We’ve had a message on the Suggestions page from Jing:

Help! I have a beanbag which has flattened over the years and so I want to know a) what recycled stuff to refill fill it with and b) what to do with the useless little squished styrofoam bits.

Craft suggestions, if there are any, might be helpful for other people but please can I have suggestions that don’t mean I have to handle the styrofoam; I have a deep and ridiculous fear of the stuff and can’t bear touching it, looking at it, or the squeaky noise it makes when handled. Odd, I know, but as fears go it’s pretty harmless.

Yes, the feel and sound of the styrofoam balls is pretty ick-worthy – but those little foam things are surely useful for something…

In the (admittedly not many) flattened beanbags I’ve seen, the flattening tends to be one of two problems: either the bag has lost some filler or, particularly in the case of more structured footstool-esque beanbags, the fabric has lost its tautness and gone floppy. It doesn’t tend to be the filler that’s the problem – because the balls are so springy and tiny. Adding some more filler or reducing the size of the beanbag would solve the first problem, but the latter would need a new cover – essentially making a new beanbag for the old filler.

As for other uses, I’ve used beanbag filler for juggling balls but the styrofoam stuff doesn’t really have the right weight to it to be used on its own in there. It would be ok in (well sealed) soft toys though.

Some people use it in potting soil to aerate it – instead of perlite – but there are pollution/chemical leakage issues with that so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Any other suggestions? Any suggestions on recycled things that could be used in the place of more shop-bought filler?

We’ve had an email from Elizabeth:

I have quite a collection of recharger plugs for stolen or broken mobile phones, cordless drills, etc. These never seem to fit the newer versions. What should I do with them?

I believe in the UK they’re covered by the WEEE Directive and nearly all household waste sites have specific points for electronic equipment to ensure they’re disposed of safely.

That’s just disposal though and it would be better to reuse them if possible. If you still know the maker/model of the original piece of equipment, you might want to try putting them on eBay – or selling them at a car boot sale or giving them away on Freecycle – to see if someone else could use them. Some charities that collect old mobile phones might also welcome old chargers – they usually say whether or not they want them on their websites.

(There is a move to make a universal mobile phone charger – nearly all the major manufacturers have agreed to use it – so hopefully that’ll cut down this problem slightly in the future.)

Any other suggestions for reuses or ways to recycle them?

We’ve covered very, very brown bananas before but I was reading a Mrs Beeton-style book on home management from the 1930s the other day (as you do), and I saw a reference to using banana skins to clean brown leather shoes.

According to the hefty tome (which also includes chapters on engaging servants, etiquette for women and fortune-telling – all essential to the 1930s homemaker), rubbing the inside of a banana skin on brown leather shoes helps feed the leather. A bit of Googling seems to corroborate this and adds that the same idea can also be applied to silverware.

Any other cunning ways to reuse banana peel?

(We’ve covered orange peel before – that’s got loads of reuses…)

We’ve had an email from Jayne:

What can I do with corn cobs? Seems such a waste to throw them in the bin after we’ve eaten the kernels. Compost?

Yes, they can be composted but since the core is usually pretty tough when the ears reach maturity (sweet corn cob as opposed to baby corn stage), they’ll probably take quite a while to rot down – chop them up to speed up the process but they’re still not going to be the fastest. (Some people get around this sort of problem by keeping two types of compost heap – one for things that will rot quickly, and one for things that will rot slowly. The first will provide regular compost for the garden, the second will produce it eventually too but the main purpose is to keep the first pile clutter-free – and keep other stuff out of landfill of course.)

Apparently they can be shredded and used as fibre in cattle fodder, burned into charcoal and on a large scale, can be used to make a industrial chemical compound.

Any suggestions for things more useful around the home?

Gift bags are great alternative to wrapping paper because it’s a lot easier to reuse them, and amongst everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it, it’s generally accepted that people will reuse them to give similar sized gifts in the future.

But what about when they get a bit tatty to be recirculated again?

I’ve got one – made out of a light card instead of heavy paper – to keep my small, current crochet project out of the preying paws of cats, and I’ve seen big paper ones remade into smaller paper ones – cutting off the tatty edges and refolding it again.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by lusi)