Aside from glass bottles then newspapers, one of the first things to hit my recycling radar was learning to tell the difference between steel and aluminium cans for recycling purposes. I think there was a Blue Peter Christmas appeal to collect aluminium cans or something, so for a good few months I watched with glee as magnets slid off the side of cans. In the name of children’s television related charity, I perfected the art of crushing cans or at least getting them wedged onto my shoes so I could pretend I was a tap dancer. Ah, happy recycling days…

Reusing them though, that’s a bit more tricky. I wonder if recycling of them is so commonplace that people don’t think to reuse them – or if they’re only recycled because there aren’t many reuses for them… Any suggestions?
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For reasons that seemed fun at the time, a few of years ago we halved and scooped out some coconuts. We clip-clopped up and down the street and around the house Monty Python style for a bit then the shells went in the cellar. There they stayed for a year or so then we found them, clip-clopped some more and then cellared them again.

Now, after a third bout of clip-clopping for the amusement of local children, the empty shells are now living in the garden and are really begging to be reused to save them from involvement in more repeat attempts at “humour”.

Any suggestions of things to do with them?

(Wonderful picture by minmax, c/o sxc.hu – because ours were too soggy to photograph well)

I was feeling a little poorly the other day so we had the standard unwell tea: chucky eggs and soldiers*.

The military men and their ovoid shaped compadres did their work and by the next day, I was up and around again – wondering what to do with the remaining egg shells.

I have used broken eggs shells in the garden in the past, to try to deter slugs and snails from my seedlings but I don’t know if it was worth it since the molluscs seemed to get through anyway. So does that actually work?

And are there any better uses for them?

(* boiled eggs and toast sliced thinly so that it can be dunked in the aforementioned eggs if the yolks are soft enough)
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Shampoo bottles upset me. Not on the scale of, say, world poverty or abuse of political power but a minor gah most times I wash my hair.

I already buy the biggest bottles I can but still, lots of wasted plastic. The bottles seem so rigid and potentially useful but I have no idea what those uses might be, given they’re typically narrow necked and their previous contents preclude using the bottle to hold anything that might be negatively affected by smelling like a chemical approximation of various fruits.

Any suggestions?
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Between jam, honey, olives and sticky-sticky sauces from the Chinese supermarket, we go through quite a lot of jars and it seems a shame to just recycle the glass and bin the lid.

So any suggestions about how they can be used again? I know it seems, on the face of it, quite an obvious thing to be able to reuse but you never know what other people haven’t thought of…

Oh, and it would also also be great if anyone knows any foolproof ways of
a) thoroughly degunking them (including smell, which always seems to linger on) and
b) getting the label and all the sticky off easily.
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