We’ve had an email from Rebecca:

Love the website, have found it really useful but I want to know if I can recycle rubber teats? I am going to sell the bottles on e-bay for re-use but I know Mums won’t want used teats and we have about 25 of varying sizes and I cannot bear to just chuck them.

Would our local recycling centre take them, is there even a facility for recycling rubber bottle teats?

Would love any suggestions.

Apparently the clear teats are more likely to be silicone than rubber – silicone can be recycled but isn’t done so widely. If they are rubber, there may be a collection bin at your local household waste recycling centre but most recycling of rubber seems to be on a bigger scale – car tyres for example.

So what about reuses? It might be worth calling a local animal shelter to see if they could use them for bottle feeding small creatures – they might need the attached bottles too though.

Any other suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Jenny asking:

I have some old perfume bottles, they are so pretty they shouldn’t just be thrown in the normal glass recycling.

Is there anything I can do with them, other that just display as an ornament. I don’t want to do this, as I hate clutter. Any ideas?

For starters, some of the Tabasco sauce bottle ideas might apply here too – since both are small, pretty glass bottles with a tiny-teeny neck.

For sprays, I also like DJ’s idea on the pump action spray bottle page – fill the bottle with water to use as a cooling spray mist on hot days. Taking that a step further, you could refill the bottles by making your own scented body or room sprays using essential oils – if that’s not your sort of thing, you could maybe offer the empty, clean bottles on Freecycle to someone in your area who would like to do that.

Any other ideas?

Rhiannon left a message on our suggestions page:

I was wondering if you have any ideas for an empty Tabasco sauce bottle? They are so pretty, but due to the very narrow neck (so that you can only shake out small droplets at a time) it is unsuitable for storing anything that I can think of.

We’ve covered narrow-necked glass bottles on here before – beer bottles or wine bottles and the like, but Tabasco sauce bottles are that bit narrower than most.

I’ve seen the teeny-tiny single serve Tabasco sauce bottle used as jewellery but the normal size bottles are a little too big for that. ;)

They might be useful for liquids that need to be added drop-by-drop – food colouring for example, but that type of thing tends to come in a little bottle with a dropper thing anyway.

The largest standard size (150ml ish?) bottle would make a cute single-stem vase (if I recall correctly, they tend to have a plastic dropper thing in the top but that can usually be pulled out) but the standard size bottle would be too small for everything bar the absolutely thinnest stem.

So suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Lisa, asking:

How can I reuse laundry detergent and fabric softener bottles?

I have a bunch piling up by my washing machine – the ones you pour, not with a spout on the side.

We’ve bulk bought fabric softener in the past and I’ve decanted it into a old, small bottle to make it easier to use – the giant bulk bottle could be stored out of the way in the cellar and the little bottle just refilled once a month. You can do the same thing with big boxes of powder – with handles, those pouring bottles are far easier to carry and use than a big box. They are also moisture tight so if the bottle is dry when you pour in the powder in the first place, it’s less likely to cake than in a cardboard box.

That’s only two bottles though – so what else can you do with them? Carolien Adriaansche makes them into cute creatures and many of the bottles that I see are nice colours or even pearlised, so you could use the plastic to make things like bold jewellery.

Any other suggestions?

Following on from last week’s little bottles that are awkward to clean post, we’ve had an email from Agata:

I’m really into manicures! I use lots of nail varnish and I have lots of empty bottles – any idea what to do with them?

Most nail polish bottles I’ve seen are glass so lid and brush aside can probably be recycled (I’m assuming the recycling process would clean the glass enough to get rid of the varnish residue). But obviously reuses are more fun.

So suggestions?

(By the way, we covered leftover little bits of nail varnish about two years ago.)