Frequent commenter on Recycle This, Linda, the bookstorebabe, emailed to tell us about a recipe for using up apple peel and cores:

I just read this on Craftster, about making jelly from the peels and cores of apples. Seems like a nice way to use something that otherwise would be composted. Especially if you’re making apple pie or such like. No, I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan on it! And I follow your website, so just thought I’d pass along the link. The first page has the recipe, the second page has some info I didn’t know about how jelly jells and such.

You have a lovely website – full of so many useful ideas!

Great link, thanks! I love recipes that use up the bits of food usually thrown in the compost bin – especially at the moment when so many people are cooking up gluts of apples.

Another reuse for apple peels is to make apple cider vinegar – either using a wild fermentation method or using cultivated winemaker’s yeast.

We also feed chopped apple peel/cores to our chickens – an indirect way of putting them in the compost really.

Any other suggestions? What do you do with your peels and cores?

We’ve had loads of really good suggestions for what to do with egg shells over the years but here are some of my favourites:

1. Feed them back to your chickens (or lizards, or dogs…)
Eggs shells contain a considerable amount of calcium – they’re 95% calcium carbonate, with the remaining 5% being a binding protein to hold the shell together – so they can be used as a useful mineral supplement for birds, reptiles or animals.

To feed them back to chickens, bake them in a hot oven for about half an hour then crush them into small grit-sized pieces. Bake them while you’re cooking something else to be more energy efficient – it kills bacteria, makes them easier to crush and changes the taste so are less likely to encourage the hens to peck their fresh eggs. The hens will reward you by recycling the old broken egg shells into fresh new eggs!

The same baked crushed shells can be added to the food of egg-laying reptiles (same principle as chickens) but for dogs on raw food diets, most people simply blend/crush a whole fresh egg in with the dog’s other food every now and then as a calcium boost.

2. Use them for cleaning
Again, baked and crushed, they can be used as a mildly abrasive, natural way to clean stains off the insides of bottles, flasks, vases, or other hard to clean things. Place a couple of tablespoons of crushed egg shells in the container, add water, then shake, baby, shake! The egg shells should help remove stains from tea & coffee or wine, without scratching the much harder surface. After you’re done, you can tip the shelly water into your compost (see #5).

3. Make your own Sterno/heating fuel
Again, taking advantage of all that calcium, you can turn egg shells into homemade Sterno – a long-burning heat sauce made from jellied alcohol, used instead of tealights to keep food warm or as a camping stove fuel. Full instructions on how to make it can be found on the Zen Stoves website (along with advantages and disadvantages of using Sterno as a cooking/heating method).

4. Turn them into chalk – or other pieces of art
If that’s a bit too much like a chemistry experiment for you, how about just making them into floor chalk instead? It’s a pretty easy thing to do – perfect for kids as it doesn’t involve stabbing instruments or flames.

5. Use them in the garden
Roughly crushed egg shells have traditionally been used as a slug deterrent in the gardens – the theory is if you sprinkle a circle of shell around plant stems, slugs won’t cross the sharp rough surface to get to your precious plants. It’s very much more of a deterrent than an eradication measure though and while some people swear by it, other people just swear at the continued loss of their lovely hostas.

Egg shells can also be added to the compost heap – whole shells take ages to break down but crushed ones disappear into the general matter very quickly.

More reuses or recycling ideas for egg shells…

At one point during the cheese course thing at the weekend, the topic of conversation turned to packaging. For us hobbyist cheese makers, it’s not an issue but for the guy running the course and the woman hoping to set up a small scale cheese company, it’s an important thing to consider: balancing appearance with food safety/durability, cost and, of course, the environmental impact.

Both of them were considering the well-trodden route for pre-packed cheese packaging – vacuum packed in pretty plastic wrapping – because it seems lower waste than the current option (clear plastic wrap then paper/cardboard to make them more presentable). But because you invariably have to cut into such wrapping to open it, it can’t be reused (it’s seldom even good enough to continue using around the remainder of the half-eaten product) and while the plastic – typically polythene (LDPE, resin code 4) – can be recycled, it’s not kerbside recycled everywhere and crucially, it’s often not marked so people don’t know it can be recycled.

