This is cross-posted to my new frugal/growing/making/cooking blog, The Really Good Life.

I’ve reached the end … of my shampoo bottle and our mayonnaise jar. And it made me wonder…

Every vaguely-frugal/green family has their own tricks for getting those last bits of gloop, sauce, oil or whatever out of jars and bottles – but what are your top tips?

Most bottles – from condiments to shampoo – are easily emptied by standing them upside down for a few hours.

Cooking sauces – jars/cans of tomatoes – are easy too: a little squish of water around to pull off the last of the sauce/juice then into the pan it goes to be reduced off.

Cooking oils bottles and jams & honey jars get left in a bowl of hot water to make the remaining contents a little runny and easier to pour out.

Metal squeezy tubes – like tomato puree and old school toothpaste – can be rolled up and squeezed, but the new plastic toothpaste tubes aren’t so rollable – cutting them open seems the only option.

What other methods do you use?

We’ve had an email from Chrissy asking what to do with an old doormat:

The bristly kind. Compost it?

The bristly ones are usually made from coir – coconut fibre – so a natural material that will compost — but it can apparently takes many years to decompose. That’s a good thing really – we’d have to replace our doormats more often if they rotted every six months – and it probably would rot down quicker in a warm, moist compost bin than on the doorstep, but possibly one for a long term compost bin rather than a quick turn around one. (Also, be careful if it has rubber or synthetic backing – you might not want that breaking down in your compost bin at all.)

In her short and sweet email, Chrissy doesn’t say why she’s getting rid of it but depending on its condition, it might be reusable in the same or another capacity – if I had a spare doormat right now, no matter how tatty, it would go outside the door to our chicken run so I could wipe my feet on the way out before traipsing back up the garden. Or, I made a wellie stand a few weeks ago and it could easily be fitted out with some stripes of bristly coir to help clean the mud off them first.

Any other reuse suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Sophie:

I bought a big bag of rubbers at the start of school but they were hard and rubbish so I turned them into stamps instead! I drew a design on them then cut it out with an art knife and they work great.

I remember doing something similar with them when I was at school – although it was less artistic/planned and more just me being bored with an compass in French. Another at-school reuse was, of course, flinging them across the classroom and watching them bounce off the walls/desks. I, of course, never did that, ahem.

If you buy a pack of mixed ones, there always seems to be a couple of really hard ones that don’t work very well in there. Aside from the stamps and airbourne weaponry, are there any other reuses for erasers that won’t erase?

We’ve had an email from Martyn:

Can solid pond liners be recycled? If so, where please?

As far as I can see, rigid pond liners tend to be made from fibreglass and as we discovered last time we had a fibreglass item on here, fibreglass can be recycled but isn’t widely done so.

A better idea would be to reuse the pond liner. They apparently have a 20 year lifespan as ponds but after that they, presumably, begin to leak. (No one mentions what happens after that 20 years – I hope it’s start to leak and not explode violently killing everyone in a 50m radius. Because that would be bad.) If you don’t need it as a pond any more, offer it on Freecycle/Freegle to someone who wants one. Or if it’s started to leak and is beyond repair, you (or someone else) might want to use it as a planter or the like.

Any other ideas?

And what about reuse ideas for flexible PVC pond liners that have been damaged or are leaking?

While we’ve covered food cans in general before, Danielle emailed asking tuna cans in particular:

i have so many, what can i do with them?

There’s a wide variety of uses for tuna cans:

I know some people use them to make “buddy burner” candles and you can use them as candle holders too – but make sure you put a bit of sand in the bottom first to absorb the heat from the candle rather than it heating the metal.

Some people clean them up and use them as “cookie cutters” for making large biscuits/cookies, and because everything in this house gets commandeered for the purpose sooner or later, I’ve used them as drip saucers under plant pots (pull the label off and leave them silver for an industrial look, paint them to make them look prettier – shiny white or cream gloss gives a pseudo-vintage enamel look).

Since they’re essentially just a small pot with a low centre of gravity, they’re useful for holding small quantities of paint/glue. Or as students have been known to do – use them as makeshift ashtrays.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by TanjaS)