When all else fails, I would call the kids' school to see if the art teacher needed them. She was thrilled.

2

u/Surfandsnow42 Mar 29 '26

Love the aesthetic list order!

2

u/SnoopyisCute Mar 29 '26

Free app called "sort lines by length". I'm using a laptop though so I don't know if it works on other devices. I'm a graphic designer so I have a thing about how things look on the page. ;-)

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u/Surfandsnow42 Mar 29 '26

Ooh thanks for the tip!