Simple Compostable Basket for Easter & Purim

I decided this year to make some simple Purim baskets for neighbors this year. It's a tradition for Purim to gift your neighbors small baskets of fruit and sweets. I haven't done this since Hebrew school, but I have a kid now and got the idea from an article ("A six-step guide to making mishloach manot that don’t suck", The Forward), so I decided at the last minute to make some modest gift baskets.

It took some consideration to figure out what to put them in, though. A common option is a paper plate with plastic cling wrap over it. However for some reason I wanted the contents to be in some kind of basket. Obviously, you can get little disposable plastic baskets drop shipped to you from around the world for $1 or so per basket, but I've been trying to reduce my waste output. So what kind of baskets does that leave me with?

Reusable is an option. But then I need to recover and store baskets or just "gift" someone an item that they'll have to throw in the trash for me.

The solution I went with was to make the baskets compostable!

Compostable single-use items delight me. Because many major cities now collect and process compostable waste. This means that rather than going into a landfill, this single use waste can be digested back into basic organic material ready to reenter the production cycle. Obviously this stuff is more complicated than I want to go into, but the point is that you can enjoy a lot of the convenience of something like a takeout bin that you just want to use to get your leftovers home, but both the production and disposal don't (theoretically) require any significant injury to our poor battered ecosystem.

All that is really required is a paper bowl, paper tape, and paper towels.

You might notice at this point that you can really get nine-tenths of the result for one-tenth of the effort to just put your treats in a paper bowl. That's true. But I wanted to see whether this would work, and I overall like the result, so I'm sharing it.

Paper bowls

Paper tape

Paper towels

Paper Easter grass

Cut a sufficiently long strip of paper tape. In my case, it was about 40 cm. Then lay a paper towel across it, with one edge of the paper towel lined up as closely as possible to the edge of the paper tape. The paper towel is there to form a surface against the adhesive so that the inside of the strap isn't sticky.

Once applied, use a craft knife or scissors to trim the excess paper towel from the other edge of the tape.

Lay the tape across one of your bowls and mark where to notch the rim. I experimented and found that I liked cuts that were angled inward relative to the edge of the bowl rather than straight, but it doesn't really matter. Just find the cut style you like. Once you get one you like, you can use that bowl as a template to guide your cutting on the next ones.

Once the edge is notched on opposite sides of the rim I trimmed some of the rim from the notched segments so they didn't curve out.

Line the tape handle up with one of the notches and stick the tape to the outside of the bowl. Do the same on the other side.

I found some paper Easter grass at the grocery store when I was buying fruit and cookies. Perhaps it makes no sense to aspire to limit needless consumption and then recommend buying dyed shredded paper and then using it to fill a paper bowl to which other paper products have been glued. I'm still undecided on whether I feel foolish suggesting it.

You can also twist up the handle for a slightly different look. I'm undecided on it, but it's an option.

But if you'd like to make a thoughtful gesture for your neighbors to celebrate the arrival of spring but don't want to be responsible for producing a lump of inert synthetics that outlive our addled civilization, consider just making it out of paper products! And if your recipients seem like the kind of people who throw their coffee grounds in the green bin, let them know that this can go in with them.