We’ve had an email from Lucy:

I’ve just moved house and now got shelves for my CD collection. What can I do with the racks I used to use? They’re metal with a wooden base.

We moved to shelves from CD towers a few years ago when the place John used to work decided to skip three wooden CD shelving units (even though they looked brand new) – they’re in a loving home now, housing CDs, random small items and in the case of one unit, my spare balls of wool. We took our old towers to our local furniture-focused charity shop and hopefully they went to a good home too.

But as for reuses instead of just passing them on – any suggestions?

Lyndall’s second (well, third) query is about festival wrist bands.

particularly the plastic ones for i would have thought the cloth and paper ones could go into a compost bin.

In my festival going days, at this point in the “summer”, I’d have a wristful of bands and I’d wear them until they got too grimy or fell off of their own accord (back in those days, the Reading Festival bands were the best – understated cool – I wore those for months). But once they’d left my wrists, I just dumped them in my “memories” suitcase because I’m too lazy to scrap book.

Nowadays similar wrist bands seem to be handed out for every little thing, just as a longer-lasting hand stamp thing – at conferences, fairgrounds and last week, I saw them being used on a city tour pub crawl thing in Berlin.

So aside from scrapbooking the memory, what else can be done with them? If you had a big stash – perhaps collected off your friends – could you weave them into something?

(Oh, and re: composting the cloth and paper ones – only natural fabrics (such as cotton or silk) should be composted and I suspect bands would more likely be synthetic for durability/cost reasons. Heavily printed paper can cause problems too (the ink can be toxic) so don’t compost them if they’re all inked-up or coated in plastic.)

(Photo by hakore)

Lyndall, of March’s bread tag query, has got a couple more “how can I recycle this?”es for us. Firstly, following on from Monday’s high heeled shoe question:

does anyone have any bright ideas about recycling old crocs? mine now have holes in the bottom of them! would love to get them resoled if possible, but have not looked into this as yet and it’s generally not cheap.

It looks like Crocs themselves have a recycling scheme – old shoes are grounded up to make up (20% of) new ‘SolesUnited’ shoes for distribution in developing countries — but it seems only for US people at the moment (or people who are willing to pay the postage for their old shoes to reach the US). (They also have spare part schemes for replacing broken straps or rivets, which wouldn’t solve Lyndall’s worn-sole problem but might help save a few pairs from being dumped.)

So any other suggestions? I guess the good old standby of gardening shoes is out if they’re leaky but I suspect the lightness of the foam might be useful for something.

(Photo by sugarbeatl)

We’ve had an email from Naomi:

I’ve got loads of old shoes that I no longer wear but they’re not suitable for use as “dirty shoes” in the garden or whatever because they’re got stiletto heels. What can I do with them?

We’ve covered old shoes before but I guess high heels are a bit different because they’re only good for aerating the lawn ;)

Of course the obvious suggestions are to pass them onto someone who’ll wear them – through Freecycle, local charity shops, eBay etc – or put them into a shoe recycling scheme so the materials can be reused and recycled.

But what about other ideas?

(Photo by kymmie_xox)

We’ve had an email from “trapkuspt” about reusing baby wipe containers:

The kind that have the pop up feature, so the opening is a soft plastic.

They have been great for holding plastic bags I want to reuse, cotton balls, puzzle pieces, etc.

And the thin wipes box for the diaper bag works pretty good for q-tips in the bathroom drawer.

I’ve also found that the hard plastic boxes are useful for filling with tissues in places where a cardboard tissue box would go soggy such as a steamy bathroom or near a splashtastic sink.

Other suggestions?

• How can I reuse or recycle other baby related stuff?