Mary Hunter runs the Materials for the Arts program at the Monroe County Waste Reduction District here in Bloomington. We know it as the recycling center. To find her, you walk past the Trading Post, where you can trade household goods, and open the door to the Materials for the Arts office. It’s maybe a 12x12 room, and it’s chock full of stuff. The walls are covered with handmade objects, made from bottle lids, cardboard, old silverware. There’s a dress made out of soda can tabs, jewelry made of old glass bottles. It’s kind of an art museum. And it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Mary accomplishes. The goal is to “divert reusable materials from the waste stream.” Mary has arrangements with companies like Cook and Baxter – both of them make medical equipment – and they send bins and bins of objects they don’t need. Small bottles, tiny plyers, rubber stoppers. She takes paper. Cardboard. Sheets. Then she connects with nonprofits, churches, schools, and artists working on community projects who need materials.

When someone gets in touch and asks for something, Mary’s coworkers join in. Once, they collected tons of milk jugs for an igloo-building project a school was doing.

Which brings us to a bigger question. When I heard about that project, I wondered what happened to the milk jugs after the school was finished with them. I didn’t get a clear answer. Odds are, they did end up in recycling or a landfill. But here’s the thing. It took them longer to get there. That's not nothing. Mary helped me think about materials differently, how we can reuse them, and how that reuse is also a way of caring for people.