We helped a friend of ours move out of his house at the weekend. He’s going away to India for a few months and needed to get out of his rented house before heading off. Because he’d left everything to the last minute, he told us on Friday that he was just going to “bin everything” he wasn’t keeping, prompting my green nerve to twitch violently and me to volunteer our services to take it all to a local charity shop instead. (If I didn’t know better, I would swear he did it on purpose…)

We ended up taking four full carloads of furniture, clothes, books and bits & bobs to the charity shop and wombled another two bulging carloads for ourselves – including a nearly new bike which we gave to our neighbour and a big box of random food items from his kitchen cupboard. We’ll use most of it in time (there were 27 cans of baked beans, 16 cans of tuna and 5 jars of horseradish sauce – it’ll take quite some time!) but it made me realise that while the charity shop we were visiting took nearly everything, they didn’t take food – so what could be done with them if we didn’t want them?

I know that sometimes schools, churches or community groups have canned food drives at certain times of the year – often around this time of the year, as harvest festivals – but what about when they’re not collecting? I suspect shelters would welcome food stuffs but probably more along the lines of those 27 cans of baked beans rather than the single cans of lots of different diverse foods (including, almost other things, a can of reindeer meat) – things that lead themselves to mass catering.

There is so much food wasted at the moment – in-date food that people have bought on a buy one, get one frees but then not liked the first one – that there must be better ways to collect and redistribute it.

Do any charity shops collect it? Are there any organisations that oversee collection and redistribution, leaving collection bins in public places (like some animal shelters have bins for pet food donations supermarkets)? Do you have any other recommendations for how to pass it on?

(The photo is of the 27 cans of baked beans and the single can of reindeer meat. I wasn’t joking.)

We’ve had an email from Allison:

We always have coffee in for visitors but rarely use more than a few spoonfuls of it before it goes out of date. Can I do anything it?

The only reuse I can think of off the top of my head is making ye olde stained paper when I was a kid – possibly not the most useful suggestion unless you really, really like making fake old maps ;)

A quick Google reveals some more useful things – they can be used as a scent in soapmaking, dying fabric or even to develop camera film.

Any other ideas?

Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.

Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!

So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?

I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…

Any other ideas?

We’ve had an email from Alice with so many ‘Reduce This’ questions that I’m going to have to run them two a week to get through them ;)

First up:

I want to reduce my use of Tesco, which I use because I don’t have transport and it’s the only one-stop place I can walk to with my rucksack for my weekly shop, but I’d be interested to hear any ideas people have for reducing personal dependence on the “Big Four” evil supermarkets.

In an ideal world, we’d all manage our own allotments and shop at local, independent shops, who source good quality items from local farms & producers. In the real world, this isn’t always possible – there are a limited number of allotments available and people have time constraints that don’t exist in the fantasy world – it’s hard to shop at small shops that are only open 9-5 when you have a 9-5 job.

Because of the big supermarkets, there are also obviously a lot less small shops around – right now, we live close to a local high street which is almost completely filled with chain stores and the house we’re (hopefully) moving to is very close to a big supermarket so there are no local shops at all.

So what have you done to reduce your use of the big supermarkets? How have you fitted it around your busy life? What would you recommend? What would you not recommend? And what about non-food items?

We’ve had a “Can I Compost This?” email from Wynn:

Can I compost fish heads?

The answer to this, like meat & animal products, is usually no. Unless you have a sealed composting system or the like, the odour of the fish might attracted unwanted vermin to your compost heap and unless your composting area is really far away from your house, it might get a bit stinky for you too.

But like other animal bones, you can though use fish heads and skeletons to make fish stock. There is often quite a bit of meat on the heads of bigger fish like salmon, so don’t forget to save that: it can be used anywhere you’d use mashed up fish (salads, fish cakes, seafood risotto…) or in the stock to make a hearty soup. Like all stocks, it will freeze well if you’re not going to be able to use it straight away and if nothing else and you’ve got cats, the stock will make you a firm favourite with your felines.

Any other suggestions of things to do with leftover fish bits?

(Photo by mama)