We’ve had another suggestion from the wonderful Am (Delusion), and it’s a bit of a meta one:

As our council have changed our curbside collection from collection boxes for paper & bottles etc to now using our old black wheelie bins, I thought of what could be done with the old recycle boxes.

The council will recycle them and so they can be taken to the Household Waste Centre, however I am sure they can have some more uses!

I have managed to acquire 6 so far, as I am going to use one for storage of plant pots, another three are going to be used as large trough plant pots for my new Wildflower seed mix and another two are going to have their bases sliced off and buried in my borders to contain my very invasive poppies.

Any other suggestions?

I’m going on a mint growing extravaganza this year to sate John’s new obsession with mint teas and they (well, the rest of the garden really) would benefit from growing in troughs like that. We’re also constantly on the look out for lidded boxes as part of our ongoing quest to cat proof the cellar (aka the pee war ground between our cats & the neighbour stray: yes, it’s pleasant). But anything a bit different?

We’ve had an email from Lyndall, saying:

hi, i was wondering if anybody knew what to do with bread tags. i hate throwing them away, but i don’t know what else to do with them. would welcome any suggestions.

We don’t really have them over here these days – shops seem to prefer those little sticky things that lose their stickiness (and therefore ability to seal the bag) after one opening but then still manage to attach themselves to your shoes/socks/cat and refuse to come off no matter how much you shake your foot/cat.

Anyway… bread tags/clips. I suspect they could just be reused as general plastic bag seals around the kitchen – but any other suggestions?

(Photo by Bando26)

We’ve had an email from Fiona, saying:

We eat a lot of dried fruit, nuts and seeds and, when we’re in a jam/marmalade/chutney making mood, a lot of sugar too. Which means we have a lot of empty plastic food bags.

Would love to know how to re-use or recycle these.

I would love to know how to re-use or recycle them too – I suspect those type of bags make up the bulk of our to-landfill waste at the moment.

I saw some storage boxes/baskets made from old chocolate bar wrappers at a cool hippy shop the other week and I’m thinking of giving that a go with these type of bags and other wrappers once I finished The Great Can Weaving Project of 2008 (don’t ask) – I’ll post on how that turns out if/when it turns out.

But what about other ideas?

(Photo by sritenou – and if you’re interested in pistachios, check out the post that started this whole website nearly two years ago :) )

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the garden with a few of the neighbourhood children because one of the girls got it in her head that she wanted to dig over our veg plot ahead of this year’s planting and I’m a firm believer in exploiting child labour at every opportunity.

Since we’ve all been pretty much in hibernation over the winter, it’s the first time I’ve seen them in a while and it reminded me about something her dad made last year. He’d got the metal chassis of an old pull-along trailer and rebuilt the rest of the trailer out of scrap wood etc. Over the random spare tyres, he had some natty wheel arches and he asked us to guess how we thought he’d made them – we guessed scrap wheel arches from something else – but as the title of this post might suggest, they were in fact an old plastic dog bed cut in two and spray painted to match the rest of the trailer. They really looked the part and as a bonus, didn’t add any extra weight to the trailer either. I thought it was a pretty great re-use and kept meaning to post it on here but forgot until now.

So that’s one idea – but probably not one most people would use – so any other suggestions?

A few weeks ago, we had to pick up John’s car from the garage after a service/MOT and while we were breathing in lungfuls of carbon monoxide waiting for the mechanic to finalise all the paperwork, I found myself staring at a big box of used disposable gloves near the counter. I don’t know how long the pile had been accumulating but there was a scary amount of them apparently just about to go in the bin.

Once I got back into the open air and my head stopped swimming from all the fumes, my first thought was “how could I recycle or reuse them?”.

I’ve only used latex gloves once – to provide grip when removing my now defunct tongue piercings – and I don’t think I’d have liked to have used dirty ones for that — but my tongue piercing fondling ones were clean after use and have been kept in the cleaning cupboard if we need them for any dirty jobs.

I guess there will be some overlap with rubber gloves – but the thinner Latex may restrict – or inspire – other uses.

So suggestions?

(Photo by Capgros)