- Clean plastic food containers make great toys for your toddlers or preschoolers. Give them a few plastic containers and lids, a big box or two turned upside down for a kitchen “counter,” and a couple of sturdy utensils and let them cook away. Kid-sized aprons will add to the fun. Set up the play kitchen near your real kitchen, if you can, and let them cook while you do.
- Use plastic food containers to store leftovers in the freezer. The smaller sizes are perfect for freezing an individual serving of whatever you happen to have leftover. If you don’t have time to prepare your lunch, just grab a container out of the freezer and let it thaw during the morning. A quick reheat in the oven or microwave will give you a warm lunch, and you can wash out the container and take it home to use for the same thing again.
- Plastic food containers make great lunch containers. You don’t have to go the freezer route; just scoop in enough of whatever you made for dinner into a container, refrigerate, and take it with you. They could be used for messier items in kids’ school lunches, as well.
- Plastic food containers work well as drawer organizers. They can round up jewelry, extra buttons, bobby pins, safety pins, business cards, whatever you’ve got. You can keep the lid and close things up if you want, or just slide the lid underneath the container and keep it open.
- Plastic food containers can be helpful gift wrap organizers Use the smaller containers for pieces of ribbon, small bows, or small decorative objects you might use in wrapping a gift. Use the larger containers for pretty fabric bags, paper gift bags, and scraps you want to reuse.
- Plastic food containers can be modified to makepots for starting seedlings. They are a better size than the tiny little things you often end up with, especially if you want to get your plants to a really good start before transplanting outdoors. Just punch a few holes in the bottom for drainage, and maybe put down a layer of pebbles before you fill it with your soil.
- Bigger plastic food containers work well to hold food scraps you accumulate through the day and then dump in your compost. You could even keep a separate one for your coffee grounds, since there are so many other uses for them.
- Small and medium sized plastic containers are great for travel containers for your homemade baby food and toddler snacks. Use the ones with good, tight-fitting lids and fill as needed. Older toddlers can often manage opening and holding the containers, so they are great for snacks on a longer trip.
- Annie | My Bio & Articles
What other ideas do you have?
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I love bare feet, Dr. Bronner's, cotton skirts, summer rain, winter snow, new places, open-minded people, deep conversations.
I had a (short-lived) natural products company while I was in college: The Full Nelson Natural Products...
I find the plastic cracker or cookie trays that are inside the paper boxes very useful as organizers because they are made with separators, usually with at least 3 ”columns”. They’re really not that different from bona fide store-bought drawer organizers.
Good ideas here! I already do some of them and have gotten some great ideas for other things to do.
Most recently I took a lot of my containers along to Thanksgiving for leftovers
but there are dozen of uses.
I love these ideas, some I knew before but needed the reminder, others I just didn’t think about, great article.
I already do a lot of this, but hadn’t thought of planting seedlings in them! Thats another great use. After all… One can only use so many containers as containers
I hadn’t thought of the seedling thing either, but it’s a great idea! I’ve wanted to start a few plants inside this spring before transferring to the garden. We can still have frost in May, so it’s not quite time for outside yet.
I might grab a few containers and start some tomato plants now after reading this again!
We use old soup pots form teh supermarket to freezer home made soup. It works well as the portions sizes are the same match
I always reuse all mine. I use them to store chopped herbs for instance like dried mint and parsley from my garden. I use the plastic egg containers to seperate out all my earrings so the pairs can easily be found.
Why buy storage containers when you have them already after you’ve used the contents? Other ideas are penny banks, cookie keepers, beach and sandbox toys, or ”stacking blocks”…the uses are endless.