How can I reuse or recycle plastic chopping boards?
We’ve had an email from Miranda:
Can I recycle an old plastic chopping board? It’s stained and scarred and we don’t want to use it any more.
As far as I can tell, most plastic chopping boards are made from HDPE (resin code 2), which can be recycled and is quite widely collected – but many places that do collect it will only collect it in certain formats (for example, plastic bottles). If HDPE is collected in your area, you could phone the recycling authority to see what they think.
If it was us, I’d probably keep it to reuse in some way – as a cutting mat for crafts or as a surface protector when glueing or something like that.
Any other reusing ideas? Or recycling advice?
Solway would take that material for recycling but in the form of a chopping board then even if it has gone well past it’s best then finding an alternative use would be a better solution.
Give it to the kids to protect your tabletop when they’ve got something they want to chop into tiny pieces for example.
if you no longer want your chopping board and you have children who loves the snow, tie string to the handle and let them use it as a sledge.
Which is it, small children or very large cutting board?
It’s worth using a good quality wooden chopping board because they can be almost indefinitely sanded down when they get ropey to give a new smooth surface to use again.
Cheap wooden ones split when the wood gets wet and swells, but you can make your own chopping board out of any decent thick bit of wood you find in a skip, just by sanding it down to a nice smooth surface, which then you can reuse for ages.
Can you sand down plastic ones? I guess they’d melt, has anyone tried?
All chopping board can be rejuvenated
go to a carpenter and he will scrape the top layer with a machine tool
Will look like new- plastic or wooden
If there’s no carpenter borrow the scraper from somebody like handyman
You’d have to try quite hard to melt a plastic chopping board you might be able to reshape it slightly with heat to make something a little more interesting.
Glue a picture on it and hang on a wall.
You can turn it into a snow pusher! Assuming the thickness is about 8 mm…
Drill 4 or 5 holes in it down the middle of the longest side. Then screw it to a planed wooden batten about 50 mm square and maybe 1.5 to 2 metres long. The plastic edge slides easily over concrete or paving.
Not much use though if you don’t get snow.
Phillip