We’ve had an email from Jen, saying:

So I was wondering if you knew any good ways to reuse Tape Dispensers when it runs out of tape.

The tape dispenser that I use can just be “refilled” – just slotting another roll of tape onto the wheel – but I did break manage to break the wheel while doing the swap at one point so it’s not as useful as a dispenser now.

I suspect Jen’s dispenser is less easily refillable though so does anyone have any non-tape reuses for a generic reasonably heavy contraption with a cutting blade thing at the front?

(Photo by Nbauer)

We’ve had an email from Sara R, asking:

What can I do with plastic forks? I always used to carry a proper one in my bag so I didn’t have to pick one up when I got a pasta pot for lunch but now the forks are inside the pot so I can’t refuse them. I’ve now got a stack of little forks that I don’t know what to do with. I reuse or recycle the pot itself but I don’t know about the forks.

Wikipedia informs me that plastic cutlery is usually Polystyrene – type 6 plastic – and that can’t usually be recycled easily so I guess we’re looking at reuses.

I guess they could be melted/moulded into jewellery or some of the other suggestions we had for metal cutlery but any plastic specific ideas?

(Photo by asolario)

My beloved laptop died last week. It’s actually been dying for about a year but my patience/unwillingness to buy a new one combined with a few last ditch life-extending efforts by John meant it only shuffled off the.. electro-magnetic coil last week.

John bought it five years ago for work and (ab)used it for a couple of years, then I inherited it and have used it as my main PC ever since – and given I work on it all day, every day, it’s really quite impressive that it’s lasted this long.

But now we’ve decided to finally lay it to rest. The power supply (which has been replaced once before) and batteries are utterly shot, meaning it frequently lost power when I was in the middle of my work – and not just once but over and over again until the planets align and it decided it’d accept/store power again. The screen’s casing is physically damaged after an accident a few years ago and something either to do with that or the graphics card meant there were constantly glitches appearing and disappearing from the screen. The airport (wireless) hasn’t worked for years and last time we opened it up it seemed to have melted (??!) and the paint has worn off the edges of the keyboard bit, leaving electric-shock inflicting bare metal. I was happy to live with the latter things – using a wire instead of wireless, wearing a jumper to prevent the shocks – but the power thing became unworkable. There is only so many times something can turn on then off then on then off then on then off… before you want to throw it through a window.

We’re going to see if anyone in our local geeky world can use it for its non-broken parts but if it’s not any use to them, I don’t know what else to do with it. Our usual computer recycling place refurbishes old PCs but I suspect, given this is an Apple and so uses all sorts of proprietary Apple connectors and whatnot, it’ll be too much hassle/expense to fix it.

Any suggestions though?

(Photo by John from when it was shiny and (quite) new, and we didn’t have piles of crap on our shelves)

(Also apologies for the couple of hours downtime that we had yesterday – our server was being moved or something.)

We’ve had an email from Emmie, asking:

How can I recycle used highlighters? I am a med student and go through these very quickly…

I bet you do, Emmie. I wasn’t anything as hard working as a med student and I still went through them by the dozen when I was at uni…

So any suggestions?

(I’ve included felt tip pens in the post too because they’re essentially just the same thing – a plastic shell with a shaped fibre tip.)

(Photo by adamci)

We’ve had an email from Angela, asking:

I currently work for a company of a little over 200 individuals. I have recently noticed how much money we spend and general waste we generate from our desk supplies alone. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of room to store items such as metal and plastic desk top sorters, wall files, book ends, and monitor boosters.

How can we recycle these items? I have looked up local recycling facilities but haven’t found anything that seems to match our need.

If they’re still in good condition, I think the focus should really be on reuse rather than recycle.

I suspect small local charities would be able to use them – but that might be too piecemeal to make it practical. It would be worth offering them on your local Freecycle group though, just in case.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by dekok)