We’ve had an email from Lise, asking:

How can rubber stamps be recycled? I found a box full in the stationery cupboard from two department name changes ago!

Given the department name comment, I imagine these are custom ones, not generic “approved” or date stamps – I’d put the latter on eBay or Freecycle/Freegle because they’re still very useful in their own right. The former ones will be less reusable but I’d have loved to play with them when I was a kid (my childhood roleplaying was surprisingly bureaucratic; when I used to play ‘school’, I spent the whole time working out class lists & timetables for said classes) (really).

Depending on the construction of the stamps, you (or someone else) might be able to take them apart and reuse them to make new stamps – replacing the stamp itself but reusing the handles or the mechanism if it’s a self-inking one. Again, eBay/Freecycle/Freegle if you don’t want to give it a go yourself. If they’re very nice old ones, a local stampmaker also might want them to reuse as antique stamps.

If you actually wanted to recycle them, you’d have to break them up into their component parts too – all the ones I’ve seen have been mixed materials so they’d have to be split apart and recycled individually.

Any other suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Alex asking:

Can big paper wall planners be recycled? We’ve got at least a dozen at my school to get rid of now but I didn’t know about recycling them in the paper bins because they’re laminated.

No, it’s very unlikely that they’ll be accepted for paper recycling. Most wipe-clean plastic-coated paper – whether it’s actually laminated or just a thin coating on one side – is also more hassle than its worth when it comes to recycling.

There might be ways to reuse them though – we covered reuses for laminated posters last year and there is probably a big overlap for reuses (especially as a lot of those ideas are school-friendly).

It’s probably also worth investigating if you can get reusable wall planners for the future – dry erase ones without a specific year on them so you won’t have to throw them out each summer.

Any other ideas/suggestions?

Finishing up our impromptu barbecue themed week, I thought I’d run a post that is sure to get some people screaming “DON’T USE THEM AT ALL! USE REAL, REUSABLE PLATES!!” – and those people have a very good point. The first part of the 3Rs is Reduce and disposable paper plates are really unnecessary in most situations – and also usually really frustrating to eat off.

However, they’re still useful in some situations – for example, extraordinarily big outdoor parties, especially for clumsy kids or festivals etc – so it’s probably worth thinking about ways to reuse or recycle them for those times when they’re almost unavoidable.

Between food waste and the often synthetic wax/plastic coating used to make them moisture resistant, you don’t really want them near your compost heap. You can get paper plates designed to be composted afterwards though – some made from thick paper, some from palm fronds, others from a light bamboo – just scrape off any large amount of food waste that might cause a problem for your heap. On our post about waxed cups, someone said you can recycle them at tetrapak recycling facilities – I would if this is true of waxed paper plates too…

Any other suggestions/advice? Or ideas for alternatives?

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?

I’ll let you guess what we had for dinner last night ;)

We were packing away the papers afterwards and John commented on how much paper was going to waste – it was quite a lot, with spots of grease soaked through to the out-most layer.

Our friend George thinks it’s wonderful for lighting fires/stoves but given it’s almost midsummer, it’s not exactly stove lighting weather.

It would compost – I’m always wary about adding anything fishy/meaty to our compost bin though in case it attracts vermin. (The oil used at our local fish’n’chip place is vegetable oil but it must smell of a bit of fish because the cats love the papers, even when the food has gone.)

Any other reuses?

From a reduce point of view, I could take along a reusable container and ask them to use that instead – the people at our local place are great, so I’m sure they would do it. Any advice on what type of container to use? A completely sealed one might make everything a bit sweaty on the way home. A reusable box with a towel/cloth on top?

(In case this is very much a UK-centric question, I’ll explain a bit: when we get our stereotypical fish ‘n’ chips, they usually come wrapped in paper. It’s typically a “greaseproof” sheet or pocket underneath the food, then all wrapped in a few big sheets of cheap paper. This used to be newspaper but now it tends to be purpose-bought white paper (often blank newsprint). Some places use expanded foam clam shells or waxed cardboard boxes but the majority of dedicated fish’n’chip places, in the north at least, still use paper.)

(CCA photo by jem)