We’ve had an email from Leann:

I have to travel a lot to work and in a day can easily get through a dozen single serving milk pots – on the train, at meetings, at hotels etc. I’m not interested in recycling them, I want to stop needing to use them! Any ideas?

Good question and it is much better to reduce rather than recycle so hopefully we’ll be able to help you with some ideas.

You could take some of milk from home with you in a little bottle – depending on the temperature, that might only be good for the outward journey — it might be like adding butter to your drinks later in the day! In the winter it’ll last longer though – and if your room is without mini-bar/fridge, don’t forget the old student/frugaleer tricks of leaving bottles of milk in a sink filled with cold water or out on a window sill.

If it ripens too quickly like that, dried milk powder or “non-dairy creamer” (Coffee mate etc) may be an alternative since they won’t go off – some milk powders need reconstituting first though so that might be a bit of a faff on the train.

It might be easiest to find a type of tea/coffee that you can enjoy without milk – for example, a lighter black tea (Earl Grey for example) if you’re not into fruit/herbal teas — then that would avoid the milk question altogether. Carrying your own tea bags around is pretty easy since they’re small and lightweight – and it would probably look less odd in a meeting if you whipped out a preferred teabag rather than milk powder and a whisk.

Any other suggestions for Leann?

From one coffee-related post to another. We’ve had an email from Rose about “K-cups”:

I love drinking the various flavors of Keurig coffee, but hate wasting the cups since they can’t be recycled I need suggestions on what to do. Kids crafts would be great since I have 2 little ones.

I hadn’t heard of “K cups” or “Keurig coffee” before but Wikipedia tells me they’re a bit like a Nespresso machine – single use pods of coffee. As with the Nespresso ones, there are a few how-tos out there on refilling the cups to reuse them again.

As far as I can see (someone please correct me if I’m wrong), the bottom of the cup is pierced during the coffee making process so that might get in the way of some reuses. From pictures on Google (btw, don’t Google Image search “k cup” unless you like pictures of boobies), I think they’re about 4-5cm in diameter and about the same tall.

I’ve got a bit of a one track mind at the moment so can’t think of anything else other than using them for growing seedlings.

Anyone else got any better suggestions? Especially kid-craft ones as Rose requested?

I had one of those “it’s amazing how things mount up” moments the other day when I opened our tea & coffee cupboard and was confronted with this:

They’re all empty, flattened out version of these:

John likes his coffee.

To be fair, he does prefer quality rather than quantity and these represents many many months of coffee consumption but still, it’s a lot of plastic.

Some details of the bags. They’ve got a zip lock closing at the top – but also a “breathing” pore so aren’t actually water or air tight. They’ve got a gusset bottom (as you can see from the second picture). They’re about 20cm/8ins square. They smell very strongly of coffee. They’re very, very red.

One idea I had was to make a shopping bag along the lines of this one (which uses cat food pouches). Or using the same patchwork principle to make a storage box for all John’s coffee paraphernalia.

(I’m also going to contact the coffee company to see if they have any recycling advice.)

Any other suggestions for reusing or upcycling them?

Inspired by clearing out of bathroom cupboards this morning, I thought we’d have a cleaning themed week here on Recycle This. We’ve covered various cleaning related things in the past – pump action spray bottles, washing powder packaging, “freshener” shakers and reducing the amount of cleaning products used – but there are still a few things we could think about reusing, recycling, upcycling & reducing.

We’ll talk about more specifically cleaning alternatives later in the week but bleach, and so bleach bottles, is a candidate for reduction. There are alternatives to such harmful stuff in plastic bottles. But some people are a bit “prise it from my cold dead hands” about bleach and will never be parted from it, no matter what us vinegar loving hippies say.

All the ones I’ve checked have been made from HDPE – type 2 plastic – and most areas that collect plastic collect resin code 2 plastics so they can be recycled but I think reuses might be harder to identify. They feel less reusable than, say water bottles or pop bottles – because of the chemical residue, because they’re thick opaque plastic and in the case of some of them, a quirky bent neck for getting under toilet rims.

Anyone got any reusing/upcycling ideas though? Do you do anything with yours or do you just throw them into your recycling bin?

For some reason, our local supermarket has stopped selling lemon juice in sensible containers and only sells it in plastic lemon-shaped bottles now. (Not actually Jif lemons but similar, with a flat bottom.)

We had to buy a couple of those annoying plastic lemons to tide us over until we can get to another shop to buy it in a lovely, recyclable glass bottle.

Admittedly we could squeeze it fresh – we generally need it in small quantities (a tsp or so at a time) – but we could freeze it (in half ice cube amounts, then once frozen, crack them out of the cubes into a baggie to save space) — but after last week’s marmalade & lemon curd making, I’m not sure how much more citrus fruit squeezing my poor hands can take ;) (I will do it though if this lemon juice in plastic lemons situation continues.)

According to the plastic lemon, it can be recycled – but doesn’t give a resin code number so I don’t know what type of plastic it is.

So any reusing or recycling ideas?

(Photo by Paul Hurst under the CCA-SA licence)