5 Awesome Ways to Put the Waste around Your Home to Good Use

August 9, 2015 Guest Post

Looking for ways to do your bit towards going green and saving the environment? If yes, home is a great place to start with. Most of us have already started taking care of simple things such as using water efficiently, conserving electricity, saving fuel, using eco-friendly products, and so on. If you’re looking to do more, recycling, reusing, and wasting less is a great idea. So if you’re ready to take project go-green-at-home to the next level, following are 5 ultimate ways to recycle and reuse waste and rubbish at home.

Scratchpad or notepad out of justifyover notebook pages or printed paper
Discarding your child’s old notebooks? Just go through the notebooks and you’ll find plenty of pages or sides that haven’t been used at all. Neatly tear them away before disposing off the book. Have a look around your study area or even the living room. You’ll come across plenty of papers and pamphlets which have only one side printed. File all these unused sides together, orstaple them together in the form of a notebook to come up with a nifty scratchpad or notepad! Whether you use it as a telephone book to jot down contact number and addresses, or as a scrap book to put down notes, or even if your children use it as a rough book for their study work, these recycled notepads can come in so handy!

Plastic bag dispenser
We all know how harmful plastic bags are for the environment but no matter how hard you try, at times plastic bags are hard to avoid. If you must use plastic bags, try re-using them for as long as you can. To store all those irritating grocery bags and shopping bags that keep piling in your kitchen, you can create an ingenious plastic bag dispenser out of that huge 3 liter soda bottle from yesterday’s party. Invert the bottle, chop off the bottom and also chop off an inch or so from the mouth to make it wider. Hang the inverted bottle behind the kitchen door or mount it up using a drill, and your disperser is ready – a perfect way to store plastic bags for future use.

Tin-can pencil holders or flowerpots
Have a nice look around your kitchen – do you see any justifyover tin cans? You’ll be amazed to see how incredible these tin cans can look if you re-use them as pen-pencil holders or flower pots. First of all, clean the tin and leave it to dry. Once dry, bring out your paints and start smearing the tin cans with your favorite bright colors and you can also even give them funky patterns and designs. Imagine how stunning these brightly painted tin-can flowerpots would make your garden look! You can also use these awesome cans in your room, to store your pens, pencils, and other stationary supplies.

Create a compost heap for your garden
Wondering if there’s a way you can reuse all those vegetable scraps and other biodegradable waste rather than dumping it into the garbage bin? Yes, apparently there is a terrific way you can recycle all biodegradable waste from around your home – by creating a compost heap! Be it justifyover food, vegetable and fruit scraps, green waste, egg shells, paper waste, old newspapers, or even leaves and grass clippings, all these can be effectively recycled as compost for your garden. Compost not only gives you an epic way to recycle biodegradable waste, but also works wonders as a natural fertilizer, pesticide, and condition for your garden’s soil bed.

Indoor herb garden from waste bottles
Even the most committed go-green warrior can find it hard to avoid the usage of plastic bottles entirely. However, all those justifyover plastic bottles from last night’s house party don’t necessarily need to end up inside the garbage bin. Simply put your creativity to work and you can come up with some unique creations made out of justifyover plastic bottles. One such ingenious way to reuse plastic bottles is by using them to create your very own indoor herb garden. Cut the bottle into half and use the bottom half to grow herbs like basil, thyme, parsley, sage, cilantro, oregano, and mint. You can use bias tape on the sharp edges of the cut bottles – this also makes them look neat. Convert your window sill or your balcony into a mini herb garden and reap the benefits – literally!

Leslie Kramer, the author of this post is a freelance blogger, who is currently writing for PerthBinHire, one of the most reputable waste management companies in Perth. Leslie is a wild life photographer and often participates in green living and waste management campaigns.