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 had an email from Yvonne, asking:

I have a small vinyl accordion door (single door size). One of the vinyl folds are tearing. How can I fix?

There seem to be a range of vinyl repair kits available for fixing small holes in furnishings, which might do the job.

Searching around for general advice on repairing vinyl, it seems there is a difference between fixing it and fixing it neatly. It some places the latter is seen as important but it can be a pain to find vinyl to match the colour of your aged/sun-bleached stuff. On an accordion door, you could make a feature of the repair by using a contrasting stripe of colour – and uses more stripes to reinforce the other folds to stop their tearing in the future. That would probably take more vinyl than you’d get in a little kit though.

Any more detailed fix suggestions?

Because she’s a keen fixer of things, I told Alice in Blogland about our new “Repair This” feature and she replied that she had something in need of mending, but didn’t know how to go about it:

It’s a pair of waterproof trousers which have taped seams. Basically I bent over in them and the seam split right down the middle, leaving the fabric intact but tearing the seam tape. Can I buy waterproofing seam tape from somewhere? What’s it called? And do I need to sew it in some sort of special way so that it ends up waterproof – if I do it wrong then I guess all my needle holes will let in water!

Any ideas?

So first up on our new “How can I repair this?” feature, how can I repair a pair of leaking trainers/sneakers?

I’ve got a pair of canvas trainers that I love – they’re like the ubiquitous Converse ones but No Sweat ones so sweatshop-free. I’ve worn the hell out of them for about five years and now they’ve both developed leaks in the sole – little tiny cracks/tears around the ball but on one of them the upper has come away from the lower slightly at the back too. I’d rather they didn’t become just fair weather footwear – so how can I fix them?

If they were hard soled shoes, I’d take them to a cobbler to be resoled but am not sure if they’d fix soft rubber soled trainers.

What about at-home fixes? I remember reading somewhere that someone suggested using silicone sealant to fix a similar sneaker leak – anyone tried that? Any better alternatives?

I’ve been thinking about doing a “Repair This” site for a couple of years now – more of a reference guide like Compost This than a discussion place – but for one reason or another, it’s just not happened, and it occurred to me the other week that actually, it’s really quite appropriate to have it on here anyway. So … new feature – “How can I repair this?”!

Repairing is, of course, an often forgotten part of the 3Rs but is really a core part of the “reduce” – if you fix something you’ve already got, you don’t need to think of a reuse for the broken item or to recycle it, and you don’t need to buy/acquire a replacement.

Obviously the nature of the repair depends on what’s broken and how, but a surprising amount of things can be fixed in 15 minutes with a bit of thread/wire/duct tape or a new washer/drop of epoxy adhesive. Sometimes it’s just really just a case of having the confidence to give it a try.

So, if you’ve got anything you’d like to repair but don’t know where to start, drop me an email at repair@recyclethis.co.uk. Conversely, if you’ve fixed something really well or in an interesting way and want to show off your awesome handiwork, send me an email and I’ll feature it on the site.

Anyway, first up, how can I repair leaking trainers/sneakers?