I’ve recently started going swimming at my local pool and every time I go (three times a week at the moment – yay previously incredibly unfit me!), I see old polyethylene (?) floats waiting in the bin to be thrown away.

The pool is pretty much constantly used to for children’s swimming lessons so they must go through loads of them as they get beaten up and (I guess) start to deteriorate because they’re constantly ducked in chlorine-y water.

The floats are either small, flat boards (about 30cm/12inches square) or long, thin cylinders of foam like giant haircurlers.

I think about asking to take them but worry they’re just end up cluttering up my cellar unless I can think of good ways to reuse them. So any suggestions?

(And yes, I will be using the save-the-swimsuit and reuse suggestions for my old swimming costumes. ;) )

(Oh, and apologies to anyone reading the site through an RSS reader who saw a bunch of spam links at the bottom of a post the other day – we got slightly hacked… We’ve looked into it and hopefully it won’t happen again – but if it does, please let us know — thanks to Helen for the heads-up this time)

We’ve had another email from our most prolific suggester of things [Am] (aka Delusion):

Me again! While at my parents I caught my mother about to throw out some very old curlers. I managed to snag them before they reached the rubbish bin and thought they would be a good suggestion idea.

There are two kinds, one are cylinders with elastic looped at the bottom that attaches to the ‘stopper’ part and the other kind are spongy, bendy ones. Any ideas for usage to stop them being dumped in a landfill?

If they’re bendy enough, I imagine the bendy ones would be a great addition to a tool box – you could use them for, say, holding pipes together or tying a garden plant to a support (the foam would stop the wire digging into the stem).

And for the cylinder ones, mini-bird feeders? Or if you could block each end, fill with lavender (or the like) to use as an air-freshner or in a drawer/wardrobe?

Any other ideas?

(Photo by [Am] – thanks :) )

This is possibly a bit like the sponge cleaner thing post but I thought it might be worth doing anyway.

Whenever we have (not sea sponge) bath sponges, they seem to be fine for a while then pretty suddenly go “soggy” in the middle – and the sog just won’t dry or wring out. Any suggestions for how to solve that problem?

And if not, what about suggestions for re-uses?

(Photo by lusi)

We’ve got a reasonably large pile of old upholstery/sofa foam – some flat and square, other bits random shaped.

We dismantled a very old (but beloved) sofa at the weekend – some of our collection came from that, with other cushions/padding from other people getting rid of sofas/cushions, or ones that have been used as padding during house moves at one time or another.

We’ve used some of the foam cushions to make a little sheltered bed in our greenhouse for the local stray cat but don’t know what to do with the rest of it.

Any suggestions?

John bought some apples from a supermarket a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t want a full pre-packed bag and the loose ones were bruised and icky because it was late in the day, so ended up getting four in a shaped foam tray. Said apples got eaten and said foam tray got left waiting for its next use.

We’ve already looked at flat foam veg trays – and there have been some good suggestions that would work well with shaped trays like these (especially the paint-mixing ones and the packing material ones) – but is there anything else that can particularly take advantage of the curvy bowl shapes?