Shelagh emailed to ask:

How can I reuse a Cillit Bang spray? It seems impossible to remove the nozzle to fill with a product.

I’ve never used it so I don’t know what the bottle is like – but I’m going out to the shops in a few minutes so I’ll have a good look at one (that’s guaranteed to get me some weird looks in the cleaning aisle ;) ). I’ll also check what type of plastic it is for recycling purposes (my guess would be HDPE, plastic number 2, which is widely recycled, but I’ll check).

We’ve covered pump action spray bottles before – people reuse them as plant spritzers or personal misters, or refill them with vinegar or homemade cleaning solutions to make their own cleaning sprays — but all of those reuses require getting into the bottle again. Anyone got any helpful hints on how to remove the nozzle section from a Cillit Bang bottle without breaking it?

Any other reuse ideas for if the nozzle section is stuck on?

I realise yesterday’s post on aerosols would be mostly recycling rather than reuse, but how about a similar item that has more reuse potential – pump action sprays?

We’ve got a number of old pump action spray bottles around the house – from old cleaning products and from a body spray that I use from time to time – and they can all be refilled and reused, but we’ve used up all our ideas about what to put in them and still have a stack of spares.

So any suggestions what would be useful to have as a spray/mister that doesn’t already coming with its own pump spray?

I suspect this is going to be more of recycle one than a reuse one – but if I’m wrong, suggestions on both are most welcome.

Since we’re not big consumers of aerosol-driven personal hygiene/hair products, we don’t have that many of them – the ones we do have are from specific cleaning products (namely, at this time of the year, household flea sprays – two of the cats have quite bad flea reactions so we have to go a bit OTT on the extermination front to stop them from getting all bitten to shreds, even after they’ve been treated themselves).

So what can we do with the aerosol cans ones we’re done? Can they be recycled?

(Photo by cinezi)