As I might have mentioned before, John and I write a geeky webcomic together and we sell geeky t-shirts based on jokes from the strip. We decided we’d only sell the tshirts if we could do it right and were lucky enough to find a printing company with a good ethical & environmental policy. We also send the shirts out in recycled envelopes or (for more orders of multiple shirts) in brown paper parcels because those one-off plastic posting bag things seem excessively wasteful.

We hope that our wonderful tshirt buyers recycle or compost the paper or envelopes but I thought it couldn’t hurt to come up with a few more reuse suggestions. We’ve already covered envelopes so anything specific that brown paper is good for?

Jack and Jill used it, along with vinegar, to fix his head but away from the world of nursery rhymes, what else could it be used for?

(Photo by lusi)

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on books for a while but the very, very obvious answer for me is “charity shops”. I buy a lot of books from charity shops and give away ones I’m done with but we’ve got a big stack of books that aren’t really suitable for that route – namely, very out of date geeky tech books.

A lot of the technology that John’s interested in moves so fast that the books are practically out of date by the time they’ve been printed and sent out. He’s trying to buy e-book versions instead now but that doesn’t address the collection he’s amassed over the years. General theory books might be of use to someone but a lot of the (very geeky, professional) training-manual types are pretty much obsolete. They’re very specialist and as I said, very out of date so chances are they’d just sit on the shelf at a charity shop until they were thrown out, or someone would waste their money buying them, thinking they’d be more useful than they are. We’ve tried giving them away through our local geek group (WYLUG) but no one wants them.

They’re big, thick, well-printed tomes and it seems a waste just to send them for recycling.

So any suggestions?

(Photo by hatashonin)

We’ve had an email from Jon Arkin:

I bought a big net of garlic from the market at the weekend because it was going cheap. I now know why, half of them have started sprouting.

I’m going to try to use as many as I can but will have to compost the rest – or are there any other non-culinary uses?

You could try planting the sprouting cloves in your garden – give them six months or so and they become new bulbs – but when I did this a few years ago, the resulting bulbs were tiny and not really worth the effort (although this might be because we have a north-facing garden and had a rather lax attitude to watering). And I suspect there may be issues with planting out commercially grown garlic like there is with planting old shop-bought potatoes.

I believe it can also be used to keep insects (and vampires) at bay but don’t know any more about that other than what I’ve learnt from bad 1980s horror films.

So any ideas or more info about the things I’ve mentioned?

(Photo by chidsey)

John did a talk at LUGRadio Live the weekend before last and decided he wanted some cue cards to help him keep track of what he was speaking about. Looking around the house for something cue-card shaped, he found a stack of business cards from his last-but-one place of employment – and then another stack from the place he worked previous to that.

The last-but-one place did a full run of 1000 cards for him without asking whether he wanted them (no) – and he didn’t give out a single card. He estimates he gave out about 10 cards for the previous place but no one ever used them to contact him. What a wonderful waste.

The cards were the perfect size for the talk – discrete but easy to handle – but since he hasn’t got another talk planned for a while, what else can be done with his old business cards?

(Photo by brokenarts)

We’ve had an email from the wonderfully-monikered “Cornish Bob”:

we’ve got about an acre of lawn which in the summer gets cut about once a week to every ten days depending on weather.

Apart from not cutting the lawn or composting, what can we do with it? We could take it to the local dump and have it composted but we want to find something we can do ourselves, I’m researching the use of grass as fuel but can’t find much on it, if we can get wood pellets made from saw dust, why not dried grass?

My mum and dad use the “tip it out of sight and forget about it” thing too since it can quickly swamp a normal compost heap and cut off the airflow.

So any other ideas? Anyone know anything about the fuel idea?

(Photo by KLatham)