• Drinks can pop top lampshade I love this lampshade made with drinks can pop tops – it’s like modern chainmail :)
• Drinks can bottoms necklace The other end of the cans – a great reuse since so many crafts using the pop tops or the sides of the cans, but I’ve not seen many using the stiffer curved bottoms.
• Fake shell-like pendants from bubble wrap Following on in the “you’d never guess what this necklace used to be” line, this tutorial shows you how to make shell-like decorations for jewellery from bubble wrap.
• Old jeans into placemats I think I’ve seen something like this before but it’s still a great idea – denim placement from old jeans, using the pockets as cutlery/napkin holders – cute!

• Very fun bench from three old chairs Speaking of cute, how fab is this bench made from old chairs?
• Old t-shirt wrapped bangles Revamp old boring bangles with old fabric from t-shirts or the like – two upcycles in one!
• Thumb-controlled watering can from an old bottle The simple on/off functionality of this quick creation from Hester at Fun in the Making would be perfect for watering little pots and seedlings in the garden without wasting water.
• Quick bags & punnets from newspaper Finally, Lucie has been in touch to show off this ace video for making small bags for fruit/veg from newspaper. Perfect if you want “disposable” bags for sharing your crop gluts this summer:

(Bench photo by Kindall)

We’ll talk about more specifically cleaning alternatives later in the week but bleach, and so bleach bottles, is a candidate for reduction. There are alternatives to such harmful stuff in plastic bottles. But some people are a bit “prise it from my cold dead hands” about bleach and will never be parted from it, no matter what us vinegar loving hippies say.

All the ones I’ve checked have been made from HDPE – type 2 plastic – and most areas that collect plastic collect resin code 2 plastics so they can be recycled but I think reuses might be harder to identify. They feel less reusable than, say water bottles or pop bottles – because of the chemical residue, because they’re thick opaque plastic and in the case of some of them, a quirky bent neck for getting under toilet rims.

Anyone got any reusing/upcycling ideas though? Do you do anything with yours or do you just throw them into your recycling bin?

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?

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 what to do with old 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.

What else can you do with empty perfume bottles? Do you have any special ways to reuse them?

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?

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?

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.)

As we have a lot of plastic water bottles, and they are easy enough to recycle/reuse… but what about the screw-on bottle tops?

When they are recycled the council insist the lids are not included…and I hate to waste all those little lids.

I always keep a few spare ones in case I lose/drop-somewhere-rank the lid of a bottle I’m re-using. I’ve also used them (usually in pairs for stability) to add height when a plant pot sits too low in the planter – water bottle caps add about 1cm while milk bottle ones are a little wide and not as tall.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

So how about babies’ bottles?

Can they be sterilised sufficiently to be passed on to others? And if not, what other things could they be used for?

• How can I reuse or recycle other baby related stuff?

(Photo by spekulator)

I use the bottom 3 or 4 inches of a 2 litre plastic coke bottle to make drawer tidies at work for all my paper clips, staples, etc. You can keep them in place by stapling them together or with a blob of blutack on the bottom!

A great idea and it made me realise that while we’ve covered a large range of different types of plastic bottles (eg, milk, squash, shower gel, shampoo, miniatures ones, pump action ones, and water, water cooler and hot water ones), we’ve not looked at pop bottles – and their blobby-shaped bottoms – in particular.

So any specific uses for the bottoms of those bottles? Anything else the separate compartments can be used for? Suggestions for any size bottle are fine.

My boyfriend has an eczema and he uses a lot of emollient, creams and liquid soap that comes in pump dispensers, some specialised emollients come from pharmacist in VERY big bottles with pumps. As you can imagine – he goes through a lot of them, and I think of the ways to re-use them.

I keep dreaming of how good would it be to be able to have stations in pharmacies and supermarkets to re-fill your pump dispensers (but obviously – this is too much to ask for).

The two organic shops near us allow you to refill Ecover pump bottles in store with more of the liquid soap/washing-up liquid – but I don’t know if you’d be able to refill other random bottles.

So any other suggestions?

(Photo by nyuszika)

I was recently bought some beer which came in stone/clay bottles. Having now drunk all the beer I am looking for something to do with the bottles. I wanted to reuse them for home brew but I am unable to get the corks back in as my corking machine only works with wine bottles.

The only thing I can think of is to break them up for crocks in plant pots but this seems like a waste of all their bottliness. Any suggestions?

We’ve got a number of old pump action spray bottles around the house – from old cleaning products and from a body spray that I use from time to time – and they can all be refilled and reused, but we’ve used up all our ideas about what to put in them and still have a stack of spares.

So any suggestions what would be useful to have as a spray/mister that doesn’t already coming with its own pump spray?

The ones I use have got a little, I don’t know, valve thing on the top to stop the gel falling out while they hang upside down in the shower. I don’t know whether this would stop anything as wet as water but the liquid gel stuff stays put.

So could this be used for anything else? I guess I could refill it with liquid soap for sink-based handwashing – either commercial stuff I’ve bought in bulk or when I get around to make my own from soapnuts – but any different, non-soapy suggestions?

The plastic bottles though, they’re not so tasty. I realise we’ve already brainstormed plastic milk bottles and water bottles but anything specially in mind for these babies, given they’re bigger and tougher?

We’re not fans of bottled water and only buy bottles when we’re in a bind, so it was quite surprising to see how many we had accumulated around the house.

We only need so many for reusing as water bottles* for over the summer so what can we do with the rest? What are your favourite reusing or recycling ideas?

* refilling old bottles, I should add, is strictly forbidden, according to notes on the labels of the bigger brands. So don’t do it! don’t! ;)

But as we’ve only got one tree in the garden (and that’s not really a tree, it’s an overgrown bush which is very cat-accessible), I’d love to find out other ways to reuse them rather than just slinging them in the recycling bin.

Any ideas?

I suspect the bottle and the ball are different types of plastic so am wary to throw them in the recycling bin – anyone know if they can be recycled? Does it help if you pop the ball out first?

But better than that, are there any reuses for them? Either complete or in parts.

And what about stick deodorant containers (the narrower, ball-less ones)?

I already buy the biggest bottles I can but still, lots of wasted plastic. The bottles seem so rigid and potentially useful but I have no idea what those uses might be, given they’re typically narrow necked and their previous contents preclude using the bottle to hold anything that might be negatively affected by smelling like a chemical approximation of various fruits.

Any suggestions?