Carbon watchers for March - Reuse

The theme for March is reuse.
Gloucestershire Carbon watchers did things a little differently by launching this month's theme as a competition. The winner of the best reuse idea will win a solar powered charger and two runners up will get some microfibre cleaning cloths, which don't require any chemical detergents.

About 70% of household waste can be recycled or composted, but not everything. Some items of waste are made of more than one material, which means it takes so much energy to recycle that it outweighs the benefits. For example, a crisp packet can be made of plastic film and paper, which cannot be easily separated.

By re-using as many items of 'waste' before recycling or disposing, it helps us reduce the amount of 'real' or 'residual' rubbish we create.

We do quite a lot of reuse in our household, but really we try to stop at the 'reduce' point if possible.

Some of my suggestions included

An old coffee jar has a ball of string placed inside it. The lid has a hole made in it, large enough for the string to be fed through and this prevents string becoming a tangled mess in the drawer - you can just pull through the amount you want and cut it off.

We buy honey in bulk - in 7lb containers which have a lid. My daughter uses these to store pens and arts and craft supplies.

I never buy any jiffy bags, bubble wrap or envelopes because I carefully open all post and reuse them. In fact I've had to give away two large boxes on freecycle because I gathered so much stuff. So I've saved things from the landfill AND saved money!

we have a tree house made from 'gash wood'. All of it scraps left over from building projects which would otherwise have gone into the skip. When our neighbour saw us building it, he gave us the final piece - a corrugated sheet of metal made the perfect roof!

I kept all the annoying plastic ties for our daughter's Christmas presents and these are being used as either cable ties around the house, to help train roses and will be used for this years tomato plants.

All glass jars are kept for jam and chutney making later in the year. many are freecycled too because people ask for them.

We occasionally get a mange tout or mini sweetcorn craving. I try to buy local, seasonal produce, but sometimes you want a treat. These come in plastic trays, so we reuse these trays as drip trays for houseplants.

We've found that the plastic lids from a particular brand of filter coffee are the right size for using as open tin covers - the sort of covers you buy for putting on top of half a tin of cat food to keep it fresh.

I reuse yogurt pots for freezing home made soup and storing leftovers in the fridge,

We use candle stubs for lighting the fire. Only a little bit at a time LOL!

I never buy clingflim; I reuse things in the house for wrapping sandwiches such as cereal pack inners, old bread bags, ryvita packets - these all last a long time before finally falling apart.

Pringles containers are used for pen pots by my daughter.

Old towels are cut up and made into flannels or used as spill cloths in the kitchen to save buying kitchen towel.

Hubby never gets rid of an outworn electrical applliance without salvaging stainless steel screws, flexes, the fuse, the plug and any other useful parts.

We have various odd things in the garden as planters - an old belfast sink that was dumped in my old house, old saucepans with missing handles, rusty bakeware and anything else like that gets a few seeds planted in it.

There have been some great suggestions from other people too, so I'm wishing everyone luck and hoping we can all inspire one another to think before we bin :)