A suggestion (and photo) from Jill:

I have a pile of old hot water bottles lurking in the cupboard beneath the sink in my bedroom. Some have actually leaked, others have simply started to perish – but none of them are fit for their original purpose i.e. to warm my bed!

The trouble is, I just can’t bear to simply throw them away in the bin – it seems such a waste.
I have never seen a recycling centre with any facilities for rubber products.
Any suggestions as to what else I can do with them, as the pile continues to grow !

Ideas then?

A suggestion from JH753 (I’m guessing that’s not their real name, unless they’re a car number plate : ) ):

When the kids were growing up, they used to play tennis all summer and got through a fair number of tennis rackets. Most of the time we just replaced them when a string got busted or they got a better racket as a birthday present when they decided they wanted to make a bit of an investment in their hobby.

I didn’t want to throw them out because it seemed wasteful but I didn’t bother getting them fixed either or giving them away because I was ‘too busy’ so they just stacked up in the garage.

What can I do with them? Most of them were quite cheap to start with so now a good few years old aren’t worth selling on or getting restringed.

So has anyone got any suggestions? I guess my first thought would be giving away the ones that are still in alright condition to a charity shop but what about ones with broken strings?

(Photo by q83

I never throw shoe boxes out. Because they’re always useful for odd bits and pieces, right?

But the thing is, I can never think of enough random bits and pieces that would utilise them properly. I tend to buy more bigger, more sturdy boxes for anything that needs a permanent home, or use plastic (ice-cream-esque) tubs if I need the contents to be kept dry so the shoe boxes end up cluttering up the place with their potential, but unrealised, re-usability.

So any suggestions of other ways I could use them? Or specific suggestions of things I could put in them?

I posted an item from my mum last week about how to reuse washing powder tablet nets and it made me think of their solid plastic friend: those funny shaped ball things that you put washing powder in before putting the ball directly into the washing machine.

I’ve got a few floating around from back in the day when they were the washing powder innovation du jour and since I’m trying to move away from chemical powder onto soapnuts now, I have no need for them.

Any suggestions for reuses? They’re really sturdy with a flat bottom but awkwardly shaped apart from that.

My brother and I got our first proper PC in the mid-1990s.

We could do word processing on it, basic drawing and DTP – lots of serious grown-up stuff that justified it as a (second-hand) purchase to our parents … but we still mostly used it for playing games.

Our favourite game, for a long while, was a pinball game which used the ALT keys to work the flippers. Before long, the worn out ALT keys fell off. So we changed the game’s controls to use the CTRL keys instead. And ditto. And so on, until we rendered our first computer keyboard pretty much useless.

I don’t go in for such abusive gaming these days but as we live on our computers now, (my boyfriend) John and I still end up with broken keyboards from time to time, or just spare ones when one comes free with a new computer or something.

When they’re still in working order, we give them away to friends or family in need, or the local computer recycling place, but any suggestions of what we can do with broken ones, or their parts? Any recycling/upcycling ideas?

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