The cheese wrapping discussion got me thinking about packaging in general, and about something I’d been thinking about since my Graze box rant last week. Following the 3Rs, we should first REDUCE, before thinking about REUSING and RECYCLING – but sometimes, in some situations, it seems better to get a larger amount/weight of packaging that’s easier to reuse or recycle.

A few examples:

• The supermarket near me sells luxury pâté in a vacuum sealed pack but the cheaper stuff in a little plastic tub. The plastic tub is heavier/sturdier so used more natural resources in its manufacture but now I can reuse it for storing small quantities of leftovers etc.
• In the past, we’ve bought luxury ready-meal desserts in reusable dishes – souffles in glass ramekins and crème brulees in shallow glazed terracotta bowls. Both the ramekins & terracotta bowls have entered our crockery supply and been in circulation for years. Plastic tubs, even reused a few times, would probably have well gone by now.
• I pick pickles & condiments in heavy glass jars rather than light, unbreakable plastic squeezy bottles because glass recycling is more efficient than plastic (and here, we can doorstep recycle glass but not plastic). I can also reuse the glass jars for preserving, saving me from having to buy new jars for that.

So what do you think? Would you prefer items to be packed in the least amount of packaging possible or prefer more packaging but something more reusable or easier to recycle? Would/do you pay more for items with reusable/recyclable packaging?

Ok, this is a bit of a rant dressed up as a Recycle This style question – it’s a genuine question but I feel the need to rant too! ;)

So many people in my (geeky) world are going nuts for these at the moment and it makes me want to cry — all the packaging, all the waste.

Graze boxes are designed to lure people away from vending machines and sugary snacks at work and get them eating more natural, healthier alternative instead. For £3.29 a pop, you get a box of snacks delivered to your desk instead – four different snacks (such as dried fruit, nuts, seeds, olives or crackers) inside little film-covered plastic tubs and encased in a cardboard box. The idea is to have them delivered regularly – several times a week – so you’re never tempted by that Mars bar or long-life vacuum-sealed muffin.

Graze’s claim to have thought carefully about the packaging – the cardboard is from a sustainable forest, is designed to be use as little material as possible & can easily be recycled again, and Mrs G from My Zero Waste asked about the plastic of the pots and it’s apparently PETE (resin code 1) which is widely recyclable where plastics are recycled.

Yes, it’s good news that the plastic is widely recyclable plastic – but getting a pack of it delivered to your door is hardly reducing waste (the first and most important of the 3Rs) and it’s not obviously reusable either. Where plastics aren’t kerbside recyclable, that PETE is likely to end up in the bin – and even the cardboard might too since offices don’t always have full recycling facilities.

(I’ll try to remain on topic with my rant here and not get into: i. how much energy is wasted transporting these light but bulky items around the country; ii. how much more expensive they are than buying the items directly; iii. how it’s easier to buy something than make a genuine lifestyle change.)

Anyway, I think you probably get the gist of my annoyance so let’s get constructive instead: the packaging can be recycled where facilities are available, any reuse suggestions though?

And what about reducing people’s use of them? Do you have any tips or suggestions how people could have the same healthy snacking experience without so much packaging?

(PS. sorry for the ranting ;) )

(CCA Photo by philcampbell)

We’ve had an email from Milly:

I know about making breadcrumbs with stale bread but is there anything that can be done with bread that’s gone a bit mouldy? I don’t mean eat it of course but compost it?

Obviously the best thing to do is avoid it going mouldy in the first place – freeze it if you don’t have time to use it up or turn it into breadcrumbs there and then. But sometimes loaves have a tendency to turn in a blink of an eye so it’s harder to avoid.

Bread is one of those things that some people compost and others don’t. It will break down quite quickly but in an open, slow going compost heap, it might attract vermin to the pile even quicker. It’s also not going to add that much goodness to the heap either so you might decide it’s not worth the risk. But then what do you do with it instead?

Any suggestions? Do you compost bread?

(Photo of non-moldy bread because looking for a photo of moldy bread was making me too queasy!)