After an idea sparked by [Am] last year and added to by Alice last week, I’ve started adding ‘Top Tips’ boxes to the most popular Recycle This pages (the ones with loads of comments) to highlight the best suggestions for reducing, reusing and recycling. It’s pretty time consuming but lots of fun, re-reading all the great suggestions that have come in over the last 3.5 years — you guys are wonderfully creative and inspiring! you’re awesome!

Anyway, while I was doing the old keys one the other day, I saw that the British charity, Guide Dogs for the Blind collect old house keys as a fundraiser – and they collect old coins too.

Like old stamps, certain ones are obviously highly collectable but there must be a lot that aren’t quite so popular – all those bogstandard 5pences and 10pences that were replaced in the 1990s for example.

Any creative or practical suggestions of things that can be done with them? Any other charities that collect them?

I also used to know about half a dozen charities who collect leftover change from overseas excursions but can’t think of any of them right now – anyone know of any?

The next Reduce This question from Alice:

I need help to get out of the shower quicker – I take long hot showers that actually use more water than a bath would, just because it’s so nice in there. Costs a fortune in gas bills!

Mmm, hot showers…

I could suggest getting a timer (or if you’ve already got some sort of music set-up in the bathroom, a playlist/CD of songs/ all about the right length) so you know when you’ve been in there a set amount of time – but obviously you’ll still need will power to get out ;)

Thanks to our then-broken boiler, our shower used to go icy cold after a couple of minutes – even though we knew it would get warm again eventually (usually after another minute or so), it was enough to get us out – no will power required. Is there something you can attach to boilers/showers that can mimic that?

Any other suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Plum:

We’ve got five bottles of mouthwash in the bathroom cupboard – all tried once but never again because they were vile! I was wondering if you had an idea if they could be used for any household cleaning tasks like brown sauce on brass.

Good question. In my experience, most awful tasting mouthwashes are very alcohol-y and alcohol does have antibacterial/antiseptic qualities — does anyone know if it would be enough for cleaning instead of rubbing alcohol?

If you don’t mind having a minty face, I suspect it could be used as a facial toner – a lot of toners have similar amounts of alcohol in them (although alcohol in toners is very drying – the best skin thing I ever did was switching away to alcohol-free cleaning products).

Any other suggestions?

Continuing with Alice‘s Reduce This questions from last week, she’s also asked:

Any thoughts on reducing paper used at work? In my housing co-op we send out several pages of minutes and agendas every month, and I’d appreciate any bright ideas about that.

We’ve covered ways to make offices and schools recycle more during our stationery week late last year but how about reducing the amount of paper generated in the first place?

My first thought is make sure all those minutes and agendas are absolutely necessary – not just whether it’s necessary to print them out but whether it’s necessary to minute in the first place. I used to work at a old-school university and we minuted every committee/group meeting, then circulated both electronic & paper copies to everyone involved. Then someone sat down and worked out which meetings had to be minuted by law/university rules – I think it was maybe two groups instead of a dozen. The other groups switched to just taking notes of action points instead of full minutes, which were just circulated electronically = a huge saving of both time and paper.

Any other suggestions?

Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.

Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!

So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?

I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…

Any other ideas?