We’ve had an email from Caren:

I’m moving out of halls next week and getting rid of the posters I bought at the start of the year, am sick of looking at them!!

I could just put them in our green bin but wondered if you had any better suggestions?

If they’re still in good condition, you might want to see if your student union has a furniture recycling programme and if they’d accept them in that. I don’t know how widely spread the practise is but (my local uni) Leeds University Union has a scheme to collect unwanted furniture, crockery, pans and other homeware etc at the end of the year instead of it just been dumped in the rubbish in the rush to clear out for the summer. The stuff is then redistributed to those in need in the local community – while posters aren’t as critical as having a pan to cook your dinner in, they might help cheer up a depressing room for someone. Or you could just pass them on to someone directly using Freecycle.

Aside from that, most proper posters I’ve come across tend to be pretty heavy paper so could be used for all sorts of papercrafts. You could use a couple which are either similar or pleasantly contrasting to make a paper basket like I featured on Things To Do Today last week. They could also be used as heavy-duty wrapping paper or made into gift bags/envelopes.

Any other ideas?

(Oh, and we’ve covered laminated posters too.)

Leigh of the scarves had another question – what to do with “name tags/nametag holders”:

you get them everywhere, but I have nothing to do with them!

I don’t know whether Leigh means conference name labels – either the pockets for use on lanyards (which we covered last year) or ones with safety pins on the back – or proper, personalised name tags for people working in public-facing positions and the like — so let’s do both.

When I used to organise conferences and events, I collected any badges leftover at the end of the day and used the pockets again for the next event – I suspect I wasn’t alone in doing that, especially in cash-strapped academia. So that’s a reduce idea: leave your conference name badge on the reception table at the end of the day and it’ll probably get reused again. The same thing might work for solid name tags if they’re first name only and you’ve got a reasonably common name.

But what about reuses? Any ideas?

The Eternal*Voyageur is back again, asking:

Any ideas on how to reuse children’s drawings ? My daughter brings a bunch of them from pre-school every day. I don’t have the heart to throw them away, and I can display only so many!

I feel the same way about anything we make/draw/paint too – and we’re nowhere near as precious as children :)

If they can’t be displayed but you’d like to keep them, how about making them into books? A hole punch (and maybe some of those reinforcer stickers), some pretty string and maybe some old cardboard decorated for covers would do for the most basic version. Keeping every picture is still going to leave you with a hefty pile but at least they’ll be easier to store – and easier to enjoy in the future.

Anyone else got other storage or reuse ideas?

Lizzy has left us a message saying:

Hello, right now I am staring at a metal central bit of a ringbinder, and wondering how to repurpose it.

I had a leather diary with it in the centre, with the pages on it. When trying to write on the left-hand page, the metal rings got in the way.

I am in the process of turning the leather part into a handbag, and am more successfully using the pages, now being held together by a treasury tag, but what to do with the six-ringed central metal bit…any suggestions?

I thought we’d cover this already but I think I’m getting it confused with the spiral of a spiral notebook.

So any suggestions?

• How can I reuse or recycle other random bits of stationery?: see our paper & stationery category for more ideas!

On a random old post, Kinna asked:

how can I use old crayons?

On another random old post, I mentioned a great tutorial I found to melt down old stubs of crayons into fun shapes and someone else mentioned using wax crayons along with old candles to do encaustic painting.

If the crayons are still like new, just, say, an undesirable colour, you could follow in the footsteps of Herb Williams and use them for sculptures: I linked to his work on Things To Do Today a couple of months ago – very cool stuff.

Any other ideas for crayons and the annoying stubs of nearly used-up crayons?

(Photo by itshears)