Zero Waste Week - tell us your best upcycling and re-use tips

Ilona

Hi. This is a rag rug I made out of old sweat shirts and tee shirts. Most of them were my own, but I got a few from car boot sales. You need a lot of garments to make a rug of this size. The backing is a piece of mesh which I got from a shipping container. In my previous life I was a lorry driver, and always taking home free stuff that I might find a use for.


Ilona

MummyBobble

We're approaching zero food waste by the simple fact that the oven's packed in and I can't afford to get it fixed. However I still have the hob, grill, slow cooker, microwave, sandwich toaster etc so meals are being planned around what I can cook rather then throwing random stuff in the trolley at the supermarket. Suppose it also helps to have two teenagers with hollow legs that will eat pretty much anything :-)

ZeroWasteWeek

MummyBobble wrote: »

We're approaching zero food waste by the simple fact that the oven's packed in and I can't afford to get it fixed.

I think your attitude is fantastic - let's add a silver lining to that cloud Teens make great hoovers / compost heaps don't they?

ZeroWasteWeek

Ilona wrote: »

Hi. This is a rag rug I made out of old sweat shirts and tee shirts.


Ilona

It's really beautiful - so colourful! You're very talented and creative... :T Thanks for sharing.

mrsd

I am really keen on recycling and reusing and do it wherever possible, even got my mum doing a lot more. Our bins are emptied fortnightly and are rarely full, the recycling one is much bigger than the domestic waste one which is good as we recycle as much as we can.

Now my problem is; I bought a compost bin and the small caddy from our local council. Everything was going great until our neighbours moved and the new owners let the house to 3 young men (they are fine, no real trouble, no loud parties etc) who dont really understand recycling or cant be bothered, so bins are often overflowing, they also dont seem to have any inclination to do any gardening. The upshot of this is they got rats which also came into our garden. The man from the council said the best way to deter them is to not have a compost bin and to get rid of the water butt, neither of which I really want to do. I read online that mint deters them and have planted a couple of plants. Any advice anyone could give on this would be very gratefully received as I dont really want to stop composting.

On another note, a friends OH who works for council said you can recycle milk bottle tops if your force them inside the bottle. That way they dont get caught up in the machinery and go through system safely.

Ilona

I re use my bath water for flushing the toilet. I also use it for washing the car,

and washing the kitchen floor. Always find another use for it, never let it go down the plug hole. Saves me money. :j
Ilona

Ilona

I had a big yukka plant in the garden, sadly it died after a harsh frost one winter. I painted all the leaves and stuck them in a pot with some compost in it. They never did grow, :rotfl: but at least they lasted a bit longer before I had to bin them, and the colour made the garden look cheerful for a while.

mama67

shandyclover wrote: »

We lived in the RO Ireland for 5 years, where you don't pay council tax, but you do have to pay a private waste disposal company to empty your bins, they actually weigh it - there are different rates for different weight brackets. The council does collect recycling for free and provides special bins for this. Suffice it to say any household watching it's pennies diligently rinsed out and recycled anything and everything. Our kids got so well trained they were horrified when they came back to UK and saw friends tossing things straight in the bin. It made me smile when we dropped kids off at a party recently, and DD18 was helping set up drinks and she asked very loudly 'so where should we set up the recycling box for empty bottles?!':rotfl:

We keep potato sacks for just such occasions, so all cans go straight into them and then go out next to the recycling wheelie on collection day; our council will take large cardboard or sacks like this rather than the wheelie being over filled

GreyQueen

Morning all.

The new teabag regime is thus; an ice-cream tub lined with a brown paper bag from the market, teabags parked temporarily on the side of the sink and, once a day, ripped open and emptied into the tub. Lid is kept on the tub otherwise, in my tiny kitchen, I'm sure to send it flying off the counter.

The tea looks lovely and rich and I plan to incorporate it straight into the soil. The papery part of the teabags is in the conventional waste bin. I drink a lot of tea, so this will be a useful habit.

Have also decided to go back to the former regime of oven-baking rinsed egg shells and then crushing them. I used to do this but was discouraged by the fact that the purpose I was doing it for (slug deterence) just didn't work. Have 4-inch-long slugs on the lottie who just cruise across such obstructions with a sneer on their little sluggy faces.

Howsomever, I will approach it differently from the POV of a soil improver, rather than a slug barrier and grind them fine and just add them into the the soil. They take forever to break down in the compost Dalek and I want the improvements right in the soil.

This is my 6th growing season on an allotment which was previously derelict for more than a decade and the soil the first year was absolutely appalling. It's unrecognisably-improved now, but it has taken a good amount of organic material added in and a lot of labour, in terms of forking the rubbish (plant and non-orgnaic rubbish) out of there. I'm wryly amused when passing allotmenteers, esp newbies, compliment me on my soil, wistfully as if they've been dealt a bad hand on their own lotties when it's just applied Stuff and hard work which got it there.

I'm also starting a bag of 'rubble' from the allotment which will eventually go to the rubble section at the tip. You're not allowed to remove stones from the site but there are a fair few enclosures in the soil which are bits of brick, concrete, breeze-block and slate which have all clearly been imported at some time and which will be deported.

Previously, I thought of these bits as too small to bother with, but with my new head on, I want to gather them up and get them to a place where they will become part of the materials chain again, rather than just waste.

If you think about it, waste is just a sign that we're not living correctly. Nature doesn't waste; everything is part of something else and on its way to another state to be used by something else. And waste is a sign that we're too rich and too disrespectful of resources.

My allotment marker project will be able to use the two screws rescued from the carpark, plus a bit of slab wood and a stake from the shed. Wood treatment for the wooden stake was already purchased for another project and was done Fri eve and yesterday, a metal protective cap for the post was cut from the lid of a coffee can and will be tacked on, and the whole thing will be assembled today. All done with existing materials an zero expenditure, yippee.

calicocat

Washing liquitab containers...I use these to grow grass in for the cat, or seedlings when I first began growing things last year and I didn't have many pots.

Also when cutting lavender back after flowering, I keep it and rub into carpets, leave for a while, then hoover up....nice carpet freshener.