We’ve had an email from Kathy asking about getting rid of her children’s old jigsaws:

I just know they’ve got pieces missing so would feel bad about giving them to a charity shop. They’re cardboard with a shiny paper top so they could be recycled?

Probably – as long as it’s just paper and not plastic laminate. Most (but not all) paper recycling bins take light card & glossy paper but best to check the advice in your area.

Since it’s getting to the dog days of the summer holidays and they’ll be bored, perhaps use child labour to do the jigsaws and check for missing pieces, then you’ll know what’s missing. If it’s not an important piece, you could mark on the box what is missing and some charity shops/thrift shops still might take them.

Other than that, I’ve seen old puzzle pieces used as decorations in a number of craft projects – photo frames & on ornaments and to make Christmas decorations (wreaths & baubles).

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by pzado)

We’ve had an email from Lise, asking:

How can rubber stamps be recycled? I found a box full in the stationery cupboard from two department name changes ago!

Given the department name comment, I imagine these are custom ones, not generic “approved” or date stamps – I’d put the latter on eBay or Freecycle/Freegle because they’re still very useful in their own right. The former ones will be less reusable but I’d have loved to play with them when I was a kid (my childhood roleplaying was surprisingly bureaucratic; when I used to play ‘school’, I spent the whole time working out class lists & timetables for said classes) (really).

Depending on the construction of the stamps, you (or someone else) might be able to take them apart and reuse them to make new stamps – replacing the stamp itself but reusing the handles or the mechanism if it’s a self-inking one. Again, eBay/Freecycle/Freegle if you don’t want to give it a go yourself. If they’re very nice old ones, a local stampmaker also might want them to reuse as antique stamps.

If you actually wanted to recycle them, you’d have to break them up into their component parts too – all the ones I’ve seen have been mixed materials so they’d have to be split apart and recycled individually.

Any other suggestions?

Echoing the pistachio shells that started this site, I was thinking about walnut shells recently.

It’s advised not to compost walnuts/walnut shells because the trees contain a chemical called juglone, which is toxic to some trees, plants and vegetables (especially members of the Solanaceae family – aubergine, tomatoes & potatoes) so better safe and than sorry when it comes to composting them.

Walnut shells have a number of industrial uses – a thickener in the paints & plastics industries, as a filler in explosives, and for cleaning/polishing – but less re-uses in the domestic setting. I’ve used exfoliating soaps and cleansers with tiny walnut shell particles as the abrasive element so home soap makers could use them up – but what about other reuses?

So how is your garden/allotment/window box doing this summer?

Due to a combination of a underestimation of seed germination rates, disorganisation/ignoring plans and demon slugs, my growing hasn’t gone quite as I thought it might but we’re doing ok and I’ve learned a lot about growing here.

One thing definitely on my list for next year – well, technically later this year – is to give my beds a good old fashioned manure boost in late autumn. The soil here is very poor but since I reclaimed the beds from the weeds in early spring, I couldn’t do a manure feed this year and I think our output has suffered as a result. I’ve been feeding the seedlings/growing plants since then but I think better soil to start with would have helped overall. Ah well, live and learn.

Anyway, homemade plant/vegetable fertilisers. I’m sure everyone reading this has a bulging compost heap for general compost goodness (if not, start one today!) but I thought it might be interesting to hear what kitchen scraps/plants/garden waste/household waste people use for specific fertilising/feeding plants at this time of year.

I’ve been making/using a lot of liquid fertiliser from nettles this year because we have so many in the field next door to our house. Coffee grinds are also popular as a mid-season fertiliser, as are potash and bonemeal.

What are your favourite produced-at-home fertilizers? Do you have any tips for particular plants?

We’ve had an email from Joe, who works for a fancy handbag designer with a number of select boutiques around the UK:

I am trying to find a way to recycle these display Perspex props. We used them in lots of our London stores and have loads of them. Sadly they are mostly all damaged so I don’t think anybody else would want them.

I really don’t want to throw them away and am trying to find out what to do with them.

It is possible to recycle perspex (aka plexiglas, lucite or acrylic glass) but it’s not widely done post-consumer — I can only find details of a scheme which aimed at collecting offcuts & waste from perspex manufacturers. (In case anyone is interested, it was the Amari Recycling Initiative – does anyone know any post-consumer collection?)

Even damaged, the raw material might be usable by makers/crafters. Local art schools (or just the the art/design&tech depts of normal schools), hacker/maker groups (such as hackspaces) or scrapstores would probably all welcome the donation – and depending on the area/amount, might even be able to do a collection. Or someone on Freecycle/Freegle might want them too.

Any other suggestions for recycling/reusing them en masse? Or individual projects for small pieces of perspex?