An email from Melinda Goodick:

In the course of seasons, we have accumulated many inflatable mattresses and beach/pool toys and also sledding tubes from the winter. They were fun, but once they go flat, the fun is gone. What can we do with them besides their intended use?

I’m presuming by “go flat” Melinda means they haven’t got a valve for refilling with air. We’ve also run into similar “what shall we do with this?” issues in the past with inflatables when they’ve split along the seam and the holes too big to realistically puncture repair.

So, ideas?

(Photo by winjohn)

We’ve had an email from Phillip Levenson:

I own a joinery manufacturers and i produce a lot of wood shavings which is mixed softwood and hardwood shavings and some dust i am struggling to dispose of it quicker than i can produce it.

I have a couple of people who take it from me who own horses. Do you know of any other ways of maybe recycling the shavings?

Untreated and unpainted wood can be composted but any reuse ideas?

(Photo by slafko)

We’ve had an email from Christina Biggs, who works for the Wildlife Trust.

I have 27 hard top yellow helmets which are out of date and need replacing according to health and safety regulations.

I run a waste and recycling classroom so ideally I would like to keep some of these on site and turn them into recycled products, I have thought about hanging baskets. What can these be recycled into? Any suggestions?

I was going to say hanging baskets (with a hole drilled in the bottom for drainage) but Christina beat me to it. Given they’re going to be pretty hard plastic, I don’t know how much they can be modified but I wonder if they could be made into fun birdboxes or something. Any other suggestions?

(Photo by brokenarts)

It’s really starting to feel like spring here and I’ve been sorting out the garden in short bursts over the last week as well as repotting some houseplants for their shortly-to-commence mad growth spurt.

Our compost bin compost tends to have big chunks of material in it so I just dig it into the beds and use shop-bought compost for the houseplants. As I can only carry the small sacks of it back from the shops, I quickly end up with a number of the compost’s plastic bags lying around the garden - they’re quite a heavy yet flexible, opaque plastic and the inside is usually black. They’re pretty strong but do tear if treated too roughly and/or pokily.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve used them to line hanging baskets (black-side out) and collected random plastic pots in them to stop said pots ending up blown all over the street but I’d love to hear it if anyone has any more ideas for reuses.

It’s been *slightly* windy in the UK over the past few days and there are lots of shattered slate tiles on the pavements around here.

My mum and dad, who live on the battered west coast, have spotted similar blown off tiles around them but the debris tends to be red roofing tiles rather than slate ones.

These tiles tend to be ridged or curved and around an inch thick - so not useful for all the flat things slate tiles can do, like be coasters. They’re also a rougher texture so can’t be used as mini-blackboards or anything like that.

So, presuming this is quite a common issue around the country at the moment, what can you do with blown down roofing tiles? Whole ones might be able to go back on the roof but what about broken ones?

(Photo by tome213)