Thoughts on rubbish

Perhaps it is the springtime that brings out the recycling bug in me! We spent this weekend doing various domestic tasks, many of which I realised related to recycling or foraging of some sort. I also realised that I get a lot of pleasure from making good use of things or searching out that second hand bargain.

I rescued a child's bench from the firewood pile and sanded it in preparation for a new lick of paint, picked up a good-as-new sofa that we bought on ebay, unravelled a jumper to reuse the wool, and collected a few buckets fulls of flints from the chalk piles (the results of much hard work by the grave diggers) to edge my little garden.  I also donated several bag of clothes to the Traidcraft bin in the car park after the girls in the office had rifled through them.

It all sounds very noble doesn't it? I know I risk sounding a bit 'holier-than-thou' in my purchasing habits but, to be honest, it has become a bit of a habit. It is not always a virtue either! In the past our many foraging trips to the tip resulted in a large number of items coming home with us that we didn't actually need and ended up back at the tip within a few months. When I was a student in Lancaster (home of the finest charity shops I know) I would browse weekly and clothed myself entirely in second hand clothes. I had a moment of realisation one week when I picked up a pair of jeans thinking, 'now who would get rid of those', before I realised that I had donated them the week before and actually I was perhaps a bit addicted to charity shopping.

The key to successful reusing and recycling is to be discerning. Select quality and select what you actually need. Much of the stuff that ends up at the tip or the charity shop - tea light holders, toast racks, USB hamster wheels, spaghetti jars, foot spas etc. - always were surplus to requirement and will possibly not enhance your life.

Upcycling is the new word for making new stuff out of old stuff. You have probably been doing it for years: a old tyre makes a swing, a bit of left over architrave is a picture frame, a sock becomes a puppet! Online there are some amazing upcycling ideas that are really fun. Today I learned how to make a laptop bag out of carrier bags and one of my favourite crafty websites is etsy.com  which is packed full of really good projects that don't just look like something made out of rubbish!

The runaway success of websites like ebay, Freecycle and preloved how how keen our desire is to reuse and recycle. Permaculture Mag's readers solutions page also yields some really good ideas. I am particularly taken with the worm tubes that seem like a really easy and low-maintenance way of making worm compost.