Now that the lovely internet is here for our every need, I can’t remember the last time I used a phone book. But still, every year or so we get phone books, Yellow Pages, Thompson directories…

They sit on our shelf for a little while, gathering dust and taking up space, then, during one of his many ill-timed cleaning frenzies, John will suddenly want to get rid of them and won’t rest until they’re out of the house or at least relocated to somewhere not in his frenzy path.

So any ideas on how we could reuse or recycle them? What do you do with them?

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I find it strange how attached I get to a couple of bits of cloth and a bunch of straps. Some bras I’ve worn to absolute death – until the underwire had been sown back in countless times and the elastic in the cloth is decidedly inelastic – and then I’ve been sad that they’re gone (turquoise bra – still miss you, sigh).

Other bras I own I’ve worn a good number of times but now they don’t fit – mostly because I’ve put on weight but also because I was less fussy about how well they fitted in the past so have a heap of bras that looked nice at one point but were completely the wrong size to begin with (purple lacy one, looking at you here).

Either way, the result is I’ve got a stack of bras that I can’t wear any more but that aren’t good enough quality to give away to a charity shop or the like.

Any ideas what I can do with them? Suggestions for what to do with any of their component parts (underwires, straps, fasteners, the cups themselves…) are welcome too.

As I’ve said before, we go through quite a lot of compact discs. John tends to buy them in 50 or 100 packs and sometimes gets them on a fancy spindle thing.

If you can’t quite see it from the photo or know what I mean, it’s a plastic base with a spindle sticking out the middle, with a clear(ish) lid over the whole thing.

The spindle thing is useful for keeping the blanks in one place but once you’ve burnt them all, it gets to be a bit of a pain to have to sort through the whole stack whenever you want a particular disc.

So any suggestions about what we can do with the spindle box – and its lid – when we’re done with it?

A suggestion from Franto:

My office has a water cooler with a supply of plastic cups. I don’t go anywhere near it and fill my glass from the tap but my work colleagues seem to use a new cup for each sip of water they take, the bin is always over following with the damn things. I want to rescue them but don’t know what to do with them.

These people seem to collect plastic cups from workplaces in bulk so that might be an idea – but has anyone got any reuse suggestions?

(photo by reemreem)

We have an old gas cooker without an integral flint so we go through a lot of matches. We tried one of those clicky flint-on-a-stick things but got too annoyed with it to continue so we went back to good old flame.

We throw the used matches on the compost heap but every few weeks, we have a empty box too. We buy cook’s matches so they’re quite big boxes – any suggestions on what we can do with them?