We tend to buy 1kg or 2kg nets of onions – plastic nets, with 1cmx1cm ish holes – but can’t think what to do with them once we’ve finished the pack. The same goes for the rare occasions when we buy big packs of oranges or lemons.

We use smaller nets – the type that garlic comes in at the supermarket – to make little bird feeders to hang in trees but the nuts and seeds mix we use falls out of the bigger holes in the onion/orange/lemon nets.

Any suggestions how we can use them again?

(Photo by upn)

John and I are breakfast cereal-fanatics at the moment and are munching our way through box after box of pre-sweetened, chocolate-flavour flavoured puffed nonsense (me) and dull, wholewheat goodness (him).

Most of our favourite cereals come in plastic bags within glossy-printed cardboard boxes so we’re left with a lot of rubbish at the end of each pack.

When I was small, cereal boxes were regularly harvested for their card but I don’t do as much cutting and sticking for fun now – and when I do need some non-corrugated card, cat food boxes tend to be sturdier (if slightly smelling of fish and ash).

As with most paper products, they will compost down but some people worry about the full colour printed designs – some inks are toxic and will leech chemicals into the compost.

Any reusing or recycling for the card sides or the boxes as a whole?

(Photo by simbncn)

I realise yesterday’s post on aerosols would be mostly recycling rather than reuse, but how about a similar item that has more reuse potential – pump action sprays?

We’ve got a number of old pump action spray bottles around the house – from old cleaning products and from a body spray that I use from time to time – and they can all be refilled and reused, but we’ve used up all our ideas about what to put in them and still have a stack of spares.

So any suggestions what would be useful to have as a spray/mister that doesn’t already coming with its own pump spray?

Most of the time, we buy loose veg – less packaging, get to choose exact which items we want and how many etc etc. But every now and then, usually when we go shopping last thing and there is no choice at all, we have to buy it pre-packed.

The most common offender is courgettes but I couldn’t find a picture of courgettes on a tray and we’ve got loose ones at the moment so I can’t take a picture myself. So here’s a picture of sausages on a similar tray, just imagine the sausages are courgettes. Ok.

So here we have our courgettes on trays. They’re narrow, shallow trays, either make of cushioning foam or flimsy plastic and we don’t know what to do with them. They’re not deep enough to use as kitchen top compost collection receptacles (we use mushroom boxes for this purpose when cooking or for collecting tea bags/leaves each day) but the plastic ones especially are too flimsy to be used under plant pots.

Any suggestions?

(Photo by fritz018)

Ok, we’ve already covered shampoo bottles and plastic drinking bottles but I think shower gel bottles are a little different.

The ones I use have got a little, I don’t know, valve thing on the top to stop the gel falling out while they hang upside down in the shower. I don’t know whether this would stop anything as wet as water but the liquid gel stuff stays put.

So could this be used for anything else? I guess I could refill it with liquid soap for sink-based handwashing – either commercial stuff I’ve bought in bulk or when I get around to make my own from soapnuts – but any different, non-soapy suggestions?