What to do with 128 pens?

I never need buy a pen again. Ever.

The pen round-up.

I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected.

Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box.

Pen operations

I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'.

Final Tally

We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils.

What to do with 67 broken pens?

In my city Biome recycles pens. It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box.

Decluttering and recycling together - I love it.

A lifetime of pens

An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years.

Our 61 pens represent 2,745,000 words. That's three times the complete works of William Shakespeare. To use up our pens we'd have to triple Shakespeare's output - and do it all by hand. Not likely.

Where did they come from?

Looking at our pens, the vast majority are gifts and/or promotional items.

The USA produces 2 billion pens a year. About 6 per person. There's no way humanity needs that many pens. Mostly they're just promotional gimmicks. A wasteful way of getting you to look at a company's logo every day.

So what to do with the 61?

This is one time when my low-waste mindset and minimalist mindset have a small struggle. It's wasteful to throw away functional items, but we don't need 61 pens.

The pencils can go to my niece and nephews for school.

The pens are difficult to give away because the world is full of them.

As with many items, the key is to stop accumulating more. In our wasteful and cluttered society this is harder than you think. You'll be given pens at conferences, work training events and exhibitions. They'll sometimes hide in a gift bag.

For some reason it seems to be human nature to take anything that's free. Even if we had no desire for it. Even if we have plenty already.

After that, I guess we'll just keep looking for more opportunities to give them when they're actually needed. Like we did before.

In short

This article was about pens, but most of this applies to many other items. We have way too many, but so do many other people. We only use them a little bit.

The solution is to stop getting more, recycle what we can and gradually use up what we have.

PS. For more articles on decluttering and downsizing, why not sign-up for my monthly(ish) catch-up email of articles from this blog.