When we were talking about making jewellery from drinks cans a couple of months ago, Mary Anne Enriquez sent me links to some relevant Flickr groups which then got buried in my inbox – sorry for that Mary Anne!

Anyway, Mary Anne thought Recycle This readers may be interested in the following Flickr groups:

• PET Bottle and other Plastics Recycled Creativity – jewellery and other knick-knacks made from old plastic bottles
• Fan>TAB>ulous Aluminum & Tin Can ART – art and accessories made from, or incorporating, drinks cans or can tabs.
• Cardboard Tubes ReCrafted – all sorts of ornaments and other things made from assorted cardboard tubes – from toilet roll tubes to giant sturdy ones.

Lots of wonderfully creative work – inspiring stuff.

Thanks so much for the links, Mary Anne and sorry again that it’s taken me so long to post them!

(Roses photo by rosely pignataro; cardboard cutout photo by giulia massera)

Well, less of a “reuse/recycle”, more of a “what else can eat them?” question…

Our cats are becoming increasingly fussy eaters in their old age. They’ve always been pretty fussy but now they’re teenagers, it’s getting worse – and we end up with a lot of mostly full boxes and bags that they are just not interested in eating.

We’ve swapped cat food with friends and neighbours in the past but all our felines have reached that certain age now and either had their teeth removed or as fussy as ours, so there is less swap potential. The supermarkets around here collect food for local animal shelters but I suspect they’ll only want sealed boxes/bags to be sure nothing has been tampered with.

I’d rather not compost them as I suspect the smell will attract undesirables to the heap but I also don’t want to just bin them. So any ideas?

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the garden with a few of the neighbourhood children because one of the girls got it in her head that she wanted to dig over our veg plot ahead of this year’s planting and I’m a firm believer in exploiting child labour at every opportunity.

Since we’ve all been pretty much in hibernation over the winter, it’s the first time I’ve seen them in a while and it reminded me about something her dad made last year. He’d got the metal chassis of an old pull-along trailer and rebuilt the rest of the trailer out of scrap wood etc. Over the random spare tyres, he had some natty wheel arches and he asked us to guess how we thought he’d made them – we guessed scrap wheel arches from something else – but as the title of this post might suggest, they were in fact an old plastic dog bed cut in two and spray painted to match the rest of the trailer. They really looked the part and as a bonus, didn’t add any extra weight to the trailer either. I thought it was a pretty great re-use and kept meaning to post it on here but forgot until now.

So that’s one idea – but probably not one most people would use – so any other suggestions?

We’ve had an email from “Pondering of Bristol”, saying:

Sorry to be a bit morbid but my daughter’s pet rat, Ellen, is on the way out and we are wondering what to do with her once the inevitable happens? We don’t have a big garden, just pots, so can’t really bury her. Should we put her in the compost?

I wouldn’t put a dead animal in an open compost heap for the same reason I would steer clear of composting any animal products – it may attract other unwanted vermin or insects to the heap while it’s decomposing. People using sealed composting systems are usually more happy to do this type of thing though.

We’ve always been able to bury our ex-cats in their favourite spot in the garden so I haven’t really thought about alternatives – does anyone else know about this sort of thing?

(Photo by puellakas)

Last Friday, before setting forth on an expedition that would involve standing in the sun and shouting for a long time, we decided to gather all the water bottles in the house and refill them to take along.

We’re not fans of bottled water and only buy bottles when we’re in a bind, so it was quite surprising to see how many we had accumulated around the house.

We only need so many for reusing as water bottles* for over the summer so what can we do with the rest? What are your favourite reusing or recycling ideas?

* refilling old bottles, I should add, is strictly forbidden, according to notes on the labels of the bigger brands. So don’t do it! don’t! ;)
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