Between jam, honey, olives and sticky-sticky sauces from the Chinese supermarket, we go through quite a lot of jars and it seems a shame to just recycle the glass and bin the lid.

So any suggestions about how they can be used again? I know it seems, on the face of it, quite an obvious thing to be able to reuse but you never know what other people haven’t thought of…

Oh, and it would also also be great if anyone knows any foolproof ways of
a) thoroughly degunking them (including smell, which always seems to linger on) and
b) getting the label and all the sticky off easily.
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We don’t use rubber gloves that often because, frankly, we don’t care that much for cleaning and when we do clean, we don’t care that much about our hands to bother with gloves. But sometimes we pull out the marigolds. For those icky jobs. The ones that involve bleach. Or cat poo. Or both.

When we do use rubber gloves, we don’t always to remember to be careful and have a tendency to pick up thorny rose bush branches, or snag fingers on cheese graters, or test how low a match will burn before the rubber melts (answer: pretty low). We find rubber both rips and melts more easily than skin and heals much slower too.

After mixing and matches odd as-new gloves to make pairs, we’re usually left with a number of random gloves that have small holes in them (usually in the finger tips) and so are no longer waterproof. They lurk in the cupboard under the sink with the old tea towels until they dry out and scream to be thrown away. Any ideas on how they can be put to better use?
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Remember when 1.44MB seemed like all the storage space you’d ever need? And then later on, when games came spread across 8 of them, meaning your heroic rescue of Sophia from the evil Nazis is interrupted while you change to disc five? And how it was so easy for the discs to corrupt if they got within a 14mile radius of a magnetic field? And how it took about half an hour to load and save to them?

Yes, we remember them so, so fondly. And have a giant stack of them to get rid of.

Any ideas?
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This is more a recipe request than a recycling thing but it saves them from the compost heap…

Despite our best efforts, we quite often find ourselves left with a couple of mushrooms when they’re starting to get a bit bruised and, well, a bit slimey. And yet we can’t always bring ourselves to just fling them out.

At what point, should they say hello to Captain Compost? And a few minutes before that, any particular recipes or dishes that hide the fact they’re not as fresh as they might be? Or any other suggestions with things to do with them?

(photo by Mela, c/o sxc.hu)

Ok, that sounds like a bit of a no-brainer but let’s elaborate on it a bit:

What’s greener a bath – which allows the water to be recycled on the garden or into a grey water system – or a shower where the water just goes down the drain?

How about if the bath water is heated in a gas boiler and the shower is electric?

(photo by Bharat Talreja, c/o sxc.hu)