We’ve kinda touched on this topic before when talking about reusing and recycling disposable razors but that was a long time ago and I thought it might be worth bringing it up again.

As when we were talking about it in 2007, I still use disposable razors occasionally – perhaps one a month since I’m still not particularly hairy or bothered, and use a rechargable electric razor for my legs. In the grand scale of things, it’s not exactly a lot of waste but it still bugs me to use anything that’s designed to be disposable.

(The electric one obviously uses power but other than that, they last a good while – the batteries on my rechargable ones tend to die every 3/4 years, but John’s got a mains powered one that will last years and years – his dad’s has been going for 20+ years apparently.)

On the old post, some people said they’d given up disposable razors (or more commonly disposable razor blades attached to a reusable handle) in favour of a traditional straight razor (aka cut-throat razor) – and they’ve never looked back. However, they’re only good for smooth/tight skin – not very useful for armpits, or the back of legs.

So what are the other options? What do you do?

Over on Twitter, fairygirl25 (aka Elizabeth) asked us:

how can u reuse plastic wrap after u use it once in the microwave?

We don’t use plastic wrap in the microwave so I’m not sure how it changes it to stop you being able to reuse it like ordinary plastic wrap/cling film/saran wrap again. Could anyone shed any light on that? Do you reuse plastic wrap?

(Instead of plastic wrap, we use lids or off-set plates on top of bowls for steaming/heat retention. That seems to work for everything we do in there – but admittedly that’s not much. If you have a microwave, what do you use?)

As for recycling, plastic wrap is usually hard to recycle as it’s PVC based (resin code 3) but some stuff is now LDPE (resin code 4) so may be accepted in some recycling facilities. Check on the packaging to find out what you’ve got and ask your local authorities for their advice.

Illustrator Fee Harding (also known as Burntfeather) got in touch this morning to confess:

I’ve been guilty of not recycling!

This overwhelming guilt forced me to start looking into what I could and could not recycle and then set out to design a set of posters to blu tak above my recycling stash in my kitchen!

I thought your readers might enjoy being able to print out their own.

You can download the posters from Fee’s site and you really should – they’re great!

She’s divided packaging waste into “the good, the bad and the ugly” – what you can recycle and can’t recycle – and added helpful hints. Very useful and cute – thanks Fee!

From making dog toys last week to kids toys this week… We’ve had an email from Petra:

Thank you for your very nice and useful site. You helped me before, but now I have a new (reverse) question:

In a few months, my youngest daughter becomes 3 years old. On her day care, it is common to give the other (little) children a small present or healthy treat.

I prefer to give a small present, especially when it is useful and they can play with it for quite a while. Last year, I made them little bags from foam that was left over from a party.

This year, again, I would like to make something for the children, preferable a nice little toy by recycling stuff. But I’m out of ideas.

Could you or your readers help me with some ideas? It should not take too much time to make, since I need to make 20 of them. And they should be safe for little ones as well.

I’ve not had a lot of experience of making gifts for children en masse so I’m going to have to ask other people to help out here… Any ideas?

One suggestion I would make – and one that might be better for slightly older children – is to take advantage of free child labour ;) Provide them with the materials to, say, make their own puppet or little creature and encourage/help them to put it together/customise it themselves. Any more age appropriate suggestions?

This one came to me in my sleep the other night – the waxed paper type wrapping you get on some loaves of sliced bread. I obsessed about it until morning so I wouldn’t forget to write it down and let me tell you, I had some weird packaging related dreams that night.

ANYWAY, waxed paper bread packaging. We’ve had bread bags and the film stuff from fancy fresh supermarket baked bread but not the waxed paper option. It’s not as common as it used to be but some brands still use it across the board.

The wrapping is not currently recyclable but carefully opened, it can be opened out into a decent size wipeable sheet. It can then be reused for it’s original purpose again and again – wrapping around homemade bread or sandwiches – but has anyone done anything more involved with it?

From a reduce point of view, you could make you own packaging-free bread or source packaging-free bread from a local baker/independent store. If you have to rely on supermarket but also have decent plastic recycling facilities in your area, you might prefer to buy bread in easy-to-recycle plastic bags – that seems to call back to our discussion the other week, about whether or not you choose to buy things with more packaging or in this case packaging which on the face of it seems worse for the environment (paper versus plastic) but is actually easier to recycle.