It’s Friday and it’s been a busy week at Recycle This Mansions so we are, I very much suspect, going to be dialling in for food tonight.

We’re lucky that we’ve got a few good pizza places in the vicinity so will be on cheese-highs by bedtime (weee, cheese dreams!) but we’ll wake up remorseful tomorrow, after our binge tonight, because we won’t know what to do with the cardboard pizza boxes that will be covering the living room floor.

We usually just fling them in the cardboard-recycling bin but any other suggestions?

Little brushes on sticks.

Oh you look so useful with your littleness and your brushiness.

But how? How? How can I use you again?

(Photo by Vixs)

They seem to be one of those things that we used to absentmindedly collect, back in the day when everyone thought it was a great idea to give away promotional mousemats or that it was *the* cheap and cheerful present to buy anyone who ever admitted to using a computer.

Given our hoarding nature, we still have a number around the house and as useful as a 2002 Dell-sponsored calendar would be to me on a day to day basis (“hmm, my birthday was a Saturday that year, how interesting”), I have a trackpad mouse now so the mats as a whole are pretty much pointless.

(On the rare occasion when I use a plug-in mouse, it’s an optical one and I use a curled up cat as a mousemat, just for the irony.)

So, we’ve got a few plastic ones and a couple of fuzzy, fabric ones to reuse. Any suggestions?

(Original photo by Vixs)

Many moons ago, I met the man who had the idea to make cotton bobbins out of plastic rather than wood (since the latter had friction problems apparently). He was quite a wealthy guy by the time I met him so I guess he made some money from the brainwave. But, of course, at what cost? After all, plastic: boo.

I don’t sew as much as I used to so it’s less of a problem but every now and then, I finish a reel of cotton and think back to that guy and his money and resent just throwing the bobbin in the bin.

Any suggestions for re-uses?

(Photo by Morrhigan)

A suggestion from Heather:

I’m so bad. Every day, I buy those prepacked sandwiches rather than making my own. Sometimes I go to Pret and buy cardboard and cellophane wrapped ones, and sometimes I go to the yummy bakery up the road and get them just wrapped in cellophone but most of the time, sigh, I have to get those standard pre-packaged sandwiches in the triangular plastic wastefulness. I do feel bad while I eat them and not just because the sandwiches are bland and tasteless yet just cost me £2. What can I do with the packaging when I’m done with it?

(Photo by Asterisco, c/o sxc.hu)