8 Uses For Garlic Skins

February 25, 2016February 24, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

In my ongoing fascination with the things I typically throw away, even in the compost pile, I thought I’d look up some of the most interesting ways to reuse garlic skins. Some, I already do, but there are a few new uses in this list I thought you might want to try.

Don’t toss those papery white skins!

1) Save them in your freezer and use for your vegetable or chicken stock. I also throw them in my slow-cooked beans to add more flavor.

2) Compost them.

3) Keep the skins on your garlic when you roast it and the protective skin layer keeps your garlic soft on the inside.

4) Eat it! According to the Daily Mail, the skin on fruits and veggies shouldn’t be discarded. As for garlic: “Peeling garlic cloves removes the phenylpropanoid antioxidants which help fight the ageing process and protect the heart.”

5) Make a paper rose out of your garlic skins.

6) Turns out garlic skin is a major antioxidant. Plan on seeing it in all sorts of health products in the near future.

7) Add them to your handmade paper recipe. They add a lovely texture.

8) Dye your hair with them using a natural ayurvedic technique.

Green Guide To Recycling Ski Gear

February 22, 2016February 22, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

By Mr. Everest

We’re at the height of the ski season and if you’re like me, this is a great time to start demo-ing new gear. But what to do with the old? Here are a few options I’ve been able to find:

SELL
You can always list your gear on Craigslist or take it to Play It Again Sports to find a buyer.

GIVE
Joining your local Buy Nothing group and giving them away to your neighbors is a great way to keep your ski and snowboard gear out of landfills and still cruising the slopes. Some people are cool with using outdated gear. My wife, for example, skied the slopes for 15 seasons on her old Black Diamond AT gear. And our 12 year old son is going to give them a try on his first hut trip this week.

Donate your gear to a local youth ski program or adaptive ski program. If you check with your ski areas or local ski shops, you’ll most likely find a program that would be happy to use your equipment that’s in good condition and not outdated. Snowpals of Tahoe is just one example.

REUSE
You could always start your own ski swap, enticing others in your community to bring their gear so families can outfit the kids with neighbor’s hand-me-downs. It’s a great way to keep skiing affordable for us all.

Yankee Magazine has a great article, with plans, showing you how to make your own ski Adirondack chair. Some people build cool fences with stockpiled skis.

RECYCLE
The North Face stores will take all of your ski clothing (hats, gloves, pants, bibs, jackets, socks), ski boots, goggles, and ski helmets. Their Clothes The Loop program sends the gear to a company called I:CO which shreds it into its elements and makes new products with it. My article about this great program goes more into depth about this the Clothes The Loop initiative in all of The North Face stores, and where to find those stores.

Ski poles? They’re mostly made of metal, so taking them to your nearest metal recycling center might be your best bet. Poles haven’t changed much over the years, though, so be sure to try giving them away before you send them to metal recycling.

If you live or ski in Colorado or Utah, a great ski industry recycling service was set up by the Snow Sports Recycling Program, which recycles ski gear collected at participating stores. I can’t find a list of the stores any longer but calling the phone number listed on the page, under “Waste Not” could likely get you the names of stores near you that’ll recycle your old gear. This program turns your gear into chips that will be turned into new goods. They’ll take skis, snowboards, boots, helmets, bindings and poles. These materials create waste streams that are approximately 5% steel, 25 % aluminum, 60% plastic and the balance are wood and fiberglass, all reusable in new applications.

Ski Poles Are Mostly Made of Metal © Liesl Clark

If you live near Aspen, CO you can contact Reeski to see if they’ll take your skis and boards to turn into cool looking furniture.

There’s no need for our gear to end up in the landfill. If you’re stumped about a particular item and want to find a reduce, reuse, recycle option for it, drop us a line in the comments below and we’ll get on it.

Recycle Your Metal Screw Caps!

February 21, 2016February 21, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 12 Comments

If you drink wine, you’ll know the caps I’m talking about. They also come on other glass bottled liquids, are made of aluminum and are never mentioned in municipal recycling lists. What’s a person to do with these things?

