A Barrel of Opportunities

The forgotten old barrel, often found discarded in the corner of a garage or the back of a warehouse, can have a useful life far beyond its job of transporting items.

As author Samuel T. Pees describes in 1883, refined products were shipped as far as the railroads went. From there, products were transported by oxcart or horse-drawn wagon to distant areas. The recipients usually didn’t return the barrels for their $1.25 refund because the empty barrels had many uses at the homesteads, including being cut in half for washtubs. Today, barrels are frequently reused as planters, for container gardening, for storage, and as furniture and wall art, in addition to other creative reuses.

As columnist Cindy Hamel observes, gardeners are "waste-management specialists," and turning old whiskey barrels into planters is just one way of managing waste in the garden. With just a little imagination, barrels can be a tremendous help in the garden. Filled with potting soil and buried at an angle, barrels can serve as large, rustic planters.

One idea offered by GardenWeb’s website is to place a rock proportional to the barrel’s diameter in the barrel and allow flowers to cover the rock, providing a mounding effect. A climbing vine planted at the edge of the barrel can mask any flaws.

An easy way to grow potatoes is to drill drainage holes in the bottom of a barrel, fill with at least 4 inches of soil, place four sprouting seed potatoes over the soil, and cover the seeds with another 4 inches of soil. Water regularly, and as the plants grow past the topsoil, continue to cover them with additional soil until reaching the top of the barrel. After the tops fall over and the plants flower, the potatoes should be ready to be dug up with little effort.

If you are looking to add some atmosphere to your garden, two half wine barrels can be reused as a rustic waterfall fountain, as described on Home and Garden Television. Metal and wooden barrels can also be employed as beehives.

Using the term "circular gardening" to depict reducing, reusing, recycling, the University of Georgia Extension Service and Atlanta Urban Gardening Program use empty 55-gallon soap barrels discarded from universities and hotels as gardening containers, keeping them out of the landfill. The barrels also reduce the cost of creating raised beds for gardening by replacing expensive landscape timbers used for the same purpose, enabling the Extension Service and the Urban Gardening Program to serve more people.

Sixteen-inch barrels also serve well as waste baskets. The 1,206-room Fontainebleau Hilton Resort and Towers in Miami Beach reuses barrels of laundry detergent and cleaning chemicals by rinsing them and using them as bins for recycling and garbage collection.

A 20-inch, old wine barrel is perfect on the patio to store barbeque bricks and starter. It can be a functional patio table with the simple addition of a square top.

A segment on the Home and Garden network describes how an elegant wall sconce can be created from a salvaged wooden barrel. White’s Tavern in Belfast, Northern Ireland—one of the oldest pubs on one of the city’s oldest streets—uses old barrels for decoration.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Merrill Environmental Center created sunshades using salvaged barrels from an Eastern Shore pickle plant that was going out of business.

Used food-grade plastic barrels can be used for emergency water storage, as emergency kit containers, as dry goods containers, or as rain collectors.

Beaulieu Vineyard, in Rutherford, California, has received the California Integrated Waste Management Board’s Waste Reduction Awards Program "WRAP of the Year" award for its reuse and recycling practices. Beaulieu Vineyard sells its old wine barrels, avoiding landfill disposal costs in the process. To locate a vendor for used wine barrels, check with the local wine producers in your area.

The Duluth News Tribune had traditionally received colored inks in 55-gallon steel drums, which were returned to the supplier. The need for an alternative market was pressing, and newspaper publishing operations require continual shipments of ink. When the supplier ceased accepting the spent barrels, the Tribune contacted the Northeast Minnesota Waste Exchange.

The program assisted in completing an exchange between the Tribune and the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District. The barrels were used to transport bulked "waste" paint for recycling. This exchange not only benefited the Tribune, saving them disposal costs, but the sanitary district as well. The district avoided the purchase cost of new containers, resulting in a combined savings of almost $5,000 a year.

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Last updated: August 01, 2008

California Materials Exchange (CalMAX) http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/CalMAX/
CalMAX@ciwmb.ca.gov (877) 520-9703