Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.

Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!

So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?

I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…

Any other ideas?

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 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?

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Another of Alice‘s “Reduce This” questions is about cleaning products:

How to reduce the amount of cleaning fluids I use, especially the ones which damage the environment the most? See my blog for an idea for free limescale remover…

Whenever I talk to anyone about this sort of thing, I always make a joke about how we’re being green (as opposed to just lazy) when we don’t keep our house all shiny and polished but there is some truth in it – a lot of people use a lot of chemicals to keep their house a lot “cleaner” than it really needs to be. (I’ve put cleaner in inverted commas because filling your house with harsh chemicals isn’t really health-clean either.)

My friend Katherine swears by E-Cloths and we use a lot of vinegar, soda crystals and borax here.

What do you use? Got any techniques to help cut down the amount of stuff you do use?

We’ve had a rather specific question from Douglas but we sometimes get incredibly informative responses to these type of questions so I thought it was worth posting in case anyone knows anything:

I was wondering if you knew of a way that I could reuse blocks that have been milled using a CNC machine (as known as rapid prototyping) The block are made out of zirconia and are use for the 3M Lava milling center. I hope you can help although i understand if not as this is and incredibly odd request since it is so specific.

So … anyone? I’ve not been able to find anything particularly useful on Google and I’ve sent a message to 3M about it but not heard anything back yet. Anyone else in a similar position?

We’ve had an email from Alice with so many ‘Reduce This’ questions that I’m going to have to run them two a week to get through them ;)

First up:

I want to reduce my use of Tesco, which I use because I don’t have transport and it’s the only one-stop place I can walk to with my rucksack for my weekly shop, but I’d be interested to hear any ideas people have for reducing personal dependence on the “Big Four” evil supermarkets.

In an ideal world, we’d all manage our own allotments and shop at local, independent shops, who source good quality items from local farms & producers. In the real world, this isn’t always possible – there are a limited number of allotments available and people have time constraints that don’t exist in the fantasy world – it’s hard to shop at small shops that are only open 9-5 when you have a 9-5 job.

Because of the big supermarkets, there are also obviously a lot less small shops around – right now, we live close to a local high street which is almost completely filled with chain stores and the house we’re (hopefully) moving to is very close to a big supermarket so there are no local shops at all.

So what have you done to reduce your use of the big supermarkets? How have you fitted it around your busy life? What would you recommend? What would you not recommend? And what about non-food items?