I was re-watching Juno the other day and it gave me an “ooh, how could I recycle…” moment.

For those who don’t know, Juno is an interesting and funny film about the titular character’s unplanned pregnancy at 16. While Juno herself is a little too wise-cracking for me, the rest of the characters and performances are great so I wasn’t too upset when it got the Best Original Screenplay last month (I’d have given it to Lars and the Real Girl ahead of Juno but the Academy didn’t put me in control of picking the winners this year, boo).

ANYWAY, the father of the baby in the film, Bleeker, has an obsession with orange TicTacs and at one point, he opens his postbox to find Juno and her best friend have filled it with a hundred boxes of the things as a gesture of Juno’s love for him. Since I’m a bit of a recycling geek, my first thought wasn’t “aww, cute”, it was “once fictional Bleeker has munched his way through those, what could he do with the boxes?”

So any suggestions? If you’re not familiar with the low-cal sweets, the clear plastic box is about 5cm (2.5inches) by 3cm (1.5inches) and about 1cm (0.5inch) thick with a little flip lid at the top.

(Photo by bruno-free)

We’ve already covered a multitude of Valentine’s Day-themed items but Tamara came up with a new one for us:

I’d like to know if anyone has a suggestion for how to re-use Valentine’s candy hearts? The chalky kind with writing on them, I mean. They passed them around at work yesterday. I only like the orange ones, and so I’ve been left with a card-deck sized box of other colors. I thought they might look cute as pins, but i think they’d melt if I tried to shellac them. So what to do?

From their pages on Wikipedia, the UK Love Hearts and the US Sweethearts sweets look a bit different but since Tamara (who I’m presuming is based in the US from her use of the spelling “colors” ;) ) refers to them as being “chalky”, I guess the texture and ingredients are pretty similar.

So any suggestions? I like the cute jewellery/badges idea but agree that it might be problematic – any ideas on how to get around that?

(Photo by kymmie_xox)