With their semi-rigid sides & strong handle, plastic milk bottles are very easily reusable – which is useful since there are bajillions generated every day.

We’ve had loads of great suggestions about them over the years but here are some of my favourites:

1. Pencil sorter
Mentioned as a featured link a few weeks ago, I love how neat and practical these containers are for coloured pencils/pens. Stored on a shelf, the lids could be painted the colour of the pencils to make for easy identification.

2. Paint caddy
One close to my heart at the moment because we’re decorating – plastic milk jugs make great paint caddies. 4 pint/half-gallon/2ltr bottles are best for this – cut out the panel of plastic opposite the handle, leave the neck intact for strength and cut down to about half way. The handle is easy to hold (or you could loop some wire/string around it to hang it from a ladder rung) and the caddy holds about 2 pints/1ltr of paint at a time – enough to do a fair amount of painting.

3. Foraging container
SandyM’s family use gallon milk bottles as foraging containers – widen the neck and add a loop of rope or a strong belt through the handle holds it up, leaving both hands free for collecting fruit. In the UK, our bottles tend to be long & thin, so possibly the wrong shape for this – but a great idea if you can get hold of those bigger square bottles.

4. Bird feeder
One of the original ideas for reusing them – make them into bird feeders. The how-to uses gallon jugs but the same theory can be applied to smaller ones too – I’ve made mini ones for our mini-tree from 1ltr/2pint bottles.

(I’ve also used a plastic milk bottle as a grit hopper for our chickens – same principle as the bird feeder but with stones/shells instead of food. It would be a cruel joke if they didn’t need the grit for digestion.)

5. Scoops
Cut away a wedge from the bottom to make it into a scoop – for scooping flour/grain/animal feed or other dry goods, or at the other end, as a pet poop scoop. Leave the lid on to avoid spills from the other end.

What are your favourite reuses for plastic milk bottles?

• How can I reuse or recycle plastic milk bottles?
• How can I reduce my use of plastic milk bottles?
• How can I reuse or recycle milk bottle tops?

We’ve covered reuses for old gift bags in general before but Meri emailed asking about one particular type:

I have a growing collection of wine bags – mostly paper – that are too nice to toss.

How can I recycle them – get them to people who might reuse them?

Most people I know reuse wine bags (and all gift bags) as many times as they can while they’re still in good enough condition to pass on. There is a bit of a tradition in my family to leave gift tags bare or written using a soft pencil to facilitate multiple uses.

If you’d rather not re-uses them yourself and have a number to give away, offer them on your local Freecycle/Freegle list. Scrap stores would probably welcome them with open arms too, as would organisers of local charity events like tombola or raffles, to make the prizes fancier/more mysterious.

Any other suggestions on where to pass them on? And what about reuses for the tall thin gift bags like these?

• I’m a big fan of reusing milk bottles for all sorts of things and this idea for using them as stationery organisers is fantastic. If they were for use by little delicate hands, I’d be tempted to sticky-tape the cut edges to make them less sharp.
• Kristin from Craft Leftovers used the offcuts from fitting a bamboo blind to make coordinating twined coasters.
• Jan McNeil, a Sculpture & Photography student from the University of Ulster, emailed to ask if anyone has any old baby dummies/pacifiers lying around – she wants them for an art project. Get in touch if you’ve got some – or have any ideas for where she might be able to get them from – and I’ll pass your details/suggestions along.
• I love the idea of this toothbrush holder made out of old toothpaste tubes. (Although I’d want to make sure it was easy to clean – which, with the lips, I’m not sure it would be in this design).
• This reusable lunch bag how-to uses new shower curtains but it could equally be made from a clean old one. A great way to reuse to reduce.
• Someone – a name didn’t make it through so I don’t know who – sent over some photos of a birthday table cloth made from old balloons: “I recycle my birthday ballons by gluing them to a clear plastic sheet, gotten in the fabric dept. They make a cute table cover for the party!”

Echoing the pistachio shells that started this site, I was thinking about walnut shells recently.

It’s advised not to compost walnuts/walnut shells because the trees contain a chemical called juglone, which is toxic to some trees, plants and vegetables (especially members of the Solanaceae family – aubergine, tomatoes & potatoes) so better safe and than sorry when it comes to composting them.

Walnut shells have a number of industrial uses – a thickener in the paints & plastics industries, as a filler in explosives, and for cleaning/polishing – but less re-uses in the domestic setting. I’ve used exfoliating soaps and cleansers with tiny walnut shell particles as the abrasive element so home soap makers could use them up – but what about other reuses?

We’ve had an email from Pauline:

I would like to use steel and aluminium cans to make jewelery. Do you know how to cut the metal out? Should the can be crushed first? Do you know how to smooth the edges so they don’t cut? If you could throw any light on this or point me to a website as I am not getting much coming up in google at the moment? Thanks.

I’ve made numerous things out of drinks cans (all aluminium I think) over the years and have mostly just used scissors for the cutting – it’s not as hard to cut as you’d think. I might use a can opener to remove the lid or a knife to start a hole in the body but then scissors suffice. I typically cut down the print “seam” and around the top & bottom to remove the curve so am left with a flat rectangle of metal.

(I’ve tried using shaped hole punches on cans but only lightweight ones so not had much success. Alison Bailey Smith has talked about the heavy duty ones she uses on plastic – I wonder if they’d be good on metal.)

And if the edges are smooth, not jagged, they’re also not as sharp as you might think. I’m not saying I’d necessarily want to wear them as jewellery in their nude state but in all my making, I’ve not once cut myself. Anyone got any tips for making the edges safer though?

Finally, anyone made any interesting jewellery from cans – or seen any inspiring examples of work around the wonderful worldwide web?