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

calicocat

Thanks guys re: ashes from chimenea answers.........in it goes then, all good, less in the ruddy bin, and good for the soil.

It's a win....win.

tablelamp

I keep folded newspaper sheets and old bank statements in a cardboard box in my kitchen under the sink. When I am preparing any vegetables or fruit for cooking I take out a few sheets and put the waste onto the paper as I do the peeling etc. this is then wrapped up and put into my compost caddy. This means that the paper helps in the compost and if I don't get to empty the indoor caddy for a few days the vegetation is wrapped and not getting smelly and mucky. Also it saves having to shred the account papers etc. as they rot down in the compost. I do the same with paper bags that come from the chemists with medicines from the pharmacy. I find this great for coffee grouts as well as they can be very messy when going into the kitchen compost container.

GreyQueen

Morning all.

Today will involve visiting my beloved allotment, to work on the soil and also the do some harvesting. I have a Carte D'Or ice-cream tub three-quarters full of spent tea-leaves from the brews of the past few days. I have also added the finely crushed baked shells from about 8 eggs to this, and this will go straight into the soil.

I propose to start treating the former onion bed, which was cleared and forked-over about 3 weeks ago. It's a strip the width of the plot, about 1.5 m wide. I think if I use a couple of sticks to mark the area I have treated, and move across from one side to the other, I shouldn't miss any bits out.

One thing which has always astonished me about adding stuff to soil is how little ground you can cover, even when you have huge quantities of manure, such a 5 tonnes at a time. This means that for those of us with a lot of ground, as opposed to a few flowerbeds, we need to be organised about not missing bits off the programme.

Not all areas of soil need to be manured, for example, each year, and you don't want to grow root veggies in freshly-manured soil anyway, but you do need to have either a notebook or a good memory for what you're doing. I have some stubby marker posts dividing sections of the plot, which help me remember what areas held what/ were manured.

I have also been busy unravelling a jumper, chipping and re-making candlestubs into fresh candles and have mended a pair of shoes with superglue. I also have paper from my cross-cut shredder soaking in a bucket and will experiment with making mini-bricquettes in the next few days. I don't have a fire at home, so would be using them on the allotment, possibly to fuel the kelly kettle if they'd burn fast enough, but this would be an experiment. I'm doing it out of curiousity, and also because the shreddings are a nuisance in the compost bin.

The past three weeks have caused one small carrier bag of non-recylcable waste to be produced from my household, although I should 'fess up that I was away for a total of 5 days during that period, so would have produced a wee bit more had I been at home.

calleyw

I have a couple of these joey cans cost me £1 each on ebay including P & P.

I use to collect water while showering in a big plastic container but found that two heavy to lift. I use it to flush the loo from the pan. And did not work there well.

Now I collect the water from the shower while waiting for it to get warm. When I need to flush the loo. I take the lid off the cistern flush it then pour the water in from the joey can. So much easier.

I also keep 3 x 2 litre milk cartons by the kitchen sink when I draw water to wash up. I fill them up and use them for rinsing and water plants and re-filling the joey
cans for up stairs.

Used about 4cubic meters since my meter was read at the end of june. Not sure if that is good ro bad with just me here. But I do try to save money were I can as I don't work full time. And need to watch the pennies where I can.

Yours

Calley

GreyQueen

Hi calley, another part-timer here (for medical reasons) who has to watch the pennies. I've used 5 cu meters of water from beginning Jan to first week in July this year. I'm out for several hours on most days (up to 6 hours some days, 4-5 hours others.

Have been busy on the allotment and have distributed the tea leaves. One ice-cream tub = thin scattering on 1 sq foot of ground. Put the kettle on, I must drink more tea asap.:rotfl:

I also turfed out the bucket which I have used to contain the non-organic carp I pick out of the soil when cultivating. Despite doing this consistantly for several years, it still keeps surfacing.

The lion's share of it is shards of window/ greenhouse type glass which isn't welcomed in recycling bins, plus a lot of rusty nails and fragments of soft plastics and bits of decayed roofing felt, none of which I have anywhere to recycle so have binned. I did pick out about a dozen bits of bottle glass which will be washed and recycled, plus fragments of bricks, small lumps of concrete and bits of breeze block, which I will gather up and take in one fell swoop to the rubble bit of the tip. Ugly stuff and I don't want it around.

