We’ve had an email from Sally asking about squeezy hand cream tubes:

Do you know what number plastic hand cream tubes are? The ones with the flip lids. I don’t know whether or not to put them in my recycling bin.

Along with the inconsistency of facilities available, lack of information on packaging is one of my major pet hates when it comes to recycling. I’ve got three different types of face/hand moisturiser in our bathroom cupboard and only one has recycling information on it – it’s number 4 (LDPE). LDPE isn’t as widely recycled as PET/PETE (number 1) or HDPE (number 2) but it is recycled in some areas – my old council Leeds used to pick it up at the kerbside so it’ll be worth checking your local advice to see if you can do the same.

Aside from recycling, any ideas on how the tubes can be reused? I suspect there will be some overlap with squeezable plastic toothpaste tubes but any new suggestions?

So we reach the end of another year – a time to look back and look forward.

Looking back at 2009, it’s been a cracking year for Recycle This – I’ve posted 204 articles and you wonderful people have left more than 3450 comments! We’ve also nearly doubled the amount of “unique visitors” to the site over the last year too – hopefully a sign that more and more people are keen to reuse and recycle more things, more often.

I finally got around to redesigning the site in May – something I’d been meaning to do for ages – which I think/hope has made it easier for people to find the most common items and related articles. We’ve also introduced a few new features, How can I reduce this? and How can I repair this? – I hope to push those ideas a lot further in the next few months so if you have any suggestions of things you want to reduce/repair, do get in touch and we’ll brainstorm some ideas for you.

Which brings me neatly onto what I intended to be the focus for this post – what are your reducing, reusing and recycling goals in 2010?

Personally, I’m going to continue working on cutting back my addiction to cheap clothes – everyone’s suggestions have been very useful, thanks so much guys – and I’m hoping to bulk cook more to stop us reaching for, for example, supermarket pizzas when we need to eat quickly or packaging-heavy biscuits when we need a snack. I’m also hoping to reuse a lot of packaging in our new garden and I’m going to set up dedicated bins for things we can’t doorstep recycle to make it easier for us to recycle them elsewhere. What are you going to do?

See you in the new decade!

We’ve covered cardboard chocolate boxes before but Roger has asked specifically about plastic Ferrero Rocher boxes:

I know for legal reasons etc you might not be able to mention the product name, but every year the ambassador spoils my family with masses of trays of various sized ferrero rocher boxes. I am just looking for suggestions of what these could be used for.

They seem a waste to just bin, obviously, but i have about 5 and all i can think of is some form of cultivation tray. The boxes are sturdy but don’t particularly seal well, i was going to use one as a sandwich box, but they don’t fasten well.

Any tips on how to make an easily accessible hinge and locking mechanism for these would be great.

As Roger says, the flat single layer ones would be useful as seed trays – or underneath seed trays/planters to stop water draining all over the place. They’re a good shape for using as sprouting trays but my experience of them is that they tend to shatter quite easily if you try to cut into them/drill holes in them so drainage might be an issue.

I remember having one of the smaller/taller ones as a misc bits box as a kid and they would be useful for similar general misc storage as an adult too – they’d be perfect for nails, screws & random bits for the DIYer or buttons & beads for the crafter – they’re clear so it would be super easy to find things.

Any other suggestions?

Hi! Apologies for the sporadic posts of late – I’ve been having so much needed time off from everything – it’s been fab.

Anyway, 2010 starts on Friday and I’m not quite ready for it. Not only because 2010 sounds like the distant future of sci-fi films but because I don’t have a new desk diary yet. I started looking for one a couple of weeks ago then got distracted by something shiny, as I often do, and now my forward planning is taking place on a piece of scrap paper.

So how can I make a 2010 diary reusing, recycling or upcycling stuff instead? Looking around the usual sites, a lot of the homemade diaries are just commercial diaries recovered with a vintage/scrap fabrics but what about using scrap paper? Perhaps printing a week-to-view layout onto old paper bags – like Crafting A Green World’s brown paper bag recipe cards?

I suspect it’ll be easier to make a month-to-view calendar by hand since there only needs to be 12 panels instead of 52 pages. Any suggestions?

What about making reusable calendars to avoid repeating the making process each year? I thought about using a blackboard but it is quite handy to be able to see when we did something, say, two months ago. Ideas?

I know a lot of people go for no-drop types of Christmas tree these days but some of them still shed like billy-o.

Pine needles can be composted – they can be quite acidic though so if that’s undesirable, make sure you balance them out in your heap with some alkali things (wood ash, for example). Also don’t drop a heavy layer into the heap all in one place – they sit pretty densely together and can restrict airflow.

They can be used for lots of other things too – Crunchy Chicken linked to a range of recipes using pine needles in drinks and biscuits, and you can use them to stuff pin cushions.

Any other suggestions?

Oh, and happy Christmas to those that celebrate it :)