We’ve had an email from Steve asking:

How can I reuse or recycle one-cup filter coffee packs?

I think Steve means these – little plastic pots that you put on the top of your cup/mug and fill with boiling water. The water then seeps through the filter-coffee-filter sandwich at the bottom et voila!, a cup of filter coffee without needing a machine.

I think the first thing to suggestion here, as in many cases, is see if you can stop or reduce using them. I realise they’re a handy substitute for offices where there aren’t machines or anything like that, but you can get reusable one-cup filter things and cafetieres/plungers aren’t expensive either. Both of those option cut down your waste by loads and it’s also easier to reuse the coffee grounds from them too.

If you do have to use them though, it’s of course better to reuse them or recycle them instead of just binning them. I wonder if it would be possible to refill them – you might have to replace the upper filter as well as the coffee though – and that would probably be so much faff that it wouldn’t be worth it.

As for other reuses, like nearly everything vaguely pot shaped, you could use it as a small plant pot – the filter at the the bottom would allow drainage. Any other suggestions?

One of our worst habits is wasting food. Not huge amounts but enough to make me want to change our ways.

Sometimes it’s store-cupboard stuff that goes well out of date without us noticing – stuff we bought on 3-for-2 offers but got bored after the second one, or stuff we bought because we were, for example, eating a lot of nut roasts at that point but then we seemed to forget about them and developed a blind spot around their part of the shelf whenever we looked into the cupboard for something for dinner. Other times, it’s fridge stuff – salad mostly or half-eaten packs of cheese – or stuff that was once store-cupboard but is now fridge stuff: partially used cans of beans or custard that turn before we can use the second half.

We’re not overly fussy eaters and generally regard best before and use by dates as guidelines – if it smells alright and looks alright, we’ll eat it. I’m also happy making soup, chillis and curries out of misc things that need eating, and we’ve tried to cut down the very short-life veg we buy: we’re going to grow pick-and-come-again lettuces in our new-house sun-porch and realised that in many places a pickled pepper or the like will serve just as well as fresh. But I still think there is more we could be doing.

What do you do to make sure you don’t waste food? Do you only buy for a couple of meals at a time? Do you plan weekly menus that you stick to? Do you have procedures to make sure you use up cupboard items in a timely manner? Love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

We helped a friend of ours move out of his house at the weekend. He’s going away to India for a few months and needed to get out of his rented house before heading off. Because he’d left everything to the last minute, he told us on Friday that he was just going to “bin everything” he wasn’t keeping, prompting my green nerve to twitch violently and me to volunteer our services to take it all to a local charity shop instead. (If I didn’t know better, I would swear he did it on purpose…)

We ended up taking four full carloads of furniture, clothes, books and bits & bobs to the charity shop and wombled another two bulging carloads for ourselves – including a nearly new bike which we gave to our neighbour and a big box of random food items from his kitchen cupboard. We’ll use most of it in time (there were 27 cans of baked beans, 16 cans of tuna and 5 jars of horseradish sauce – it’ll take quite some time!) but it made me realise that while the charity shop we were visiting took nearly everything, they didn’t take food – so what could be done with them if we didn’t want them?

I know that sometimes schools, churches or community groups have canned food drives at certain times of the year – often around this time of the year, as harvest festivals – but what about when they’re not collecting? I suspect shelters would welcome food stuffs but probably more along the lines of those 27 cans of baked beans rather than the single cans of lots of different diverse foods (including, almost other things, a can of reindeer meat) – things that lead themselves to mass catering.

There is so much food wasted at the moment – in-date food that people have bought on a buy one, get one frees but then not liked the first one – that there must be better ways to collect and redistribute it.

Do any charity shops collect it? Are there any organisations that oversee collection and redistribution, leaving collection bins in public places (like some animal shelters have bins for pet food donations supermarkets)? Do you have any other recommendations for how to pass it on?

(The photo is of the 27 cans of baked beans and the single can of reindeer meat. I wasn’t joking.)

We’ve had an email from Allison:

We always have coffee in for visitors but rarely use more than a few spoonfuls of it before it goes out of date. Can I do anything it?

The only reuse I can think of off the top of my head is making ye olde stained paper when I was a kid – possibly not the most useful suggestion unless you really, really like making fake old maps ;)

A quick Google reveals some more useful things – they can be used as a scent in soapmaking, dying fabric or even to develop camera film.

Any other ideas?

Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.

Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!

So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?

I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…

Any other ideas?