So after the chicken killing on Friday night, we spent Saturday playing with pig guts. It was an unusual weekend.

We were playing with hog parts because we were on a sausage making course at Old Sleningford Farm in North Yorkshire. It was a very interesting and fun course in a lovely location – I’d heartily recommend it to any sausage fans or just people wanting to try a new skill. Rachel & Martin, who run the course, are lovely – keeping us delightfully fed and watered the whole time we were mincing meat then squishing it into “casings”.

Rachel & Martin recently moved to using “ready spooled” casings for their sausages – they cost a little more but save a whole lot of time because they come “spooled” on narrow plastic tubes rather than in loose hanks (imagine how knotted hanks of yarn can get, how awkward it is to unravel them sometimes; now imagine that with pig guts instead of yarn). At one point during our group making 25kg of sausages, there were a number of the spools on the table – and Martin wondered aloud how they could be reused or recycled. Like a pork spattered recycling superhero, I suggested that I might know a friendly internet community who could come up with some ideas… :)

They’re about 30cm (1ft) and the hog casing ones are just over 1cm (half an inch) in diameter. I realise, like with chicken feathers, these aren’t something everyone will have to reuse/recycle – but any suggestions?

I guess suggestions of particularly relevance to small scale sausage producers/smallholders/foodies would be best as they’re the ones most likely to have the tubes in the first place.

We’ve looked a little toilet tubes and giant big tubes in the past but what about ones more in the middle of the size range?

I got sent a (freebie promotional) tshirt from the US a couple of weeks ago and for some reason they decided to send it in a solid cardboard poster tube instead of an envelope or postal bag.

Said tube has sat around the living room ever since with a “how can I be reused?” question mark hanging over its head. It’s a solid cardboard tube, about 50cm long (20″) with plastic caps at each end (one of them with a lip to make it easy to take out).

Now, thanks to one of our friend’s newly-discovered love of expensive whisky, it’s also now been joined by a similar whisky bottle tube – slightly lighter cardboard but similar plastic caps.

I’ve kept them to this point for reuse if I need to send anything small poster-ish through the post but that’s quite unlikely – so any other suggestions?