We’ve had an email from Louise W:

Our church hall has accrued dozens and dozens of tea towels over the years, I don’t know where they come from. We usually tear the tatty ones in half and use them for cleaning rags but I was wondering if you had any ideas for other things we could do with them. Some of us are good at sewing so could make things with them for our jumble sale.

If it’s a straight-up surplus of good condition towels, I’m sure there would be local shelters/re-homing community groups who would love a bulk donation – either for use in their own kitchens or to be give out to those in need of even though most basic household supplies.

If they’re too tatty for donating, the decent parts of the fabric can be upcycled in a number of ways – I’ve seen aprons made from cute dish towels, cafe-style curtains/blinds for kitchens, baby bibs (especially if the towels are super soft from frequent washing) or quilt-style hot pad tablemats using a few different towels.

Finally, if they’re far too tatty for any of that, they do make great dishclothes/cleaning rags and can be shredded to be stuffing for small toys or the like.

Any other recycling ideas? Practical as well as creative crafty ones?

Every now and then I search for something on Recycle This and am floored when I find we’ve not covered it. The most recent example: tin foil.

We’ve talked about possibly recycling aluminium foil for charity and about related items such as easter egg/chocolate wrapping foil, foil trays for pet food or pies and tarts, even the serrated boxes that silver foil comes in but not silver foil itself. Crazy!

It’s easy to reduce using it in the first place by swapping to using lids on tubs or bowls instead etc and reusable wrapping materials – and it’s widely recycled too — most kerbside/community bins for tin cans accept foil too. But what about reuses for it?

I know a lot of people reuse clean bits of foil as new. Do you do that? If not, do you have other reuses for nearly-new foil?

What about for “dirty” foil – stuff with food baked onto it?

(Picture by pasukara76)

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.

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.

Apologies for not posting yesterday – I was away on an “introduction to cheesemaking” course over the weekend and too tired to type yesterday ;)

I’ve been making super-easy cheeses like paneer for a few years now but before I committed to anything that needed months of effort/ageing, I wanted to learn some core skills from someone who knows what they’re doing. The course, through the Low Impact Living Initiative, was great for that and very very interesting – so now I have a burning desire to make all sorts of cheeses – and that requires moulds.

We saw a selection of stainless steel moulds and (food-grade) plastic ones – and someone else on the course mentioned they’d heard about moulds made from drainpipes. The course leader didn’t exactly advocate that but said that in theory, it would be fine — just drill holes in the rigid sides, making sure the outside of the hole was wider than the inside, and that there was no jagged bits of plastic left on the inside or outside of the holes.

So that got me thinking: what else could cheese moulds be made from? Any food-grade plastic packaging perfect for reusing? Or do any other household/kitchen utensils lend themselves to being used as cheese moulds – either as they are or with a bit of modification? Because it’s just for my consumption, I’m not bothered about them being pretty round cheeses.

If you make your own cheese, what do you use?