Christine Thompson got in touch recently to tell us how much she loves the site (in return, I love those emails :) ) and since she’s a primary school teacher, we chatted about the great primary-school themed suggestions people had come up with for school milk cartons.

She added that she’s made pirate ships out of taller tetrapak juice cartons with the triangular top, Victorian ladies out of “curvy” plastic bottles and:

I also made brilliant ‘Three Wise Men’ from Actimel bottles (saved them for months so everyone could have three!), little craft ball for head and lots of old Christmas paper for robes.

I thought that sounded like an excellent idea so let it inspire today’s post: what else can be done with those little Actimel/Yakult/’probiotic’-yoghurt-drink type bottles?

We’ve featured bubble wrap before but many of the (great!) suggestions were for big pieces – installation around plants, shower curtains, . However, Aine Palmer has asked about smaller pieces:

In our local supermarket, the punnets of strawberrys all have a small piece (3×4 being the smallest, and the largest not too much bigger) of bubblewreap at the bottom. Not stryofoam peatnuts, but good old fashioned bubblewrap. Does anyone have a good idea for what to do with these?

We’ve had an email from headteacher Carole Brautigam:

We are a small rural school for 4-9 year olds. We are currently working towards our eco-schools bronze award. We are keen to recycle the milk cartons that the children use.

We’ve covered the recycling of tetrapak before – there are a few companies that recycle it – but I wonder if there are some particularly primary-school suitable re-use suggestions for the little containers…?

We’ve had an email from Rob Williams:

I collected silver foil/aluminium foil for a lady at work and she gave it to a charity. She has now retired and I still have a growing pile of foil. Does anyone know of a charity that wants this? I’m told it is a ‘valuable’ commodity.

Our doorstep recycling includes aluminium foil so it can easily be recycled – but as Rob asks, does anyone know of any charities that collect it?

And since we’re all about reusing, while we’re on the topic – any re-use suggestions?

(Related items: we’ve already covered foil pet food trays and foil chocolate/sweet/biscuit wrappers.)

(Photo by nlHarri)

At any one time, there are at least two or three crisp (potato chips) packets blowing around our street, invariably ending up in our garden or making “fffffwhpp” sounds as they rattle against the railings at the end of the road.

I remember making shrinky-dinks out of them when I was a kid but aside from that, I can’t think of any other ideas about what can be done with them. (And I don’t even know whether you can do that with the foil lined packets kicking around now.)

So is anyone else more inspired about what can be done with them? Suggestions for big “family size” packets as well as standard ones are welcome.

(And in case anyone else other than me is interested, this is the 250th post on here – that’s a whole lot of reusing and recycling ideas! I’m think I’m going to celebrate with some salty potato snacks!)

(Photo by monomatt)