Here are 3 options:

1) Recycle Them! According to most wine magazines and green advocates the screw tops can be recycled. Well, not in my neighborhood. And here’s what Seattle’s Ask Evelyn has to say on the matter:

“Put small caps in the garbage. Small lids can jam the machinery at the recycling plant.”

Don’t listen to Evelyn. After a few hours of research, I was able to sample enough municipal sights that do take these small caps (Los Angeles, CA and Boulder, CO for example) but they ask you to NOT screw your metal caps back onto your bottles (same goes for metal lids on glass jars) as they will then need to go to a secondary sorting facility where someone will have to take them off. Metals go in metals, glass in glass.

So, here’s the deal: Metal has value. Save those little caps, no matter where you live, and throw them in your municipal metal recycling bin. If you’ve collected enough of them, I doubt they’d turn your accumulated metal away.

2) Even If Your Recycler Doesn’t Take them, Recycle Them Anyway! Here’s how: If you can recycle cans, you can recycle these little screw caps. Step on them to squash them and put them inside your can. Fill your can half way with the little caps. Then, close the lid a little so the caps don’t fall out. It’s subterfuge, but it should keep the caps from getting into the equipment and will add them to the recycling mix. These caps are made of aluminum, so if you want to be a purist, you should probably put them inside an aluminum pop can (that you’ll have to open with a can opener). If you’re really cautious, then save them, as I mentioned above, and put them in the scrap metal bin. We have a friend on our island who collects them, along with all aluminum foil, pie plates, aluminum wine cork wrappers, etc. and she delivers this aluminum to a recycler in Seattle who will pay for it!

3) Screw Cap For Your New Water Bottle: Reuse the cap, wine bottle and all by turning the whole thing into your new glass water bottle. It’s chic, cheap, and easy.

That just about sums it up. I had a tough time finding ANY information on these twist caps, except the fact that scientific studies are showing that twist top wine tastes better than natural corked wine (!), but some aged red wines do better with oak cork though they run the risk of cork taint. Other than the cork vs screw top debate, there’s a hole in the materials culture media about these little caps and we’re happy to fill it as best we can.

Am I missing something really cool (or obvious?) that should be done with metal screw caps? If so, please let me know. What do you do with yours? Let’s talk!

8 Reuses For Unmatched Socks

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 18 Comments

We all know about sock-hungry dryers. Well, I believe drawers are sock-eaters, too. Somehow socks go into dresser drawers in pairs but come out as singles, forever abandoning the sacred union. We started a special box of single socks a few months ago and decided it was high time we searched the house for all socks to take a full tally of the situation.

Sorting Socks is Sorta Fun. Photo © Liesl Clark

It was the perfect task for a 7 year old, searching through every drawer in the house and coming up with nearly 100 single socks! The laundry room coughed up a few more. Then, we got to work with our matching game. Thirty pair were reunited! But sadly, about 40 odd socks now have no mate. What to do?

I’m vowing to have a moratorium on sock-buying for at least a year, or until our dryer and drawers have consumed them all. This family has way too many socks. In the meantime here’s a list of what we’re doing with our 40 odd socks:

1) A few special unions have been created, and we look forward to showing them off at school as soon as possible.

2) I put one in the freezer to use over our ice pack. It’ll protect a child’s skin against that cold pack.

3) The 7-year-old, has her sights set on a few sock creatures, like this adorable sock hippo named “Emma” that she made the other day.

4) I invented a new type of yarn, like T-shirt yarn, but it’s….Sock Yarn! This stuff is easy and kinda cool to make.

First, find a single sock and cut strips into it without fully reaching the edge. A great photo that explains it in a tutorial for T-shirt yarn is here. You’ll then cut diagonally, linking the strips together in a spiral cut. It’s easy!

Then stretch your sock yarn out so it curls in on itself:

You might attract a feline in the process. Sock yarn makes an excellent cat play toy.

Roll your yarn into a ball and you’re done!

Sock Yarn. Try It. Photo © Liesl Clark

5) A travel utensil holder is a sock reuse I’ve been meaning to do. Now it’s done.

