Posts tagged "packaging"

How can I reuse or recycle chocolate/sweet tins?

After seeing Judith Williamson’s wonderful jewellery made from old sweet tins the other week, I’ve been thinking about what else could be done with them. T’is approaching the season for big tins of chocolates and biscuits after all.

Since they’re well sealing metal tins, they’re great for using for stuff that needs to be kept dry – a sewing kit, next year’s seeds stash, spices, flour, first aid kits/emergency kits, spare nuts & bolts in the garage… What do you store in them?

But do you use them for anything more exciting? Like Judith, have you use them to make anything fun?

How can I reuse or recycle pet food pouches?

Our lovely old cat Boron has had the last of his teeth taken out this week – he’s always been prone to gum problems and while gummy, he seems happier now his mouth isn’t so inflamed.

Our vet says he might still be able to have dry food – which has made up the bulk of his diet for most of his life – but once he (Boron, not the vet) knows we’ll give him more wet food if it’s too painful/awkward for him to eat biscuits, I suspect he’ll made demands for that all the time.

When we had four cats, we used to feed them cat food from cans – a can per day between the four of them as a treat, alongside unlimited dry biscuits – but after losing two of them, cans were resulting in too much food waste and we had to switch onto pouches. It was a struggle for me, giving up easy-to-recycle cans in favour of annoying just-about-impossible pouches — a toss up between packaging waste and food waste.

Now Boron is going to be eating more wet food, we might be justified in moving back onto cans – or, sigh, we might just end up generating more pouches.

I’ve contacted a couple of cat food companies to see what they advise doing with the pouches – I’ll update this post when I hear back from them – but in the meantime, do you use pet food pouches?

Do you have any reuses or recycling ideas for them?

Great reusing and recycling ideas from October

We’ve had some great comments on Recycle This over the last month. Here are some of my favourites:

Green Halloween: how can I reduce the amount of sweet/candy wrapping?

Continuing in our Green Halloween series…

What with food safety issues and all the urban legends about razor blades & whatnot, nearly all trick-or-treat treats these days are shop-bought and individually wrapped – possibly the worst way to eat sweets or chocolate in terms of packaging waste, especially as it’s mostly plastic wrappers which can’t be recycled.

Do you do anything to minimise the amount of sweetie packaging you give out – or collect?

What are the most reusable or recyclable options?

One way of to reduce, of course, is to opt out of the whole trick or treating thing altogether – but are there any other alternatives?

And while we’ve covered this before in the long dim and distant past, any new reusing/upcycling ideas for the wrappers – transparent ones like in the picture or opaque ones used on mini chocolate bars etc?

(Photo by eisenbahner)

How can I reuse or recycle the plastic bags from cereal boxes?

Like tin foil the other week, I can’t believe we haven’t covered this one already.

To extend the product shelf lift and to protect it from moisture, most breakfast cereal is wrapped in some sort of plastic – either a snug film wrapping or, more frequently, a plastic bag/liner – inside its cardboard box.

The bags tend to be made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which is resin code 2 and so is theoretically recyclable wherever type 2 plastics are collected. (Do check with your local councils/collection spot though – some places don’t accept film type packaging, even when they accept the same resin code in bottle form.)

But what about reuses before recycling?

My father-in-love stores bread in them since they’re better quality than any sandwich bag you could buy for the purpose. Other people cut them open to use instead of wax paper when preparing many sticky items for baking, or when freezing things like burgers or dough.

What do you do with yours? What are your favourite recycling ideas?