We’ve had an email from Lesley, asking:

Has anyone got any suggestions for re-using the “bladders” from the inside of wine boxes? Being both airtight and water-tight, there must be an alternative use for them.

Given the springing of spring this weekend and the fact it’ll probably be hard enough to get it clean (ie, un-wine sceneted) enough to re-use as a drinking liquid container, I’m tempted to come up with garden suggestions.

My first thought was for brewing a liquid fertiliser using nettles but then I realised, duh, you can’t really get nettles in that little neck hole so that wasn’t a particularly useful thought. Thanks there brain.

So any actually feasible suggestions for Lesley instead?

We’ve had another meta suggestion – this time from Kate:

How can I recycle a black plastic dustbin?

It’s true you shouldn’t bin a bin!

It is true! We’ve actually got two old bins in our garden – one pre-dating my move here that’s filled with soil and has herbs and ivy growing out of it (the latter pretty much hides the fact it’s a bin) while the other one (our pre-wheelie bin bin) is used for compost. It’s not as good as our proper compost bin – because there is no easy way to get the soil out again – but I consider it a long term overflow thing, to stop the other compost bin being filled up with things that take ages to rot. Before that, when we actually did DIY stuff on the house, it was used to hold bags of sand and cement because it was reasonably water tight.

Any more suggestions?

(Photo by dean)

We’ve had an email from Rachel R, saying:

We accumulate quite a lot of twine from hay bales used to feed horses at work. We get both the rough, “hairy” and plastic kinds. The only thing I can think to do is give it away at gardening sales this spring or to teachers for use in craft projects.

Staying on the giving it away route, someone on your local Freecycle group might be able to make use of it too.

Aside from that, crafty/practical suggestions, the rough hair stuff could be wrapped around a piece of scrap wood to make a cat scratching post (it might need glueing on so the cat doesn’t pull it straight off again) or if you fancy macrame, you could follow a plant hanger pattern which could be used for plants – or presuming Rachel works in a stables (I guess should could be talking about that rare breed of office pony…) – for hanging head height buckets of food/water/treats for the horses.

I’m sure there are lots of other possibilities too though – anyone else got any ideas?

(Photo by Nbauer)

We’ve had another suggestion from the wonderful Am (Delusion), and it’s a bit of a meta one:

As our council have changed our curbside collection from collection boxes for paper & bottles etc to now using our old black wheelie bins, I thought of what could be done with the old recycle boxes.

The council will recycle them and so they can be taken to the Household Waste Centre, however I am sure they can have some more uses!

I have managed to acquire 6 so far, as I am going to use one for storage of plant pots, another three are going to be used as large trough plant pots for my new Wildflower seed mix and another two are going to have their bases sliced off and buried in my borders to contain my very invasive poppies.

Any other suggestions?

I’m going on a mint growing extravaganza this year to sate John’s new obsession with mint teas and they (well, the rest of the garden really) would benefit from growing in troughs like that. We’re also constantly on the look out for lidded boxes as part of our ongoing quest to cat proof the cellar (aka the pee war ground between our cats & the neighbour stray: yes, it’s pleasant). But anything a bit different?

It’s our third Easter here on Recycle This so this is just a quick post harking back to previous Easter-ish posts:

• How can I reuse or recycle … excessive Easter egg packaging? (2006)
• How can I reuse or recycle … excessive Easter egg packaging? (2007)
• How can I reuse or recycle … shiny chocolate wrappers?
• How can I reuse or recycle … wire egg dippers?

(Photo by LotusHead)