Just use a piece of your sock yarn to tie it shut.

Socks make excellent pencil holders too, just use an extra thick sock.

6) I saved a few socks for our rag basket, for dusting and other fine-rubbing I might need to do on furniture or countertops.

7) Cut the toe section out and use your sock tube as a travel coffee mug cozy.

My Favorite Sock Reuse: Travel Coffee Mug Cozy © Liesl Clark

8) The rest went back into the super duper sock box under the bed in waiting for sock sorting day next year when I vow yet again to never buy new socks and then learn how to darn the odd ones that remain. Actually, each week on laundry day we take the single socks and open up the box to see if the missing mates are inside. I have the box sorted by color, darks to lights, so the task goes quickly:

Can you believe how many unmatched socks we have?

Do you combine unmatched socks, in an effort to stave off buying yet another pair? Or is there a special reuse you’d love to share? We have a few hundred more you might want to check out at our Trash Backwards app.

Willa loves her sock yarn ball.

DIY Mason Jar Soap Dispenser

February 12, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

I’ve eyed the useful mason jar soap dispensers made by creative people and thought I’d try to make one myself. Was it difficult? Not at all. This DIY project takes a few minutes to pull off.

All you need is a mason jar with a wide mouth lid, a push pump from a discarded soap or hand cream dispenser (I had to cut mine down so it would fit in my pint jar,) a pair of pliers, and a Sharpie.

Find the center of your flat mason jar lid and punch a hole in it with a can opener (oh right, that’s one more tool you’ll want.)

I was able to make a hole quite easily with my pliers. Draw a circle around the hole that’s in the center of your lid, is in my first picture, and start to pull the hole apart, making it wider and wider.

You simply keep pulling the pieces of metal wider and wider around the edges of your circle until they’re just wide enough for your pump to fit through.

When you have sufficient room for your pump, slip it through but try to keep the fit quite tight.

I pressed the edges of the metal lid down tight against the lid to prevent any future cuts when I need to add soap to my dispenser. You can use a silicone sealant to lock the pump down to its center hole and smooth out your sharp edges.

This whole project took 5 minutes once I had gathered my supplies.

When we went away on vacation our cat knocked over a pretty glass dispenser I gave my husband for Christmas. My husband is the dishwasher after dinner and I wanted him to feel like he had a cool “tool” to use at the sink.

We mostly use baking soda for our dishes, but this liquid soap gives great suds if you like ’em and makes a mild hand soap, too. Our current liquid soap is an extremely watered-down (like 6:1 water to soap) biokleen dish soap.

Valentines: The Original Folk Art Scrap Hack

February 11, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

I remember having to make valentines cards in elementary school for each of my classmates. The handmade cards tended to come from whatever scrap paper, lace, and paper doilies we had around our home. Each valentine was different, a scrapper’s attempt at making beauty from what was available.

And then things changed, and there was a new ethic afoot: Skip the handmade valentine and buy a mass-produced version for your friends, complete with a stash of sweets. All you had to do was fill in your name, the recipient’s name, and add a packet of hearts. It certainly was a time-saver, but these so-called valentines felt like a cop-out and an opportunity for some not-so-creative folks to make money off of us. I’m still a big fan of the hand-crafted valentine. You might say the valentine is an original form of folk art, and some still practice it today.

Our kids, over the past few years, have been assigned, at school, to make valentines for their classmates from materials found in their home. Alas! We could bring back the tradition. Here are a few examples I’ve pulled from our photos over the years:

1) The Traditional Scrap Paper Valentine: We first gathered our scrap paper and cut out traditional hearts on card stock we had rescued from the landfill. We also save pretty scrap paper from magazines and junkmail so we have plenty of colors and textures to choose from for projects like this.

2) A Scrap Fabric Valentine: Then we found some pretty scrap fabric and cut out hearts to glue to the reclaimed card stock. Those felt a little more 3D and folksy.

3) Bookmark Valentines: Cut long strips of paper about 2 inches wide by 6 inches long.

