Christine Thompson got in touch recently to tell us how much she loves the site (in return, I love those emails :) ) and since she’s a primary school teacher, we chatted about the great primary-school themed suggestions people had come up with for school milk cartons.

She added that she’s made pirate ships out of taller tetrapak juice cartons with the triangular top, Victorian ladies out of “curvy” plastic bottles and:

I also made brilliant ‘Three Wise Men’ from Actimel bottles (saved them for months so everyone could have three!), little craft ball for head and lots of old Christmas paper for robes.

I thought that sounded like an excellent idea so let it inspire today’s post: what else can be done with those little Actimel/Yakult/’probiotic’-yoghurt-drink type bottles?

We’ve had an email from unsteadyocean:

I was just wondering if anyone has suggestions for reusing the cloth bags that bulk rice comes in? I’ve seen suggestions for making them into tote bags but I would love to get more ideas.

Around here, they tend to be plastic-coated cloth or just woven plastic – but either way, ripe for re-using.

So any suggestions?

(Photo by kirsche222)

We’ve had an email from Rob Williams:

I collected silver foil/aluminium foil for a lady at work and she gave it to a charity. She has now retired and I still have a growing pile of foil. Does anyone know of a charity that wants this? I’m told it is a ‘valuable’ commodity.

Our doorstep recycling includes aluminium foil so it can easily be recycled – but as Rob asks, does anyone know of any charities that collect it?

And since we’re all about reusing, while we’re on the topic – any re-use suggestions?

(Related items: we’ve already covered foil pet food trays and foil chocolate/sweet/biscuit wrappers.)

(Photo by nlHarri)

We’ve had an email from Carine:

I have huge chopsticks left from those Chinese delivery, since we usually don’t use them… fork and knives do better !!!
So what can I do with them.

The first thing I would say would be to ask the take-out place to not include them with your order – reducing is always better than dealing with the waste afterwards. But that obviously doesn’t address the stack Carine already has.

We’re still using some plastic ones we got with a delivery a few years ago and I recently re-used some “disposable” bamboo ones to when creating a mini-greenhouse around a cutting – I put the cutting in an old clear plastic bag and used the chopsticks to keep the bag away from the cutting.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by Penny Matthews)

As I mentioned before when talking about broken crockery in general, we have a very hard, very cold stone floor in the kitchen. Things tend to smash, or at least break, when we drop them.

In addition to that general broken crockery thing, I thought broken mugs, particularly handle-less mugs, deserved their own post. We’ve got a small collection under the sink, holding random bits and bobs (fuses, screws, bits of chain) that really should be sorted out and put where they belong because we’ll never remember to look there when we need them.

So what else can we do with our stash? We’ve got the handles for two of them but they can’t be glued back on and used for drinks again for safety reasons – and all the mugs are just a bit too small to use for planters (well, for the houseplants we’ve got at the moment at least). Any other ideas?