We’ve had an email from John K:

I wonder could you help me with an issue I have with disposing of old footwear. I know there are some programs that accept old footwear and the different parts are separated and some are recycled as astro turf, basketball court surfaces and the like. If you do not have access to such a program, what can you do with your old footwear? I live in an apartment so using them for outside activities like gardening can not provide the solution.

I asked this question on my blog last month but nobody left a comment, I’m hoping your readers can come up with some interesting solutions.

We have a similar problem – if they’re in good condition then we charity-shop or freecycle them, but you only need so many pairs of scruffy decorating/gardening shoes. So anyone got any suggestions?

Any details of the programmes John K mentions would be great too.
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We don’t use rubber gloves that often because, frankly, we don’t care that much for cleaning and when we do clean, we don’t care that much about our hands to bother with gloves. But sometimes we pull out the marigolds. For those icky jobs. The ones that involve bleach. Or cat poo. Or both.

When we do use rubber gloves, we don’t always to remember to be careful and have a tendency to pick up thorny rose bush branches, or snag fingers on cheese graters, or test how low a match will burn before the rubber melts (answer: pretty low). We find rubber both rips and melts more easily than skin and heals much slower too.

After mixing and matches odd as-new gloves to make pairs, we’re usually left with a number of random gloves that have small holes in them (usually in the finger tips) and so are no longer waterproof. They lurk in the cupboard under the sink with the old tea towels until they dry out and scream to be thrown away. Any ideas on how they can be put to better use?
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John’s socks have a tendency to

a) stretch to about seven foot in length
b) go hard and strangely crunchy
c) go missing

Mine hole at the heel and toe, lose all elasticity around the ankle then drain of colour.

When they’ve gone past the not-even-on-washing-day-when-every-other-sock-is-dirty stage, we usually just throw them in the dirty rag bag for using when something gross needs cleaning up. But even with all the gross (feline-related) things that happen in our house, we still have a huge stack of odd and broken socks.

Ideas?