We’ve had an email from Emmie, asking:
How can I recycle used highlighters? I am a med student and go through these very quickly…
I bet you do, Emmie. I wasn’t anything as hard working as a med student and I still went through them by the dozen when I was at uni…
So any suggestions?
(I’ve included felt tip pens in the post too because they’re essentially just the same thing – a plastic shell with a shaped fibre tip.)
(Photo by adamci)
We’ve had an email from Barbara Patrick:
I have a whole box of these plastic spiral book binding thingies at my work and no idea what to do with them. I would love some creative crafty suggestions. I live in United States and our currently recycling only takes 1’s & 2’s. Our print shop doesn’t want them. ugh! help!
If they’re still in (re)usable condition, maybe a school (or the like) would be able to use them in their reprographics department? A print shop might worry about them being in less than perfect condition but a school probably wouldn’t be as fussy.
If I had access to one of the whole punching machine things, I’d probably use them for making scrap paper notepads but if not, I suspect that would be a lot of hassle and I’d just use a bulldog clip as I usually do instead.
Any other suggestions?
(Photo supplied by Babs)
As I might have mentioned before, John and I write a geeky webcomic together and we sell geeky t-shirts based on jokes from the strip. We decided we’d only sell the tshirts if we could do it right and were lucky enough to find a printing company with a good ethical & environmental policy. We also send the shirts out in recycled envelopes or (for more orders of multiple shirts) in brown paper parcels because those one-off plastic posting bag things seem excessively wasteful.
We hope that our wonderful tshirt buyers recycle or compost the paper or envelopes but I thought it couldn’t hurt to come up with a few more reuse suggestions. We’ve already covered envelopes so anything specific that brown paper is good for?
Jack and Jill used it, along with vinegar, to fix his head but away from the world of nursery rhymes, what else could it be used for?
(Photo by lusi)
We’ve had an email from Jasmin:
I shred bank statements, receipts etc but our local authority doesn’t accept shredded paper in the recycling bin. I don’t have a garden so composting isn’t easy either, does anyone have any other suggestions?
I’ve seen shredded paper used as packaging to protect breakable items in the post so that’s one idea – but any more reusing or recycling suggestions? What do you do with it?
(Photo by winjohn)
We’ve looked a little toilet tubes and giant big tubes in the past but what about ones more in the middle of the size range?
I got sent a (freebie promotional) tshirt from the US a couple of weeks ago and for some reason they decided to send it in a solid cardboard poster tube instead of an envelope or postal bag.
Said tube has sat around the living room ever since with a “how can I be reused?” question mark hanging over its head. It’s a solid cardboard tube, about 50cm long (20″) with plastic caps at each end (one of them with a lip to make it easy to take out).
Now, thanks to one of our friend’s newly-discovered love of expensive whisky, it’s also now been joined by a similar whisky bottle tube – slightly lighter cardboard but similar plastic caps.
I’ve kept them to this point for reuse if I need to send anything small poster-ish through the post but that’s quite unlikely – so any other suggestions?
