Where do old clothes-hangers go to die?
Bear with me; this will make sense soon, I hope. Nearly 2 years ago, we put our stuff into storage and, with 2 suitcases each, we set off for the first of several extended trips to Europe. Having spent the time living in 5 different rented apartments in London and Wellington, last weekend we finally moved into our new (100 year old) permanent home. You’d think that in 21 months we hadn’t time nor space to accumulate much detritus, but no; it still took several car trips to transport our peripatetic selves to the new place. At the same time, the household movers delivered our possessions from storage.
Unpacking and putting everything in a sensible (at least for now) place is a chore, lightened by good and bad surprises - “I’d forgotten we had that,” and ” Why on earth did we bother to pack this?” However, one thing was no surprise. As we unpacked our clothes from the storage boxes and hung them with our clothes we had kept or acquired since, the pile of unneeded cheap wire and plastic clothes-hangers grew and grew.
Now I know we had a purge of such things before we put everything into storage, so how come we’d acquired so many since, and in such a short time? The answer is of course that virtually every garment you buy comes on a hanger, and every time you send something to the dry-cleaners or laundry, it comes back on a hanger. It’s a wonder we ever need to buy hangers at all. Inevitably you end up with far more hangers than you can possibly need. So where do all the surplus hangers go?
There’s much comment about unnecessary plastic and paper packaging, but at least there’s a recycling industry which can use it again. So what about all these metal and plastic hangers. Opportunity for some smart thinking, perhaps?
February 1st, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Funny you should bring it up - my first job (after the paper run) was at Farmers. I used to work for an hour a day after school in ‘the hanger room’ where I would sort and box the millions of hangers they no longer needed. I remember spending days wondering what this hanger funeral home was like, I was that bored. Of course now thinking about it I suppose they reused them. Pity I didn’t think about that at the time, when I was stomping on them to crush them into boxes.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
I simply, periodically, take the dry cleaner’s clothes-hangers back to them. When buying new clothes, I almost always leave the hanger behind in the store.
You should always keep a couple of wire hangers around, though. They’re useful for unblocking sinks, etc., once you’ve unwound them.