Dani saw my mention of using a plastic bottle to make a resealable plastic bag last week and got in touch to say she finds ways to reuse the whole bottle in her gardening adventures.

I use an old cereal bag and a bottle top to keep the seeds airtight / waterproof as well as keeping seeds of the different families together.

I use the neck section as a mini collar to protect my plants and I use the base as a plant holder – just perfect for all the lemon pips I have growing.

Great, efficient reusing, Dani!

(Apologies for the downtime yesterday – our hosting provider had a huge hardware failure. As I also work for our hosting provider, I was stressed from both sides – not a good day!)

We’ve had an email from Jo:

Hi. Got a question for you. Is it better to buy pop in big bottles or cans from a packaging point of view? Big bottles seem like less waste for the amount of liquid but are plastic. Your thoughts?

Neither are great for a number of reasons. Aside from the actual waste from the packaging, it’s really resource-intensive to ship around liquid in anything other than pipes – and the production tends to be pretty bad for the environment too, let’s not forget about the production.

But to the question in hand, both the plastic and metal are non-renewable resources, the creation of which is very destructive to the environment, but both can be recycled and are widely collected. If though, you can only recycle one or the other in your local area, that might sway you one way or the other.

The easiest way to reduce the waste is, of course, to reduce consumption of the drinks in the first place. Or make them at home – either getting the fizz through a natural process (like making homemade ginger beer) or a less natural one.

I usually prefer bottles – we don’t drink much fizzy stuff at all and when we do have it, prefer little amounts rather than full cans – and even though we no longer have doorstep recycling of plastics, plastic bottles have more reuses around the home and garden.

Anyone else got any input? What about suggestions for reducing the amount of fizzy drinks drunk – what are similar but better alternatives?

Renee, from Friday’s glue/tape cartridge question, also asked about bottle cap liners.

Again, I wasn’t sure what she meant but thankfully she included a picture —>

I don’t see them used that much over here (or at least not in the things I buy) but I think they’re basically a washer to help the seal between the cap and the top of the bottle (??).

I think I’ve seen some waxed card ones (which usually get soggy so are good for little else after their intended task) but these ones that Renee are asking about look to be circles of plastic.

In searching for more information about them, I found this very cool bowl made out of 100 of them and I guess they could be used for oversizedtiddlywinks too. But what else can be done with them?

(If you’re interested in other bottle cap related stuff – we’ve covered plastic screw-tops and metal caps elsewhere on the site.)