We’ve had an email from Barbara Patrick:

I have a whole box of these plastic spiral book binding thingies at my work and no idea what to do with them. I would love some creative crafty suggestions. I live in United States and our currently recycling only takes 1’s & 2’s. Our print shop doesn’t want them. ugh! help!

If they’re still in (re)usable condition, maybe a school (or the like) would be able to use them in their reprographics department? A print shop might worry about them being in less than perfect condition but a school probably wouldn’t be as fussy.

If I had access to one of the whole punching machine things, I’d probably use them for making scrap paper notepads but if not, I suspect that would be a lot of hassle and I’d just use a bulldog clip as I usually do instead.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo supplied by Babs)

We’ve covered the toner/ink cartridges in the past but have now had an email from Wendy Johnson Houghton about the machines themselves:

I have recently purchased a new printer for my personal use.

I now have a printer which sort of works, but not brilliant – and I want to know whether it is recyclable?

If it’s still working – as you say it is, someone else might prefer to take a chance on refilling the existing cartridges or replacing them with cheaper ones – so it might be worth offering it on your local Freecycle group.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by brokenarts)

We’ve had an email from Alison:

My company just organised a conference and we had some waterproof stickers printed up to promote it and give out. We’ve got a box leftover but they can’t be used at future events because they’ve got this year’s date and venue on them. Can they be recycled?

I’m assuming Alison’s means vinyl when she says “waterproof” and according to my limited research, most types of vinyl can be recycled. I don’t know if that’s just containers or bigger pieces though. Anyone know?

What about reuses?

(Photo by Ambah)

As I might have mentioned before, John and I write a geeky webcomic together and we sell geeky t-shirts based on jokes from the strip. We decided we’d only sell the tshirts if we could do it right and were lucky enough to find a printing company with a good ethical & environmental policy. We also send the shirts out in recycled envelopes or (for more orders of multiple shirts) in brown paper parcels because those one-off plastic posting bag things seem excessively wasteful.

We hope that our wonderful tshirt buyers recycle or compost the paper or envelopes but I thought it couldn’t hurt to come up with a few more reuse suggestions. We’ve already covered envelopes so anything specific that brown paper is good for?

Jack and Jill used it, along with vinegar, to fix his head but away from the world of nursery rhymes, what else could it be used for?

(Photo by lusi)

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on books for a while but the very, very obvious answer for me is “charity shops”. I buy a lot of books from charity shops and give away ones I’m done with but we’ve got a big stack of books that aren’t really suitable for that route – namely, very out of date geeky tech books.

A lot of the technology that John’s interested in moves so fast that the books are practically out of date by the time they’ve been printed and sent out. He’s trying to buy e-book versions instead now but that doesn’t address the collection he’s amassed over the years. General theory books might be of use to someone but a lot of the (very geeky, professional) training-manual types are pretty much obsolete. They’re very specialist and as I said, very out of date so chances are they’d just sit on the shelf at a charity shop until they were thrown out, or someone would waste their money buying them, thinking they’d be more useful than they are. We’ve tried giving them away through our local geek group (WYLUG) but no one wants them.

They’re big, thick, well-printed tomes and it seems a waste just to send them for recycling.

So any suggestions?

(Photo by hatashonin)