Been prepping allotment produce for the freezer and for immediate consumption - am a tired garden bunny tonight.

76rosie

i have come back from holiday this week.

my friend has decorated the bathroom and living room using reclaimed paint from the community project. it is was worth the effort. He also made a little shelf for the bathroom.

We also upcycled the mdf from my old wardrobe to make a shelf in living room to hideaway stuff.

I can also recommend the water meter. i also have a joey can. My OH and i have used 13cm3 since april. This will make around 130 pound saving a year.

We definately try to reduce food waste though.

GreyQueen

Yeah, I'd pay north of £500 per annum for water for an unmetered supply whereas the 12 months to 07/07/14 cost me £90. Since the approx £400 saved is half a month's wages, that's money well-worth hanging onto.

Excellent bargaineering with the decorating projects. I was once able to get some paint from one of those projects and was able to decorate two smallish rooms in slightly different tones of the same colour. I love the feeling when you are able to make something out of not-a-lot for your home. I once got a pine shelf from a bootsale for £1 which was that horrible gingery sort of shade. A light sanding and painted with cream gloss and mounted on a cream wall, and it was an excellent addition to the parents' smallest bedroom. Still there 20 years later, in fact.

Have washed the bottle-glass fragments and will be slinging them into the bottle bank down by the communal bins on my way out today. Sixteen bits of glass back into the materials stream. Drives me nuts that flat glass isn't supposed to go into the bottle banks as most of the stuff I dig up on the allotment is bit of that. Have had several kilos of glass out of there over the years, I reckon.

I picked an awful lot of runner beans yesterday, which were mostly prepped for the freezer, which I have Tetris-ed within and inch of its life and which really will not take one thing more. It's only a table-top model, but surprisingly useful, and sips electricity. I reckon it has paid for itself in YS bargains held over for use and batch-cooking done and frozen.

And the strings from the runner beans and the skin from the beetroots will be going back up to the allotment today and straight into the composting.

ScaryGreen

Hi all,

We're generally good with food waste as we have a kitchen caddy but our main issue seems to be packaging such as yogurt pots, plastic carrot/potato bags, plastic wrapping from broccoli. Any ideas on how i could recycle these things long term (e.g. there's only so many uses for empty yogurt pots)?

Thanks
SG

GreyQueen

ScaryGreen wrote: »

Hi all,

We're generally good with food waste as we have a kitchen caddy but our main issue seems to be packaging such as yogurt pots, plastic carrot/potato bags, plastic wrapping from broccoli. Any ideas on how i could recycle these things long term (e.g. there's only so many uses for empty yogurt pots)?

Thanks
SG

Hi there, your council may be able to take yoghurt pots, I know ours is just about to do so for the first time, due to finding a market for the plastic. Might be worth emailing them if their website doesn't say?

Otherwise, could you try asking a local nursery/ infant school whether they would like them for paint pots? Another possibility if you are using a lot of little yoghurts is to see if you can swap for one bigger pot, such as the 500g size, and just spoon out what you need? I appreciate this may not mesh with how you use yoghurts, such as if you use them in lunchboxes, just a thought.

Re potatoes, could you buy them by the paper sackful? If you have access to a car you can see these in country areas at farmgate sales, typically circa £6 for a 25 kilo sack. Very economical and you only have a paper bag, which is very strong and you could probably even return whence it came. If you haven't a car, would someone deliver them for you?

Carrots can be bought loose in supermarkets, and may even be a bit cheaper than bagged. You could take a lightweight re-usable cloth bag to the shop. Or buy them off the market in paper bags or have them shoot them straight from the scales into your reusable shopping bag. Country areas sometimes have carrots sold in 10 kg nets at the roadside. If you have cool storage, these should keep long enough for you to use them, or you could split a bag with friends, or peel and cut some up for the freezer.

Some shops sell broccoi heads without plastic packaging, could you seek it out that way? The plastic isn't recycled atm. HTH.

Primrose

Foe those of you are keen gardeners, on water meters and need to water your vegetable seedlings regularly, ask for large packets of water retention crystals as useful birthday presents if people don,t know what to give you.

A small quantity of them dug into the soil at root level in the ground or in containers really retains moisture for plants where it's needed and reduces the amount of watering needed. i,ve found the effect can last for much of the growing season, dependent on your soil type.