We’ve had an email from Josh:

Hi, I’ve got one for you, playing cards. I play a lot of poker with my buddies and our cards get bashed up pretty quickly, the edges bent over primarily so we can’t play with them anymore. They’re plastic (?) coated so can’t be recycled with cardboard, right?

Just because you can’t play with them any more though doesn’t mean that they’re at the end of their useful life.

Yes, you’re right that they can’t be recycled as paper if they’re plastic coated - but they’d make fun bookmarks, the non-face cards could be used for shopping lists and if some still have strong edges, you could drag them between keyboard keys to pull out the stupid amount of cat hair and sesame seeds collected in the gaps (maybe that’s just my keyboard).

Other suggestions?

(Photo by mordoc)

Here we are, again: New Year’s Eve.

The supermarket at the edge of our estate is selling giant packs of party poppers for 80p so come tomorrow, some households (and probably entire streets) will be covered in strings of paper and little empty plastic shells.

The obvious answer is not to get them in the first place but assuming they’ve already been popped, what are the options?

The paper is usually none too fancy - not glossy or heavily printed - so can go in the compost, or if you’ve got a lot of it, could be used as packaging for small items.

The plastic bits though - essentially a small cup with a (holed) stem at the bottom of it - aren’t quite so easily reusable. I mean, aside from fun hats for finger puppets. Can you think of anything else you could reuse them for?

Aside from that, do all have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and all the best for 2009. Oooh, and stay tuned for a vaguely Recycle This related announcement tomorrow :)

We’ve already covered recycling or reusing dead ones but Trevor has a question about recycling schemes for pens that still work:

Here at the School of Health Studies we get inundated with promotional pens from various medical and drug companies.

Most of these pens never get used and just fill up our desks draws. Is there any way of recycling them so that they can be used in third world schools or something?

I suspect most medical and drug companies aren’t going to pay any attention to a request for “no more pens, thanks” so it makes sense to want to pass them on to someone who’ll use them.

So does anyone know of any schemes to send school supplies to third world countries - or deprived ones closer to home?

(Photo by Zonnekoe)

We’ve had an email from Peri, asking:

I have many old school textbooks that i don’t need any more. how do i recycle them cheaply?

Peri doesn’t give any more information about how many is “many” or how old is “old” but I imagine it’ll be more than would be accepted in the standard waste system and old enough that they’re either too tattered or too out-of-date for use by other children.

So any suggestions about what can be done with them?

(And on a related topic, anyone got fun ideas for ways to cheaply protect new textbooks in the future? I remember that sticky-backed plastic was the standard thing we used for textbooks and exercise books but wallpaper was also fairly hardy - and often gave a fun surface to doodle on - and one of my school friend’s used newspaper, specifically the pink-coloured Financial Times, which looks great.)

(Stock photo by lusi - and our first reuse: “world’s most uncomfortable pillow” ;) )

Finally on this week’s Recycle This stationery theme, we’ve got this question from Nicole:

Now all my college’s lecture rooms FINALLY let you use powerpoint, I can get rid of all the OHP lecture notes I’ve created over the years. What can I do with them?

According to Wikipedia, most transparencies are sheets of cellulose acetate. The Google results are confusing but I think cellulose acetate can be recycled but I suspect it’s carried out more at a manufacturing level than post-consumer. Anyone know for sure?

What about reuses? I imagine they can be used like old photo negatives to make lampshades and the like - probably would work better for those with photocopied pictures, diagrams or text on rather than hand-written notes. Other ideas?

Other stationery items

• How can I make a notebook out of recycled materials?
• How can I reuse or recycle used envelopes?
• How can I reuse or recycle the spiral of a spiral bound notebook?
• How can I reuse or recycle hanging files?
• How can I reuse or recycle glue stick tubes?
• How can I reuse or recycle printer cartridges?