We’ve had an email from Alice who wants to turn this whole crazy thing on its head:

Instead of an item that I want to recycle, I’m actually working backwards here – does anyone know what kind of waste could be used to build a sturdy bookcase?

A few ideas spring to mind from previous posts – namely snowboards (and I guess skateboards would be similar), hollowcore doors – and old hollowed out televisions. There is also a suggestion on making shelves out of old books but I suspect that’s more decorative than sturdy.

If you’re interested in an industrial look, you could use stacked metal food cans (or decorated old paint can) between the shelves – and depending how you do it, they could be used for secret storage too – or skip-diving might turn up some breeze blocks or the like (it might get heavy quickly but red house bricks would look cool).

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by GiniMiniGi)

We’ve had an email from Mark:

I found your site from Google after getting fed up with old snowboarding gear I have that has no snowboarding use left but could be used for other things. Searching your site I found a use for old plastic bindings, that someone said they could use for a project.

How can I reuse 2 old snowboards (one from 2000, the other 1995?) and one set of aluminium bindings? I am not after anything for them but feel they could be put to alternative uses.

I’m presuming they’re not still usable as snowboards by anyone else for whatever reason – otherwise I’m sure Mark would just pass them onto someone else who could use them (either through something like Freecycle or a snowboard-specific forum or whatever) – and Wikipedia informs me they’re usually made from a combination of wood, fibreglass, plastic and metal so recycling them is probably a nightmare – so we’re looking for reuse suggestions.

I think they’d make a cool version of the traditional cheap breeze-block-and-a-plank shelving unit but I realise that might not fit everyone’s favoured design aesthetic.

So any other ideas?

(Photo by bartgroe)

We’ve had an email from Timothy asking “how can i reuse or recycle old snowboard bindings?“.

As my knowledge of snowboarding on extends as far as playing ‘SSX’ on the XBox, my first question was “what are snowboard bindings?”. Wikipedia informs me they are the bits that hold the snowboarder’s feet to the board and can either be as simple as straps or complex moulded hard plastic things. (Someone please correct me if I’ve read/written that wrong.)

So any suggestions?

(Photo by aculine)