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Want to induce culture shock among the millennials (and others) in your life? Introduce them to the widespread Postwar-era practice of razor blade disposal lovingly depicted in this blog post. Back then, a significant minority of shavers would discard their used double-edged blades through a slot in the back of their bathroom medicine cabinets.
Out-of-sight, out-of-mind, the rusting, blood-flecked blades
would accumulate, sometimes for years, in the narrow space between the walls of
one’s bathroom and an adjacent room. The yield:
a distinctive detritus for future homeowners and home restorers. (And
perhaps down the road for a forensic DNA researcher or two)
You can still buy slotted medicine cabinets on eBay. But they’ve gone the way of household ephemera
like coal chutes, dumbwaiters, milk doors, and root cellars.
With the slotted cabinets, the idea was to maximize personal
safety by minimizing handling and injury from the used blades. They were, after
all, marketed as safety razor
blades.
That disposal strategy, with its relative disregard for inheritors
of the mess, flies in the face of today’s expanded consciousness, which emphasizes
recycling and a systems-oriented mindset that accounts for the consequences and
destinations of disposal. Still, razor blades are not on the list of items that
I can drop into my recycle bin in “progressive” Amherst, Massachusetts. So,
like many of my friends and neighbors, I pitch them, ensconced in their plastic
containers, into the trash. I for one would be grateful for clear instructions and
a behaviorally convenient solution to
the matter.
Of course, there’s always the Norelco solution, which has
been with us since the days of razor-blade wall slots. (see below)
