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Right! Here's the answer! Old metal medicine cabinets from the 40s on up had a "razor slot" in them to safely dispose of used razor blades. There was nothing usually installed under this slot, they just went down into the wall.
It appears that much of the country hasn't heard about something the cool kids are doing called recycling. Razor blades are steel.
My God, it would take years to fill up a mayonnaise jar. A lifetime for one person using an old style double or single edge flat blade.
You CANNOT put razor blades in curbside recycling. it's a biohazard and major safety concern for the people who sort through recycling.
Some areas do provide for scrap metal recycling, where you can put something like a razor blade directly into a scrap metal container but that is going to be a special visit to the facility where that is allowed, and not something you can just stick in your recycling bin and put out by the curb.
I can only imagine how many used razor blades were lurking behind the wall in the bathroom of my old 1927 bungalow. I guess they finally stopped the practice when the "new" 1960's bathroom was installed as I don't remember that medicine cabinet having a slot. Gosh, I really miss that house.
My childhood home in NJ definitely had one of these and my father certainly used it.
Home was built in 1951 and when it was renovated in 2002, the guy doing the work found one heck of a pile (father died in '93 so 38 years worth).
But to me this is a commentary on the way people lived then and now. When these houses were built, I have to believe the mindset was that:
A) People planned on living in the house until they died, so no concern of a new family having to deal with it upon renovation.
B) They didn't plan on tearing down walls to renovate while they lived there as people were not as willing to change things and/or they didn't have as much money to do so.
C) Disposable razors didn't exist then.
People are much more mobile now, and homes are renovated more frequently, so this isn't a good idea now obviously.
I went back to double-edge a few years ago and the ones I buy each come in their own little sleeve so I put the used ones in that and then put them in a used medicine bottle and the one I have filled so far I wrapped it up in paper and taped it and labeled it "DO not open, used razor blades". It's in the under the sink cabinet.
When I was in commercial construction, we were always going through razor blades, especially carpet installers, who use blades that are pretty similar to a razor blade and because they need to have sharp blades for clean seams, they went through lots of them. Most of the time, people would store a few in the handle of the knife or they would stack them to the side, then use tape to wrap around the bundle of them before tossing in the dumpster. It worked pretty well as it was much ore difficult to get cut.
Carpenters and roofers leave all sorts of things walled up in the houses they work on. We've found empty liquor bottles, notes, poems. But the most amazing thing we ever found was a ninety year old homemade legal document, sealed into a metal container, walled up behind a ceiling over the basement workbench, stating that the (long-since dead) owner of the house was NOT the father of a certain woman's child, signed by the woman! We looked up who had lived right near there at that time, and found that there had been an African American domestic worker living around the corner, by the same name as the woman who signed it. The man was White.
We figured he must have given her money in exchange for her signing that note, then he sent her on her way. A few years later, he married and had two sons. We tracked down one of the sons, from whom we had bought the house, and gave him the note in its case. That son was in his 80s at the time. Weird to think that he had an older sibling out there, probably mixed race, that he'd never known about.
Kind of sucks as a home inspector because they will sometimes fall into the crawlspace.
It would have to be awful rare, since stud walls all have a bottom plate sitting on the subfloor. So somehow there would have to be a gap between the bottom plate and the inside face of the wall material, that just happened to be located directly above a similar gap in the subfloor, and then a razor blade would have to magically fall just through that little gap. Since most older houses have subfloors of planks, usually tongue and groove, set at a 45 degree angle to the walls, it's hard for me to imagine how this could happen except that once in a lifetime occurrence.
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Here's the answer! Old metal medicine cabinets from the 40s on up had a "razor slot" in them to safely dispose of used razor blades. There was nothing usually installed under this slot, they just went down into the wall.