Punch a hole (we punched a star, really) into one end of each strip.

Tie a little ribbon or scrap fabric through the star, and you’ll have bookmarks ready to decorate as useful valentines.

4) Valentine Heart Wands: In our pantry, we found some pie tins and colorful plastic straws we had found on the beach, saved, and washed. These would become our raw ingredients for heart wands we made for several of the students:

Cut a heart out of your pie tin and glue it to the end of a straw. They work with pretty sticks, too. And if you want to embellish your silvery pie tin heart, you can glue a smaller heart to your tin heart.

The Tin Man would be proud.

5) Wire and Yarn Hearts: We often craft wire hearts from scavenged wire and then wrap them in yarn. The children love hanging them around the garden. The little heart below was made by my daughter when the deer ate her bleeding hearts. She was so saddened by the loss of her hearts, she placed a fence around them and crafted this wire heart on the outside for the deer to eat, still leaving them something to enjoy. The sweetness of a 6-year-old is undying.

6) Classic Hand-Stitched Valentine: My daughter love to sew by hand. These hand-stitched valentines took her a month to make, but she poured her love and talent into each one. She left a little pocket in each to be filled with organic jelly beans, her favorite treat we buy in bulk at our local store. These are pretty easy to make so long as you have felt. We asked for felt on our local Buy Nothing group, and neighbors had plenty to share! She cut out hearts in varying sizes with my pinking shears and then layered them and sewed them together, leaving a pocket at the top.

7) Produce Sticker Heart: This one might be a bit of a stretch, but for those health-conscious sweethearts in your life, why not craft a produce sticker heart valentine? It was a cathartic exercise, for me, because those plastic stickers to announce that we’ve bought organic produce bother me greatly. No tutorial necessary, right?

Send in a picture of your own homemade valentines. We’d love to share them with all our sweethearts.

Clothes The Loop With The North Face

February 7, 2016February 7, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 17 Comments

I’m excited to make a huge discovery, for those of us who ache when we throw into the landfill big chunks of plastic that could likely be repurposed into something else. The North Face stores will take not only your old clothes, shoes, and outdoor gear like backpacks and tents, but they’ll also take your old ski boots! Please read this article by my husband that tells you all about this great initiative.

By Pete Athans

Living on an island means we don’t have access to a lot of services and conveniences. We like that.

A 35-minute ferry ride delivers us into what feels like the bowels of Seattle, ejecting ferry-riders beneath a highway underpass, a continuous stream of cars, buses and trucks humming above. Just around the corner from the hum of the waterfront is one of The North Face’s first stores to open in the U.S.

I’ve worked for the company for nearly 30 years, and I still love walking into this special Seattle space. Behind the modern store facade, you still have a sense of the original post and beam construction, probably used for shipping or as a warehouse years ago. Today, I’m even more proud to step into the store with my family, carrying our used clothing, textiles, and gear that we aren’t able to sustainably throw away on our small island. In fact, most people have a tough time finding places to discard used clothing and specialized outdoor gear in this country. But every store in the US that The North Face operates now has a “Clothes The Loop” box where you can drop off your used and worn-up clothes, gear, and shoes. You’ll get a discount on your next purchase at The North Face store as a reward for your efforts.

Here’s how you can find a store near you that is participating in this program. Click on their Find A Store link. Then, at the bottom of the map, click on the boxes that say “The North Face Stores” and “The North Face Outlets.” Those are the stores owned and operated by The North Face that have this program.

The North Face has initiated this much-needed clothing, gear, and shoe recycling program, they call “Clothes the Loop,” in a partnership with I:CO an international textile and shoe recycler that breaks materials down into 400 categories for carpet padding, stuffing for new toys, and fibers for new clothing. I:CO currently processes about 500 tons of used items every day in 74 countries. They have collection points all over Europe and in the USA.

