The other day, Mrs Green of My Zero Waste mentioned how happy she was to receive something in the post wrapped in newspaper rather than a bubblewrap lined envelope or plastic bag.

We buy a lot of stuff online – secondhand stuff from eBay, homemade things from Etsy/Folksy, computer bits, craft supplies, clothes for us and the bajillion small people exploding from the loins of our friends etc etc – and as a result, always have a large amount of packaging lying around our office. A lot of online shops have made improvements over the last few years – crinkled brown paper or air bags instead of polystyrene packaging nuggets, and I’ve received stuff from eBay in all sorts of reused cardboard boxes – but the pile still grows. I reuse it where I can (see below for related reuses) but I’d rather reduce the amount of stuff I receive in the first place if possible.

The most obvious answer to the question is “stop ordering so much stuff online and support your local shops instead”, which is fair enough for some things but other things are harder to come by in real life.

Has anyone ever asked an online shop to reduce the amount of packaging they use? Has anyone sent it back for them to deal with? I’d love to hear your experiences.

If you sell stuff online, what do you do to keep packaging minimum? Got any suggestions for others in the same position?

Post packaging reuses

• How can I reuse or recycle envelopes?
• How can I reuse or recycle padded envelopes?
• How can I reuse or recycle plastic post bags?
• How can I reuse or recycle bubble wrap?
• How can I reuse or recycle packaging cushions?
• How can I reuse or recycle brown paper

• Now the rush to the holidays is out of the way, it’s a perfect time to catch up with fixing and mending stuff around the home and those dozens of jumpers snagged by cats over the first properly chilly bit of the season (… just me?). The Craft blog recently had a roundup of some fab repair projects to get fixing juices flowing.
• MJ over at Making Do with the Not So New posted about a great scheme someone has set up in her area – community give and take chests. Perfect for things not suitable for a charity shop (such as food or once-used bottles of bathroom supplies) or things too small to warrant a Freecycle/Freegle posting.
• MJ also linked to webecca’s yarn winder (swifts) tutorials – made re-using random household objects such as clothes pegs and coathangers.
• Crafting a Green World’s Becky linked to a video tutorial on making cute little handbags from the covers of old, damaged hardback books.
• Craftstylish’s Cal has written a great how-to on replacing a coat lining to breath new life into a tattered vintage coat. The same idea can also be extended to making a coat that bit warmer for winter.
• Finally, reuse old drinking straws and expanded foam packaging to make handy storage for seed beads. It would work for actual seeds too – easy to sprinkle them out at planting time.

(Photo by Diane Gilleland for Craft)

So we reach the end of another year – a time to look back and look forward.

Looking back at 2009, it’s been a cracking year for Recycle This – I’ve posted 204 articles and you wonderful people have left more than 3450 comments! We’ve also nearly doubled the amount of “unique visitors” to the site over the last year too – hopefully a sign that more and more people are keen to reuse and recycle more things, more often.

I finally got around to redesigning the site in May – something I’d been meaning to do for ages – which I think/hope has made it easier for people to find the most common items and related articles. We’ve also introduced a few new features, How can I reduce this? and How can I repair this? – I hope to push those ideas a lot further in the next few months so if you have any suggestions of things you want to reduce/repair, do get in touch and we’ll brainstorm some ideas for you.

Which brings me neatly onto what I intended to be the focus for this post – what are your reducing, reusing and recycling goals in 2010?

Personally, I’m going to continue working on cutting back my addiction to cheap clothes – everyone’s suggestions have been very useful, thanks so much guys – and I’m hoping to bulk cook more to stop us reaching for, for example, supermarket pizzas when we need to eat quickly or packaging-heavy biscuits when we need a snack. I’m also hoping to reuse a lot of packaging in our new garden and I’m going to set up dedicated bins for things we can’t doorstep recycle to make it easier for us to recycle them elsewhere. What are you going to do?

See you in the new decade!

We’ve had an email from Yvonne, asking:

I have a small vinyl accordion door (single door size). One of the vinyl folds are tearing. How can I fix?

There seem to be a range of vinyl repair kits available for fixing small holes in furnishings, which might do the job.

Searching around for general advice on repairing vinyl, it seems there is a difference between fixing it and fixing it neatly. It some places the latter is seen as important but it can be a pain to find vinyl to match the colour of your aged/sun-bleached stuff. On an accordion door, you could make a feature of the repair by using a contrasting stripe of colour – and uses more stripes to reinforce the other folds to stop their tearing in the future. That would probably take more vinyl than you’d get in a little kit though.

Any more detailed fix suggestions?

I meant to post this on Tuesday – the start of advent – but after being away, I didn’t have time to do it justice so here it is now.

I haven’t celebrated Christmas for about a decade. Because I’ve got a tiny-small family, Christmas was never a big deal in our house and my participation in it has waned as the years went on until I stopped celebrating it altogether in about 2001-2002. I’m not a Christian so all that side of things is lost on me, I see my family whenever I want to, and I give gifts when I see/make something for someone rather than waiting until a date in December. For the last few years, I’ve worked on Christmas day – a perfect low-traffic day for new introducing designs or features for websites we run. True, part of it is a somewhat cynical reaction to the huge amount of waste and excess at this time of year, but it’s not that I’m particularly bah humbug about it: I just don’t participate in it in the same way many people don’t celebrate, for example, Eid or Hanukkah.

The gifts thing though is still a bit of a problem. In previous years, we’ve had long, difficult arguments with our families over gift giving. Giving is a big part of Christmas for them and as much as we’ve tried to push them that way, giving to charities on our behalf just isn’t the same for them. We end up feeling selfish for not letting them buy stuff for us and ungrateful for not willingly accepting the stuff they inevitable do buy for us. But we spend all year trying very hard not to buy stuff we don’t need, to reduce our consumption and our waste output, and then get a selection of random unneeded things, often novelty items wrapped in one-time-use shiny paper and bows. I realise they’re gifts given out of love but it’s not just that – there is so much pressure to give commercially bought gifts at Christmas – last year, my mum said she felt she had to give me things because she’d bought stuff for my brother and it wouldn’t be fair otherwise. (I didn’t care about “fairness” but it was a big deal to her.)

Has anyone else been in a similar situation on the giving or receiving end? What strategies have you used to deal with it? I always thought Christmas lists to family as an adult were a bit snotty but I guess that would solve the unwanted/unneeded problem. I realise that the whole issue is a bit of a snotty, my-diamond-shoes-are-too-tight one but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(Photo by Vanessa Fitzgerald)