Re-Usable Household Items

Re-Usable Items That You Might Not Have Thought About

Recycling is an excellent way to help keep our environment clean. However, you can take it a step further by reusing a number of household items in fun, interesting, and useful ways. Let’s take a look at a number of creative uses for reusable items that you may not have thought about.

Old Curtains

These make great rags for cleaning your car or other large areas.

Coffee Grounds

Coffee grounds have a number of different uses. Many plants prefer acidic soils and adding coffee grounds to your compost is a great way to increase its nutrients. Coffee grounds are also a powerful insect repellent. Sprinkle the grounds over an ant pile and watch them scurry away. Finally, use the grounds as a deodorizer for your refrigerator. Place them into a small cup and they’ll help keep your refrigerator smelling fresh.

Margarine Tubs

Margarine tubs are excellent food storage containers. Chances are you go through a large handful of containers each year, all in varying sizes. By the end of year you’ll have your own set.

Milk Jugs

Like most, you’ve probably lost your share of clothespins. You can cut the top off of a milk jug and hang it from your clothesline, creating a handy clothespin holder.

Old Toothbrushes

Old toothbrushes are fantastic for cleaning hard-to-reach and small areas. Use your toothbrush to clean grout, areas around the sink, drains, and faucets.

Altoid Tins

Altoid tins are excellent storage containers for small items. You can use them to create a mini emergency kit for your car, as a place to hold your sewing materials, etcetera.

Butter Wraps

Once you’ve finished a block of butter you can use the wrapping to grease baking pans.

Envelopes

Envelopes can be used to store garden seeds, as a to-do list, or even as a bookmark that will never slide out. You can create a bookmark by cutting the corners off of the envelope, forming a triangle, and sliding it over the page you’re on. Your bookmark won’t slide or stick out like a normal bookmark would.

Plastic Bread Clips

Plastic bread clips are the ultimate scraping tool. They’re great for scraping off price tags, labels, and even lottery tickets.

Old Cookie Trays

An old cookie tray placed at the bottom of an oven or grill will catch anything that falls, helping keep it clean. These are just a handful of creative ways to reuse normal household items. So before you recycle something, ask yourself if it can be reused. You may be surprised at what interesting uses you can come up with.

About the Author

This article comes from Phill representing www.freestuff.co.uk – with all the latest freebies, competitions, deals and games.

Your Dispose Cell Phone A Pollution Problem

Your Dispose Cell Phone A Pollution Problem

Many people don’t recognize it, but cell phones are becoming a huge share to pollution on our planet now. As part of our “throwaway” life style together with our voracious appetite for mobile phone usage meaning that landfills are becoming choked at an appalling rate with not only computers and other electronic components, but cell phones as well.

Sadly, it is estimated that over 125 million cell phones are cast-off annually. Landfills does not have to be the last stop for your cell phone, your old cell phone can be recycle.

The reason why cell phone recycling is important is because they contain some bad toxic material embedded inside their circuitry and displays, toxins such as Arsenic, Lead, and Copper, Cadmium, Mercury and Beryllium (a carcinogen which has been linked to cancer), dangerous chemicals you wouldn’t want leach into the surroundings. If disposed of correctly the non toxic materials can be recycled and used again save our limited natural resources.

Regrettably, no landfill is 100% safe and it is the toxins that leach from these materials into the ground which pollutes our groundwater level and our drinkable water supply. Currently less than 1% of the entire earth’s water is drinkable so we must take steps to protect it.

Studies from the University of Northwest Indiana http://www.iun.edu/~environw/landfills.html have revealed that a whopping 82% of landfills in Northwest Indiana alone experienced leaks, a frightening statistic when you consider how much damage it poses to the surrounding environment and that the consequences such as migration of methane gas and leaching contaminants cannot be isolated.

Therefore toxic are the emissions from landfills that living within a close proximity of one can affect health such as low birth weight in newborns, shorter height than the general population and heart defects and liver abnormalities to name a few. If these are just some of the side effects from landfills, imagine what else we are casting into them.

Our landfills are becoming so overflow with unwanted electronics in our technology starved society that unless we do something, we will run out of land to accommodate it all and the resources with which to make them.

So, before you decide to throw out your old cell phone in exchange for a new one, think for a moment do you absolutely need it or is because you want the coolest new style? If your older model is still working fine, do you really need to buy a new one?  What else could that money be spent on?

Think about where that cell phone will end up. Just because it disappears from plain sight as it heads for the landfill does not mean its impact stops there.  The effects of your old cell phone will continue to be felt long after your memory of it has faded.

What Can you Do? Each country has different requirements dispose of electronic products. With a little research, you can find out what policies as well as where you can go for donating or recycling. Disposal doesn’t have to be the end of the road. Why not give your old cell phone another lease on life and adopt it out to a good home?

You can donate them to a worthy cause, for example www.wadt.org is a nonprofit organization that accepts cell phone donations for victims of domestic violence.

How about reselling it on eBay or offer it free at Craigslist?

Here is another fantastic means, there are actual businesses that will pay you up to $50 for your old cell phone, they make it extremely easy to arrange and will even pay for postage and handling.

There is no excuse for not recycling or re-use your old cell phone and you could feel good in knowing that you helped keep mother earth a little cleaner because ultimately these little things make a big difference.

– // –

Eco friendly holiday cards at Tiny Prints.