Here’s a list of the kinds of items you can take to your nearest store and put in their box:

Old Clothing

Shoes

Hiking Boots

Rope

Bed Spreads

Sheets

Table Cloths

Fabric Scraps

Ski Boots

Backpacks

Tents

Climbing Harnesses

Pillows

Stuffed Animals

We’ve taken samplings of just about everything on the list above to their store. It’s reduced our family’s solid waste significantly each year. According to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year, and this figure is rapidly growing. Add your outdoor gear to that figure and surely it’s over 100 pounds. We’re very excited to hear that they’ll take ski boots. Before this, there were no options in the Seattle area and most cities for ski boot recycling.

Before you take your items in to The North Face, if any of them are usable, please try to give them away to someone who might be able to use them, through a project like your local Buy Nothing group. When my family travels to the Himalaya, we always bring a few extra duffels of clothing and shoes. We work with communities in Upper Mustang who are in dire need of good shoes.

Discarded handmade shoes in the village of Samdzong. Photo © Liesl Clark

Traditional woven wool shoes in Samdzong, thrown outside at the end of their life.

Since children grow so fast, it isn’t hard to pass on our own children’s lightly worn fleece, outerwear, hiking boots, hats and gloves to kids in remote mountain communities. It’s the least we can do in a high mountain environment where people only have access to poorly made Chinese apparel.

If we’re more mindful of our textile and outdoor gear waste, we can each make a difference. We know the textile industry adds tremendous environmental stress on our planet, but by giving away our usable our clothing and gear and then recycling what’s un-wearable, we can reduce the demand for virgin materials in new clothing and conserve the energy that goes into making fibers for fabrics.

For us islanders, this new drop box at The North Face will be a welcome destination for fabrics and apparel we’ve been stockpiling in our homes in hopes that a recycler would appear in our midst. Your jeans that have holes in the knees and gloves that are nearly shredded from outdoor use are welcome at the Clothes the Loop bin.

Hope to see you there, recycling your hole-y socks and dented hats.

DIY Bamboo or Stick Fence

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 9 Comments

This bamboo fence, in Kalopani, Nepal, is one of my favorite garden fences I’ve come across while traveling. It’s a simple construction of bamboo sticks and woven electrical cord to hold the whole structure together. Here, people use what they have at hand to create beauty in an unforgiving alpine environment at 7,500 feet.

Several 1-foot-high sticks are placed vertically in the ground about 5 inches apart and a long bamboo stick is split down the middle and placed horizontally across the vertical sticks, all woven together by an old electrical cord tied and knotted at the corner of the fence.

It’s a simple construction and quite attractive for a high altitude flower garden at the base of Dhaulagiri, the world’s 7th highest mountain.

If you’re looking for some more interesting ideas for fencing materials, we might have what you’re looking for in our Trash Backwards app.

Click Through for More Fence-Building Ideas

What have you used for fencing?

Garden Glove Love

January 30, 2016January 30, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 19 Comments

It all started on a bike ride. We kept seeing garden gloves along the side of the road. In fact, we had seen the gloves lying there for weeks and finally decided to pick them up. One by one, over the course of about 2 weeks, we had managed to collect 20 pairs!

We’re an island of avid gardeners, farmers, and a world-famous garden tour called “Bainbridge in Bloom.” Twelve months of gardening weather here on Puget Sound has afforded us 4 seasons of dirt digging. The problem is that the gardeners’ (or perhaps it’s the hired landscapers’) gloves too often end up along the sides of the roads, having fallen from the backs of landscaper’s trucks, farmers’ tractors, or islander’s cars. Being a food-grower myself, I couldn’t just let those gloves rot in the ditches.

My children and I have been collecting them: pulling to the side of the road, jumping out of the car, jumping back in, celebrating, for a year now and have 45 pairs plus about 50 singles ready for a mate. Do you have a single garden or work glove awaiting a partner? Don’t throw it out! Send it to us so we can marry it to one we have here because their next life is going to be GOOD.

All pairs of gloves we reunite will go to Kathmandu to protect the hands of the rag pickers there. Life as a rag picker is tough, really tough, and many are children in their pre-teens. These kids, and plenty of adults, make a living picking through other people’s trash to compile enough polyethylene plastic or PET plastic bottles to send to India for recycling. It’s a decent living, but the conditions are among the worst on the planet. We want to help by giving them the garden gloves we’ve found on our streets and in your garden sheds.

