We’ve had an email from Wen Rou (from Chile!):
Hi, I’ve got a box with cans of expired beer, how can I recycle it? The empty cans I’ll take them to the recycling center. I can just throw the beer away, just wondering if anything useful can be made with it.
If you’ve got a snail & slug-infested garden, the most obvious suggestion is to use it for beer traps to catch those slippery suckers. From what I’ve seen, they’re not fussy whether it’s lager, ale, in date, premium or the cheapest nastiest stuff sold in our supermarket for 88p for four cans (John tried the latter and said it tasted like bitter, gone-off water).
Beer is also supposed to be good for hair – mix with water as a final-rinse aid. It apparently leaves it silky and shiny – but I don’t know whether that needs a yeasty ale-type beer or whether a lager will do. (Anyone know?)
Any other suggestions for either this expired beer or other related stuff, like the sediment-y bit at the bottom of bottles/barrels?
(Stock photo by macleod)
Categories: food, hobbies, items
Posted by louisa
on 22 October 2008
Aside from glass bottles then newspapers, one of the first things to hit my recycling radar was learning to tell the difference between steel and aluminium cans for recycling purposes. I think there was a Blue Peter Christmas appeal to collect aluminium cans or something, so for a good few months I watched with glee as magnets slid off the side of cans. In the name of children’s television related charity, I perfected the art of crushing cans or at least getting them wedged onto my shoes so I could pretend I was a tap dancer. Ah, happy recycling days…
Reusing them though, that’s a bit more tricky. I wonder if recycling of them is so commonplace that people don’t think to reuse them – or if they’re only recycled because there aren’t many reuses for them… Any suggestions?
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Categories: food, items, kitchen, packaging
Posted by louisa
on 23 May 2006
I asked a similar question on Twitter the other day but since I’ve lost more leaves to the blighters over the weekend, I thought I’d asked for more suggestions – I want to belt & braces it!
In response to my Twitter question, @KakeLover replied: “beer traps! gets the slugs everytime!” and @maryhoresh said “this year trying egg shells they aren’t supposed to like waking over them.also heard to paint glitter around edge of pots”.
So I’ve got beer traps down (made from old drinks cans, filled with out-of-date beer), John on order to eat eggs for breakfast and if I can find some glitter, I’ll make my pots into disco pots. I’ve also heard they don’t like copper (they’re supposed to get a little electric shock from it) but I don’t have enough old copper pipes to go around – will see what I can dig up though.
Any other suggestions? What have you tried? I’ve heard introducing certain parasitic nematodes can kill off slugs for a short time – anyone had any experience with that?
Categories: garden, items, reverse this
Posted by louisa
on 8 June 2010
(Apologies for the downtime yesterday – our hosting provider had a huge hardware failure. As I also work for our hosting provider, I was stressed from both sides – not a good day!)
We’ve had an email from Jo:
Hi. Got a question for you. Is it better to buy pop in big bottles or cans from a packaging point of view? Big bottles seem like less waste for the amount of liquid but are plastic. Your thoughts?
Neither are great for a number of reasons. Aside from the actual waste from the packaging, it’s really resource-intensive to ship around liquid in anything other than pipes – and the production tends to be pretty bad for the environment too, let’s not forget about the production.
But to the question in hand, both the plastic and metal are non-renewable resources, the creation of which is very destructive to the environment, but both can be recycled and are widely collected. If though, you can only recycle one or the other in your local area, that might sway you one way or the other.
The easiest way to reduce the waste is, of course, to reduce consumption of the drinks in the first place. Or make them at home – either getting the fizz through a natural process (like making homemade ginger beer) or a less natural one.
I usually prefer bottles – we don’t drink much fizzy stuff at all and when we do have it, prefer little amounts rather than full cans – and even though we no longer have doorstep recycling of plastics, plastic bottles have more reuses around the home and garden.
Anyone else got any input? What about suggestions for reducing the amount of fizzy drinks drunk – what are similar but better alternatives?
Categories: packaging, reduce this
Posted by louisa
on 22 October 2009
