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

GreyQueen

Upsidedown_Bear wrote: »

All of them

Excellent! I shall be taking a bagful there next week.

There is a modest but sincere pleasure in closing a shortcoming on one's personal recycling, is there not? I have a nice little cache of bottle tops all washed and ready to go, plus the ones from the parental home.

Among the items retrieved from the carp among the good tuff in the little drawers were 6 cheapy 1980s digital watches, all long since dead, but on steel watchbands. I have de-banded them and chucked the watches (unless someone knows of a better place) but the steel bands will go into metal recycling at the tip as the scrap man doesn't seem to be coming around here any more.

I'm a tad concerned about the teabags as I chuck them in my compost Dalek at the allotment. I shall now be ripping them open and chucking the contents not the bags. Always something new to learn.

Upsidedown_Bear

Mojisola wrote: »

Most teabags have plastic in them which means they don't break down properly in a compost bin. If you tear them as they go into the compost bin, the contents will be composted and you can sieve out the bags before you use the compost.

Thanks for the reminder
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/02/teabags-biodegradeable

Aril

The company that take things like toothpaste tubes, yoghurt pots etc are called Terracycle [no personal connection to me]. A lady in Sussex has set up a initiative with them with local drop off points and then they collections are used to raise money for charity.

I understand your obsession GQ. All the people I clean for know I hate waste so they give me batteries etc which don't go through our household recycling scheme as I'm happy to drop things off if I'm going to somewhere that takes them anyway.
Arilx

shandyclover

ZeroWasteWeek wrote: »

haha! I hear you - you're officially a rubbish geek I once worked with a family of 7 and it was an amazing experience. We worked on their rubbish over a couple of months and they reduced it from an overflowing wheelie bin once a week to needing their bin emptied every 6 weeks. It was so heart warming to work with a family that wanted to make a difference despite ill health, kids in nappies, a cramped house and a tiny budget...

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:

skeeter93

Thanks for the info on the tea bags. Years ago I collected them in a big jar and soaked them, to pour the water on plants (I read it was good for them). This didn't last long as it went stinky and I was not very OS and just gave up. I planned on tearing them open and pouring on the soil later, but I didn't know the paper couldn't go in the compost.

I've just read through my shire's recycling list, and refreshed my memory on what can go in. We do recycle a lot of stuff, but were unsure on a few things, and have had arguments - 'you can't put that in the recycling!'

Lilyplonk

ZeroWasteWeek wrote: »

If any of you are in West London, I can arrange that for you at the Harrow plant

Good luck with the composting - hey, you sort out the worm fear and I'll start picking up other people's rubbish from the pavements and recycling it - let's bust through this! :eek:

If you're passionate about it, why not set up a local upcycling workshop? I'm sure you'd be great

I'm in Merseyside - Knowsley to be precise - but haven't heard of any 'upcycling groups' around here. I don't have the available time to start one, but would love to get involved if one is already going. I'll contact our local Environmental Waste Dept at the council to see if they have any details - thanks for the idea :T.


'Some News' on the composting front - my DS2 has just acquired an allotment and he's anxious to start his own compost heap - so I'll be letting him take my Food Waste in future .

GreyQueen

It might also be worth familiarising yourself with what can be taken in at your local 'dump' in terms of sorted into categories and what happens to it.

If you're not sure of anything, do check the relevent websites and email the council if necessary; people like me answer these and we're keen as mustard that you recycle stuff.

Love that someone is diligent enough to salvage discarded removal boxes. These have been a hot-ticket on my freegle for a long time, because when you want them, you really want them, and when you're through with them, you need to get rid asap.

I have been considering Teabag Management chez moi since yesterday. I will shortly be drafting a prospectus for a degree in the subject. I will re-purpose a small container like an ice-cream tub and line it with newspaper and rip the spent teabags open. As the container is shallow, the leaves should dry out and not get stinky and then the whole bundle can be dropped into the compost Dalek on the allotment. The teabags themselves shall go into general bin.

A couple of weeks back I was tooling past the local dump on my sit-up-and-beg pushbike when I saw a bloke with a sack trolley taking several chunks of tree up there. Several very burnable chunks of tree. I bet someone would have bitten his hands off to take that off him, for their fire or their woodburner.

Several people may be very happy to have your discards, could you but get in touch with them. Freegle/ freecycle is great for this. I even rehomed a non-working printer, which was several years old and needed a new printhead which was uneconomic to fit. Advertised it as spare-or-repair, with its manual and driver disks, cables etc and had peeps fighting over it. So much better than dumping it.

juliapenguin

Lilyplonk wrote: »

my biggest problem about making my own compost is the fact that I'm absolutely petrified of worms.

Me too! I feel sick even thinking about their existence.

Nocturnes

Thanks for everyone's great ideas on this thread. I thought I was doing well with the recycling but see I can do much more!

My neighbour keeps chickens so any food waste that doesn't end up in the stockpot goes to them. We get a good supply of eggs. I was looking at what we could do with the eggshells and was so surprised with the results. A few here on this nice blog
http://ruralspin.com/2013/04/07/7-ways-to-use-eggshells-and-tips-you-need-to-know/
and plenty more ideas on the net. For now I am going to try them in the battle against slugs though I fear that the Special Slug Forces deployed around here are not going to deterred by mere eggshells. Will report back.

skeeter93

I haven't had much luck with freecycle. Nobody wants my junk I put it down to my area, but I think my junk is just too junky.