Oh, I hate trying to photograph transparent things but oh how I love muffins. Sweet, sweet muffins with your sugar and your chocolate and your ability to crumble all over my clean white t-shirts (thanks muffin, thaaaaanks).

How I love the way you’re there for me in the morning when I want a snack and how well you coordinate with both tea and orange juice (although not both beverages at the same time, bleugh).

But how I hate your packaging: its formed plastic and its inability to photograph well. Boo! Boo!

If only there were some other uses for your packaging so I could enjoy your goodness without feeling green guilty at the same time…

(Today’s post brought to you c/o a muffin-induced sugar rush)

Another suggestion from SaraR:

Hi guys. Thanks for the great ideas for what to do with the leftover coffee – I told one of my colleagues and now she’s taking it home to use on her garden.

Anyway, I have another one for you based on another of my naughty addictions – red wine. We have a number of cork-corks and plastic-corks lying around the house and add to the number regularly, but I don’t know what to do with them. Do you have any ideas?

We’re not wine drinkers so we don’t have much call to reuse or recycle wine corks or the plastic synthetic equivalents so any suggestions for SaraR would be very useful indeed.

I know there are a number of popular wine cork crafts – most commonly noticeboards or trivets – anyone got any specific favourites?
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I know, we all hate them with a passion. But despite taking cotton bags when we go shopping (most of the time…) and using them as bin liners, we still have about seventy-nine billion plastic bags in the house.

We have two of those bag tidy things full, another load wedged between the freezer and the wall, and then ones from clothes shops and the like in the bedroom (because they’ve yet to walk downstairs yet).

What, oh what, can we do with the accursed things?
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Last Friday, before setting forth on an expedition that would involve standing in the sun and shouting for a long time, we decided to gather all the water bottles in the house and refill them to take along.

We’re not fans of bottled water and only buy bottles when we’re in a bind, so it was quite surprising to see how many we had accumulated around the house.

We only need so many for reusing as water bottles* for over the summer so what can we do with the rest? What are your favourite reusing or recycling ideas?

* refilling old bottles, I should add, is strictly forbidden, according to notes on the labels of the bigger brands. So don’t do it! don’t! ;)
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Since jars and the like are kept out for reuse, our glass recycling bin is mostly filled with narrow-necked bottles: olive oil bottles, balsamic vinegar ones, organic squash bottles and if any wine or bottled beer drinkers have been around, those bottles too.

They don’t seem as easily reuseable as wide necked jars or bottles, and the oil ones are a pain to clean out thoroughly (or they are for me at least) – some of them have those “easy pour” tops in which make it even harder. But still, I’m reluctant to recycle them – mostly because there isn’t doorstep recycling for glass around here and it’s a chore to take them to the glass banks at the tip.

So any ideas to save me that tip-trip?

(Photo by levi_sz, c/o sxc.hu)