This isn’t a real post just an advert for those who are currently feeling slightly sick after eating too much chocolate this morning.
We covered excessive Easter egg packaging last year but are still keen to hear your ideas and suggestions.
The cardboard can usually be recycled and the foil reused in a number of crafty ways but what about the plastic?
We’ve looked a little toilet tubes and giant big tubes in the past but what about ones more in the middle of the size range?
I got sent a (freebie promotional) tshirt from the US a couple of weeks ago and for some reason they decided to send it in a solid cardboard poster tube instead of an envelope or postal bag.
Said tube has sat around the living room ever since with a “how can I be reused?” question mark hanging over its head. It’s a solid cardboard tube, about 50cm long (20″) with plastic caps at each end (one of them with a lip to make it easy to take out).
Now, thanks to one of our friend’s newly-discovered love of expensive whisky, it’s also now been joined by a similar whisky bottle tube – slightly lighter cardboard but similar plastic caps.
I’ve kept them to this point for reuse if I need to send anything small poster-ish through the post but that’s quite unlikely – so any other suggestions?
We’ve already covered a number of Valentine’s Day type things:
And while we’ve thought about the wrapping on individual chocolates, we haven’t thought about the chocolate boxes themselves.
Some of them – particularly the high end, Valentine’s Day ish ones – are quite pretty and I’ve used them in the past for storing letters and the like. But what about other reuses? Have
Some boxes have formed plastic to hold the individual chocolates – like cake packaging – so it would be great if anyone had recycling ideas for those too.
I’ve had an email from Andrew Urban:
I have something that needs to be recycle and actually is recyclable but maybe companies will charge a lot to take them.
It’s a 12″ long 3″ wide non-corrugated cardboard tube. My company uses around 3,000 a week of these tubes and we need a environmentally friendly way to dispose of them.
We have considered using a wood chipper to chop them into smaller pieces and then send them to a landfill but that will only solve our waste issue not our recycling issue.
This is probably on a lot bigger scale than most of the commenters on this site usually think about but if anyone’s got any ideas at all, post a comment below and maybe Andrew and his company will be able to scale it up and save all that landfill space.
John and I are breakfast cereal-fanatics at the moment and are munching our way through box after box of pre-sweetened, chocolate-flavour flavoured puffed nonsense (me) and dull, wholewheat goodness (him).
Most of our favourite cereals come in plastic bags within glossy-printed cardboard boxes so we’re left with a lot of rubbish at the end of each pack.
When I was small, cereal boxes were regularly harvested for their card but I don’t do as much cutting and sticking for fun now – and when I do need some non-corrugated card, cat food boxes tend to be sturdier (if slightly smelling of fish and ash).
As with most paper products, they will compost down but some people worry about the full colour printed designs – some inks are toxic and will leech chemicals into the compost.
Any reusing or recycling for the card sides or the boxes as a whole?
(Photo by simbncn)
