Ok, we’ve already covered shampoo bottles and plastic drinking bottles but I think shower gel bottles are a little different.

The ones I use have got a little, I don’t know, valve thing on the top to stop the gel falling out while they hang upside down in the shower. I don’t know whether this would stop anything as wet as water but the liquid gel stuff stays put.

So could this be used for anything else? I guess I could refill it with liquid soap for sink-based handwashing – either commercial stuff I’ve bought in bulk or when I get around to make my own from soapnuts – but any different, non-soapy suggestions?

A suggestion (and photo) from Jill:

I have a pile of old hot water bottles lurking in the cupboard beneath the sink in my bedroom. Some have actually leaked, others have simply started to perish – but none of them are fit for their original purpose i.e. to warm my bed!

The trouble is, I just can’t bear to simply throw them away in the bin – it seems such a waste.
I have never seen a recycling centre with any facilities for rubber products.
Any suggestions as to what else I can do with them, as the pile continues to grow !

Ideas then?

A suggestion from JH753 (I’m guessing that’s not their real name, unless they’re a car number plate : ) ):

When the kids were growing up, they used to play tennis all summer and got through a fair number of tennis rackets. Most of the time we just replaced them when a string got busted or they got a better racket as a birthday present when they decided they wanted to make a bit of an investment in their hobby.

I didn’t want to throw them out because it seemed wasteful but I didn’t bother getting them fixed either or giving them away because I was ‘too busy’ so they just stacked up in the garage.

What can I do with them? Most of them were quite cheap to start with so now a good few years old aren’t worth selling on or getting restringed.

So has anyone got any suggestions? I guess my first thought would be giving away the ones that are still in alright condition to a charity shop but what about ones with broken strings?

(Photo by q83

I never throw shoe boxes out. Because they’re always useful for odd bits and pieces, right?

But the thing is, I can never think of enough random bits and pieces that would utilise them properly. I tend to buy more bigger, more sturdy boxes for anything that needs a permanent home, or use plastic (ice-cream-esque) tubs if I need the contents to be kept dry so the shoe boxes end up cluttering up the place with their potential, but unrealised, re-usability.

So any suggestions of other ways I could use them? Or specific suggestions of things I could put in them?

I posted an item from my mum last week about how to reuse washing powder tablet nets and it made me think of their solid plastic friend: those funny shaped ball things that you put washing powder in before putting the ball directly into the washing machine.

I’ve got a few floating around from back in the day when they were the washing powder innovation du jour and since I’m trying to move away from chemical powder onto soapnuts now, I have no need for them.

Any suggestions for reuses? They’re really sturdy with a flat bottom but awkwardly shaped apart from that.