We’ve had an email from Karen, asking:

What can I do with old tissue boxes? The ones I get have a plastic layer on the inside of the top so make it easier to pull single tissues out. I realise that if I tear that out I can just recycle them with my card but is there anything I can do with it otherwise?

The greenest solution is usually to use hankies or equivalent re-usable clothes instead of tissues but that’s not always possible.

I buy big boxes of tissues and decant them into old smaller boxes for different rooms around the house so if the plastic-ked ones are quite small, you could do that.

Any other suggestions? What about for the box in general?

(Photo by scol22)

We’ve had a clever suggestion from Shabnam:

This might be an obvious one: but use old maps as wrapping paper! I just used some for to friends who loved it.

Photos posted on my blog.

Good idea, Shabnam! I’ve also seen them used as feature wallpaper. Any other suggestions?

(Photo by singhajay)

As I might have mentioned before, John and I write a geeky webcomic together and we sell geeky t-shirts based on jokes from the strip. We decided we’d only sell the tshirts if we could do it right and were lucky enough to find a printing company with a good ethical & environmental policy. We also send the shirts out in recycled envelopes or (for more orders of multiple shirts) in brown paper parcels because those one-off plastic posting bag things seem excessively wasteful.

We hope that our wonderful tshirt buyers recycle or compost the paper or envelopes but I thought it couldn’t hurt to come up with a few more reuse suggestions. We’ve already covered envelopes so anything specific that brown paper is good for?

Jack and Jill used it, along with vinegar, to fix his head but away from the world of nursery rhymes, what else could it be used for?

(Photo by lusi)

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on books for a while but the very, very obvious answer for me is “charity shops”. I buy a lot of books from charity shops and give away ones I’m done with but we’ve got a big stack of books that aren’t really suitable for that route – namely, very out of date geeky tech books.

A lot of the technology that John’s interested in moves so fast that the books are practically out of date by the time they’ve been printed and sent out. He’s trying to buy e-book versions instead now but that doesn’t address the collection he’s amassed over the years. General theory books might be of use to someone but a lot of the (very geeky, professional) training-manual types are pretty much obsolete. They’re very specialist and as I said, very out of date so chances are they’d just sit on the shelf at a charity shop until they were thrown out, or someone would waste their money buying them, thinking they’d be more useful than they are. We’ve tried giving them away through our local geek group (WYLUG) but no one wants them.

They’re big, thick, well-printed tomes and it seems a waste just to send them for recycling.

So any suggestions?

(Photo by hatashonin)

We’ve had an email from Jasmin:

I shred bank statements, receipts etc but our local authority doesn’t accept shredded paper in the recycling bin. I don’t have a garden so composting isn’t easy either, does anyone have any other suggestions?

I’ve seen shredded paper used as packaging to protect breakable items in the post so that’s one idea – but any more reusing or recycling suggestions? What do you do with it?

(Photo by winjohn)