Friday is usually dilemma-day but anyway…

A suggestion from my dad:

Daughter,

So then?

Garden uses would probably be best but I’m sure he’ll consider anything. And he’s promised to take photos of anything he does with them : )

Turning over our compost bin is a ineffective nightmare. It involves precariously balancing on a metre-high brick wall and digging down, now below foot level, into the flimsy bin without using the sides of it for leverage in any way (because of the aforementioned flimsiness). Needless to say, it doesn’t get turned that often.

But every time we do turn it over, egg boxes return to the surface, almost completely unchanged by their weeks of being surrounded by rotting matter. I suspect we would do better if we tore them up or soaked them with water before throwing them in, but it did make me think: they’re clearly not as disposable as I thought, so what else could they be used for aside from the compost heap?
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When I left my last but one job, I was given a juicer as a leaving present. Since I abhor fruit in its many evil forms, we swapped the fancy be-tapped blender for a breadmaking machine since we love bread and thought it would be a darnsight more useful.

Oh, we had such good intentions. We made bread at least twice a week and made pizza dough too. We made quick white bread and long slow wholemeal. We used the timer so we’d wake up to nice fresh bread in the morning. Ah, happy days.

Then after about a six weeks, like I guess about 95% of people that own a breadmaker, the novelty wore off and suddenly we just had an unused appliance taking up half the worktop and a couple of big bags of buy-one-get-one-never-use flour in the cupboard.

Time passed.

Then, recently, I found I had a bit more time on my hands and I decided to make a pizza base-esque garlic bread. I turned to our good old flour mountain with glee. Our now out of date flour mountain. Our now out of date with ick, some tiny crawling things in it. The glee wore off and I learnt a good lesson about buy-one-get-one-free products and novelty devices.

I’m not obsessive about best-before dates but I draw the line at cooking with tiny crawling things. So what non-culinary uses are there for old flour?
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Aside from glass bottles then newspapers, one of the first things to hit my recycling radar was learning to tell the difference between steel and aluminium cans for recycling purposes. I think there was a Blue Peter Christmas appeal to collect aluminium cans or something, so for a good few months I watched with glee as magnets slid off the side of cans. In the name of children’s television related charity, I perfected the art of crushing cans or at least getting them wedged onto my shoes so I could pretend I was a tap dancer. Ah, happy recycling days…

Reusing them though, that’s a bit more tricky. I wonder if recycling of them is so commonplace that people don’t think to reuse them – or if they’re only recycled because there aren’t many reuses for them… Any suggestions?
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Between jam, honey, olives and sticky-sticky sauces from the Chinese supermarket, we go through quite a lot of jars and it seems a shame to just recycle the glass and bin the lid.

So any suggestions about how they can be used again? I know it seems, on the face of it, quite an obvious thing to be able to reuse but you never know what other people haven’t thought of…

Oh, and it would also also be great if anyone knows any foolproof ways of
a) thoroughly degunking them (including smell, which always seems to linger on) and
b) getting the label and all the sticky off easily.
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