We’ve had an email from Leann:

I have to travel a lot to work and in a day can easily get through a dozen single serving milk pots – on the train, at meetings, at hotels etc. I’m not interested in recycling them, I want to stop needing to use them! Any ideas?

Good question and it is much better to reduce rather than recycle so hopefully we’ll be able to help you with some ideas.

You could take some of milk from home with you in a little bottle – depending on the temperature, that might only be good for the outward journey — it might be like adding butter to your drinks later in the day! In the winter it’ll last longer though – and if your room is without mini-bar/fridge, don’t forget the old student/frugaleer tricks of leaving bottles of milk in a sink filled with cold water or out on a window sill.

If it ripens too quickly like that, dried milk powder or “non-dairy creamer” (Coffee mate etc) may be an alternative since they won’t go off – some milk powders need reconstituting first though so that might be a bit of a faff on the train.

It might be easiest to find a type of tea/coffee that you can enjoy without milk – for example, a lighter black tea (Earl Grey for example) if you’re not into fruit/herbal teas — then that would avoid the milk question altogether. Carrying your own tea bags around is pretty easy since they’re small and lightweight – and it would probably look less odd in a meeting if you whipped out a preferred teabag rather than milk powder and a whisk.

Any other suggestions for Leann?

We’ve had an email from Maggie:

I found a box of lavender bath cubes while cleaning out my mum’s bathroom cupboard at the weekend. Mum says she doesn’t like them and I can’t use them because of my sensitive skin. Is there anything I can do with them or should I throw them in the bin?

As we often say on here, try to pass them on to someone else to use – Freecycle/Freegle them or if the pack is unopened, a local charity shop or jumble sale etc might like them.

Does anyone have any reuse suggestions for if that’s not possible (opened packs for example)? The only thing I can think of is distinctly unseasonal – to make bubbling cauldrons at a Halloween party.

Anyone got any other ideas?

At some point in the long forgotten past, I bought a room dividing screen thing. I think the idea was that we would use it to shelter off the messy desk whenever we had guests staying over in our spare room/office in our old house but to the best of my knowledge we never used it because it got in the way and none of our guests cared.

It’s a metal frame which originally had plain cream fabric panels tied onto it. I’m not sure where the fabric panels are now but they can easily be replaced. The three metal sections come apart easily. It’s about 6ft/180cm tall – I couldn’t fit it all in my camera frame without including my untidy desk, my caked-on-mud wellies and the equally filthy dog ;)

So any ideas what I can do with it?

I could, of course, reinvent it as a room divider – some pretty reclaimed/vintage fabric to make it a feature. While we still have an untidy section of our used-for-storage spare room in our new house, I’m still not sure our guests will care and it’ll just get in the way for us the rest of the time. I could use it for a similar purpose in the garden – using weather-resistant fabric or plastic for the panels instead – but again, I think it will get in the way.

Any other ideas?

We’re in the middle of having our bathroom replaced. It’s been a nightmare, never again etc etc – but it has had some upsides. For example, after I mentioned to the main plumber that I’d reuse the side of the old shower enclosure to make a cold frame or something, he brought me six old wooden-framed windows from the house he’s renovating. (He only lives down the road and I’m hoping he’ll remember us whenever he has further juicy “rubbish” or scrap wood.)

The windows are each about 1ft/30cm wide by 3ft/90cm tall, and will make cloches or a better cold frame (since the shower enclosure was opaque plastic and would be a pain to resize/frame). Well, the four clear glass ones will be good for that, this question is about the other two:

They’re rather pretty, don’t you think? As you’d probably expect, the colours are a lot brighter when there is light coming through them rather than when they’re on the ground – the flowers are deep pinky-red and the darker band is a lovely purple.

It seems a shame to just use them to shelter veg seedlings but I can’t think what else to use them for. They’re only a single glaze and we’ve got relatively new double glazed windows in the house so we won’t want to use it as a window in here. I’m not against passing it on again to someone who would use it for it’s original purpose but I’m wondering if you lovely people have any other suggestions for things I could use it for instead.

Restore the frame and hang one on the wall as a strange but fun decoration? Or hinge one on the front of a made-to-measure 15cm/6ins deep box to use as a wall-mounted part-display/part-storage cupboard?

Any other ideas?

We’ve had an email from Karen:

I am new to your site and I really love it!

I do have a suggestion though, I had been cleaning up the bathroom and found old sunscreen lotion bottles, still full. I heard you can’t use them more than a year, because they go bad and won’t work any more. I have used them in the past longer than I was supposed to, but now they are definitely too old. Do you have any suggestions?

I didn’t know that about sun lotion but searching around the web, a lot of people do seem to advise adhering to the product’s expiry date. However, according to a dermatologist quoted on the Mayo Clinic website, it’ll probably be good for three years or until it hits its expiry date – whichever happens sooner. Apparently after that, it loses its effectiveness.

I’m not sure what should be done with it after that – it’s probably not moisturising enough to be used as a general body lotion. One argument would be to buy smaller quantities so you’re not wasting as much – but as they’re usually (always?) in plastic tubes or bottles, there would be a big knock-on plastic waste issue from doing that.

Any ideas? Anyone know of any sunscreen in non-plastic packaging?