There’s something about the combination of garlic, parmesan and salt on flat garlic breads that I absolutely love. I think it might be the cheese and the salt – and perhaps the garlic.

Because we don’t always have time to make our own, we have either a flat garlic bread or a frozen pizza about once a month – but they’re packaging nightmares: the bread/pizza sits on top of a round foam base, covered in shrink-wrapped plastic and in a cardboard box.

The cardboard can be recycled but the plastic and foam not so much. Any ideas for reusing the foam bases?

(If you’re not familiar with them, they’re flat, round discs about 25cm (10″) in diameter – but bigger ones are used for bigger, fresh pizzas. The foam is about 4mm thick (1/8th of an inch) and not bendy – it snaps rather than bends. Ours also usually have a slight (ahem) garlicky odour which might impact the uses.)

We’ve had an email from Paul Smith asking:

I’m really interested in how one would recycle a yoga mat? One of the old school, pvc based ones, not the eco friendly one (which I have now).

If Paul means the type of mat I think he means, they’re a long thin piece of foam, about 6ft long and 2ft wide (185cm by 66cm ish) and about half an inch (1cm) thick. Depending on the requirements and the thickness/flexibility of the foam, they can either be rolled up like a camping bedroll or are left flat (the ones at my uni gym were like that).

So any suggestions for reuses? Or are there any recycling options if somewhere (like a gym) was getting rid of them in bulk?

Paul doesn’t say what condition his yoga mat is in – some of the ones at the uni were bashed to smeg at the sides and going thin where they’d been doubled up – so re-use suggestions for falling apart ones would be good too, just in case.

(Photo by bharat – I couldn’t find a picture without a ball in it too, so just imagine that’s not there :) )

Kate’s other suggestion was expanded polystyrene foam packaging because while we’ve covered loose polystyrene peanuts and sheets of foam, we haven’t mentioned those nasty squeaky environmental nightmares yet.

Any ideas for moulded polystyrene that supports electrical stuff in transit? I can’t believe manufacturers aren’t forced to collect it, chibble it up and remould it into something else. Hate throwing it in the bin but what else can you do with it?

Despite hating the feel and sound of it when it rubs against itself (iccccccck), I break it up to use at the bottom of plant pots or to raise the pot a bit higher if it’s sitting low in a planter – but that’s usually just because I’ve not thought of anything else to do with it and it’s just sitting there in the garden when I need something vaguely it shaped.

So any other suggestions?
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We bought a flat-packed side table from Ikea a few weeks ago (to be my home office so my junk doesn’t pile up right across the living room) and its individual flat pieces were wrapped in thin sheets of foam to stop them scratching each other in transit.

The sheets are about 50cm wide and 1m in length, but only about 1mm thick so pretty see-through.

We don’t really have anything we need to pack up at the moment and while I’m not opposed to keeping it around until we have something to pack, if we can use it for anything else in the meantime, that would be good. So any suggestions?

A few years ago, a neighbour of ours decided to make it ‘snow’ in her front garden by spreading from packing foam all over the place. Then, thoughtfully, she didn’t brush it up after Christmas and instead left it to get blown by the wind until the whole street was covered.

I bring this up now because we found half a dozen of the little gems in the compost heap yesterday and it enraged me anew.

So any suggestions what my neighbour could have done with the foam instead of “decorating” our street?

(Photo by Daino_16)