We’ve had an email from Ronnie:

My youngest got it into his head at Rudolph likes honey (or Winnie the Pooh was pulling the sled too, we haven’t got a straight answer from him about it) and left an open jar on his window sill on Christmas eve. We only found it on Tuesday. Aside from the single fly, it looks OK but no one wants to eat it. Can we compost it?

You can compost it but if I were you, I’d save it to reuse in other ways. Honey is a great beauty aid – mix with oatmeal and water to make a soothing face mask; mix with water and a little cider vinegar for an all-over body moisturiser; with olive oil, it can make a hair condition; and it has anti-fungal qualities too so can be used as an alternative treatment for athlete’s foot.

And apparently you can use it to embalm the dead. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Any other reuses for honey?

We’ve had an email from Trish:

My son has recently bought a drum set and we desperately need to sound-proof a room where he can practice. How can we do this using recycled materials?

The old cliché is egg boxes – does that really work though? Waffle foam packaging would probably be slightly better but possibly difficult to source in large enough quantities. I guess egg boxes might be too since the people who tend to have open trays of them – egg sellers or small grocers – tend to reuse them for their original purpose. If egg boxes work, would shaped foam sheets used for packaging round fruit be an alternative?

My boyfriend John, who is a drummer too (although one that doesn’t care too much for soundproofing), has suggested carpet as something good at muffling and easy to source in large pieces. He also suggested cork tiles – the air in the cork structure aids sound deadening apparently.

Another thing I’d add although it’s not really a reuse/recycle thing is, if possible, try placing the drum kit in different parts of the room/house. Some sounds – footsteps, creaking floorboards, John jiggling his legs – really travel around our house but only from/to certain spots. I suspect it’s a joists/floor board thing but don’t know any more than just suggesting trial and error – anyone know why it’s like that?

Any other suggestions?

• Now the rush to the holidays is out of the way, it’s a perfect time to catch up with fixing and mending stuff around the home and those dozens of jumpers snagged by cats over the first properly chilly bit of the season (… just me?). The Craft blog recently had a roundup of some fab repair projects to get fixing juices flowing.
• MJ over at Making Do with the Not So New posted about a great scheme someone has set up in her area – community give and take chests. Perfect for things not suitable for a charity shop (such as food or once-used bottles of bathroom supplies) or things too small to warrant a Freecycle/Freegle posting.
• MJ also linked to webecca’s yarn winder (swifts) tutorials – made re-using random household objects such as clothes pegs and coathangers.
• Crafting a Green World’s Becky linked to a video tutorial on making cute little handbags from the covers of old, damaged hardback books.
• Craftstylish’s Cal has written a great how-to on replacing a coat lining to breath new life into a tattered vintage coat. The same idea can also be extended to making a coat that bit warmer for winter.
• Finally, reuse old drinking straws and expanded foam packaging to make handy storage for seed beads. It would work for actual seeds too – easy to sprinkle them out at planting time.

(Photo by Diane Gilleland for Craft)

We’ve had an email from Sally asking about squeezy hand cream tubes:

Do you know what number plastic hand cream tubes are? The ones with the flip lids. I don’t know whether or not to put them in my recycling bin.

Along with the inconsistency of facilities available, lack of information on packaging is one of my major pet hates when it comes to recycling. I’ve got three different types of face/hand moisturiser in our bathroom cupboard and only one has recycling information on it – it’s number 4 (LDPE). LDPE isn’t as widely recycled as PET/PETE (number 1) or HDPE (number 2) but it is recycled in some areas – my old council Leeds used to pick it up at the kerbside so it’ll be worth checking your local advice to see if you can do the same.

Aside from recycling, any ideas on how the tubes can be reused? I suspect there will be some overlap with squeezable plastic toothpaste tubes but any new suggestions?

So we reach the end of another year – a time to look back and look forward.

Looking back at 2009, it’s been a cracking year for Recycle This – I’ve posted 204 articles and you wonderful people have left more than 3450 comments! We’ve also nearly doubled the amount of “unique visitors” to the site over the last year too – hopefully a sign that more and more people are keen to reuse and recycle more things, more often.

I finally got around to redesigning the site in May – something I’d been meaning to do for ages – which I think/hope has made it easier for people to find the most common items and related articles. We’ve also introduced a few new features, How can I reduce this? and How can I repair this? – I hope to push those ideas a lot further in the next few months so if you have any suggestions of things you want to reduce/repair, do get in touch and we’ll brainstorm some ideas for you.

Which brings me neatly onto what I intended to be the focus for this post – what are your reducing, reusing and recycling goals in 2010?

Personally, I’m going to continue working on cutting back my addiction to cheap clothes – everyone’s suggestions have been very useful, thanks so much guys – and I’m hoping to bulk cook more to stop us reaching for, for example, supermarket pizzas when we need to eat quickly or packaging-heavy biscuits when we need a snack. I’m also hoping to reuse a lot of packaging in our new garden and I’m going to set up dedicated bins for things we can’t doorstep recycle to make it easier for us to recycle them elsewhere. What are you going to do?

See you in the new decade!