I wanted to tell you a little more of what I have learned on the subject of recycling and how to reuse and recycle more of your household waste to help with the lessening of items going to landfill.

Textile recycling can be a great way of making sure items which are torn or otherwise unsaleable as secondhand goods are used to good effect. Many textiles are recycled into other textile items of clothing or if they are in good condition are sent to charities to reuse in famine areas. Mostly, I feel, all decent quality secondhand clothing, footwear and handbags can be given to charity shops and many charity shops will come to collect these from your house if you do not have any transport as I do not. My local Blythswood Care has a huge depot about 40 miles away from which they send famine/disaster relief items to other countries in need, and the van driver makes regular trips to our town charity shop each Wednesday. He is a very nice man and does not mind turning off the road on his way back to the depot to collect items from us when we are having a huge clear out. I was also delighted to hear that although our local recycling does not take quilts or duvets, this charity will take them for recycling without any problem and we recently managed to give them no less than 8 bags containing older, thinner quilts we had over the years used and used up!! They also took pillows and old footwear, books, tapes, CDs, and magazines.

I find that another useful way to use textiles is if you are interested in crafting. They make fantastic rag rugs…..or patchwork quilts…a dying art, really, but you would enjoy learning how to do these things…they are such fun to do and if you have younger children it keeps them amused for ages. If you have wool it is great to teach a younger child how to knit or crochet or even do a dolly bobbin….that is a dying art….you just need an old wooden cotton reel and four small nails and you hammer them in around the hole in the end, then attach your wool to one…then using a blunt-ended large darning needle, you just wrap the wool around and take a strand over and off each edge of the square you have created until you end up with a long squidgy snake of wool going through the middle of your cotton reel…you will have to push this through at first….but when you use lots of different colours and keep going….you can make a lovely swirly rug for in front of the hearth, or plait three of them together and make a draft excluder….the possibilities are endless…..and fun to think of too…bear this in mind now the winter is coming and you can keep children amused for ages….far better for them than sitting in front of a computer game!!

Carrier bags of course must be reused but many charity shops will take them off your hands along with any old coat hangers you might have and you can use the above dolly bobbin workings to make a long sausage to hold all your carrier bags, then a drawstring to go round the end so when you pull one out, another appears, and keep them to hand behind a long kitchen cupboard door so you will always have them to hand when you go shopping or need one for any reason. I also reuse all the waxed insides of cereals (wiped out with kitchen towel) for my children’s packed lunches. I reuse all my glass screwtop jars for dried goods (I haven’t bought any of those expensive kitchen containers for years…!) - mine contain cous-cous, semolina, brown sugar, etc., and another useful thing is to cut off cooking instructions or sell-by dates from the pack and just either sellotape them to the underside of the jar lid or to the outside of the jar…that way you will not accidentally poison either yourself or your family.

The aluminium trays in which food comes, like a small gammon joint, for example, are great once cleaned out for reusing to heat food in the oven, such as a few mushrooms in garlic butter….they are so much easier to clean than a huge oven tray…and the black plastic containers which contain ready meals like pasta bakes, once washed out, make great reheatable microwave containers for small amounts of food like beans, etc.

You can also reuse toiletry bottles like handwash or shampoo bottles if they have a pump action for things like spritzers for your houseplants, or for plant feeders, once thoroughly washed out, they make great baby bio feeders.

I have yet to find a really good bulk buying place where I can get dried goods in larger containers and decant them at my leisure – does anyone know of a good place? There used to be a good one locally but it closed down – and it had the equivalent of large bins full of dried goods such as sugar with a little trowel, and you could buy these in plastic bags and just as much or as little as you wanted, to save waste.

I buy as much of my grocery shopping as I can in places like our local Semi-Chem which sells Tetley teabags – 88 for £1.00 – far cheaper than anywhere else – and Cup-A-Soup for 59p. These are handy staples to have in my cupboard at home and at work in case I get snowed in at either place because living in the highlands as I do, you have to have contingency plans!!

I have also recently discovered there are a number of local schools and clubs who will take aluminium drinks and food cans from you and this is how they are funded….very worthwhile causes.

If anyone can add to the above, I would be delighted to hear more……I am learning all the time. Have you heard of Zero Waste volunteers? I am keen to know more. Thanks for reading!