We’ve covered the nasty cheap plastic good-for-little coat hangers you get given (usually whether you want them or not) at clothes stores but Elizabeth Phelan wants to know about other types:

I have lots of wire hangers and nicer quality plastic hangers (not the ones they give you from the retail stores). Do you know where I can take them to have them recycled or reused?

I’d see if the local charity shops could use the better quality ones and I’d keep some wire ones around the house for those emergency prodding and poking situations that require a sturdy bit of thin wire – but that wouldn’t be suitable for Elizabeth’s “lots”.

So any suggestions? Elizabeth lives in Northern California so location specific recycling points would be great – but if you know somewhere outside that locale, feel free to add it in case it’s of use for someone else.

(Photo by Capgros)

Following on from last week’s soggy sponge post, what about those newfangled body scrubber things?

For those that aren’t familiar with them, they seem to be some sort of nylon (?) net, squished together into a puffy ball shape.

They don’t “sog” up as much as sponges but as a commenter on the sponge post notes, all that type of thing are such a fab breeding ground for bacteria, they probably shouldn’t be kept hanging around for too long – and so will be thrown away when there is still a bit of life in them (and I don’t mean the bug life).

I imagine they’d be quite a fun texture for using for paint effects while decorating – but any other suggestions?

(Photo by kitalanya)

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 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)

A few weeks ago, I had a bit of a panic about the situation with my personal paperwork. For our business, I’m pretty good – everything even remotely related to anything goes in a folder, which goes in the filing cabinet, and promptly gets forgotten about until it’s next needed. My personal stuff – bank statements, utility bills and all that jazz – though, who knows? There was a box in the living room, a box file in the bedroom and about five separate stashes of papers in the spare room-cum-study-cum-store-room.

So a few weeks ago, as I said, I had a bit of a panic and sorted everything out. Everything is all neatly filed now and if I need the July 2003 credit card statement (balance: £00.00, charges: £00.00) from a card I never used, I know exactly where it will be. Hurrah!

But, during my sorting, as well as finding we had kept a metric ton of waste paper stored up there, I found three cheque book and credit card wallet sets. They were included in the opening-account packs of “freebies” in my bank-hopping days at university.

The cheque book one is, by the feel of it, cardboard covered in vinyl and the cheque-book shaped, while the credit card one is vinyl with semi-opaque card sized pockets.

I thought about writing recipes on the back of old business cards and using the card one as a mini cookbook in the kitchen but since the pockets are not transparent, I’d have to take the cards out to read them – which kinda defeats the point of protecting them.

So any suggestions?