How can I reuse or recycle festival wrist bands?

festival wrist bandsLyndall’s second (well, third) query is about festival wrist bands.

particularly the plastic ones for i would have thought the cloth and paper ones could go into a compost bin.

In my festival going days, at this point in the “summer”, I’d have a wristful of bands and I’d wear them until they got too grimy or fell off of their own accord (back in those days, the Reading Festival bands were the best – understated cool – I wore those for months). But once they’d left my wrists, I just dumped them in my “memories” suitcase because I’m too lazy to scrap book.

Nowadays similar wrist bands seem to be handed out for every little thing, just as a longer-lasting hand stamp thing – at conferences, fairgrounds and last week, I saw them being used on a city tour pub crawl thing in Berlin.

So aside from scrapbooking the memory, what else can be done with them? If you had a big stash – perhaps collected off your friends – could you weave them into something?

(Oh, and re: composting the cloth and paper ones – only natural fabrics (such as cotton or silk) should be composted and I suspect bands would more likely be synthetic for durability/cost reasons. Heavily printed paper can cause problems too (the ink can be toxic) so don’t compost them if they’re all inked-up or coated in plastic.)

(Photo by hakore)

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4 Responses to “How can I reuse or recycle festival wrist bands?”


  1. sami says:

    If you make or collect earrings (the kind with studs and backings), you can cut off the part of the strap with holes to put earring pairs together. This could help keep things organized if you store your earrings in a bowl or a drawer.

  2. Lizzy says:

    If you were making a notebook from cut-out envelope backs, random bits of paper stapled together etc. The wrist bands would be awesome on a cover.

  3. Valeria says:

    Use as bookmarks.

  4. Valeria says:

    Use for scrapbooking.



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