My children and I made a movie about the rag pickers in Kathmandu. If you have a few minutes, this film short will give you a brief look into the work they do:

Most rag pickers have no gloves at all. They pick bare-handed through broken glass and human excrement to find their quarry, and the best protection they can have, in my humble estimation, is for their hands (of course it doesn’t hurt to have a face mask, too.) We’ve seen some rag pickers with just one glove, as that’s all they have.

In August, we’ll be headed to Nepal again, to give gloves to Kathmandu’s rag pickers to aid in protecting them from the unsanitary conditions in which they work daily. Over two hundred rag pickers work at the city’s dump some 50 miles from Kathmandu. But countless children pick plastics from the Bagmati River as well as the streets of Kathmandu, and having a glove or two could save a child from infection, disease, and dysentery which comes with the territory.

Want to help us protect the rag pickers, those moving Kathmandu’s trash backwards into new goods, to help reduce the mountains of garbage in the foothills of the Himalaya? There are 3 things you can do to help:

1) Use our Trash Backwards app and indicate when you’ve done something good. By clicking the “I Did It” button on any individual solution, you show us that you’ve changed your behavior to help reduce waste. These simple clicks that show what you’ve done to reduce, reuse, and recycle provide us with data to indicate whether a social movement like ours that educates through social media can make a difference. Every “I Did It” click means we can do some good, too. It’s a one-for-one correlation between your action at home/in the office and our action worldwide. For every “I Did It” click in our app, we’ll do our own good: We’ll hand out a pair of gloves to a rag picker, we’ll remove batteries from a water source in a village, we’ll collect plastics from rivers and shorelines, we’ll conduct a village waste audit. Every action you do enables us to do our greater good and ultimately find the support to do even more! So, please visit us at TrashBackwards.com and find some solutions to our global waste that you can undo in your own small scale, then hit the “I Did It” button and we’ll do the same. The more you do, the more we’ll do in return.

2) Send us your odd (or pairs of) garden gloves. We’ll likely have a match and can then get them into the hands of someone in need. Please know that the conditions are deplorable for a rag picker. Gloves could save someone from infection and truly make a difference. Does one glove have a hole in the thumb but the other is fine? Send us the good one!

Garden Glove Love

6027 NE Baker Hill Road

Bainbridge Island, WA 98110

3) Simply help fund our efforts to improve the lives of Kathmandu’s rag pickers and kids in higher villages. You can do so by donating much needed funds to the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation so we can get our duffel bags of gloves (we donate shoes and books too) over to Nepal and remove toxic waste from the highest watersheds in the world while also helping to increase literacy in local villages. As little as $20 can go such a long way in Nepal. We’ve been bringing children’s books by porter, yak, horse, and donkey up to the highest villages in the Himalaya for 7 years now, and have opened 7 children’s libraries called The Magic Yeti Libraries. We bring books up and toxics down. Our target this summer is to remove batteries, CFL light bulbs, and plastics from the rivers, streams, irrigation ditches and water supply of villages between 9,000 and 14,000 feet. We’ll get these toxic materials out of the pristine waters and bring them down to a municipal organization that can dispose of them responsibly. We all live downstream of these waters, but for those who live in the villages nearby, the battery and plastics-laden streams need to be cleaned up as soon as possible.

Garden Glove Love was inspired by England’s Glove Love campaign, a nationwide movement to rescue single gloves and give them a new life on the hands of eager people wanting to help reduce our overall impact on the environment.

Start today with your efforts to reduce your own impact on our planet by doing some good with the stuff you already have in your life. Reduce, reuse, re-gift, repair, and rethink your material assets as you use our Trash Backwards web app and you’ll inevitably help others and our planet, too.

Zero Waste Shipping: Padded Envelopes & Mailers

January 28, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

Refuse & Reduce: We never buy anything for shipping, like envelopes, bubble-pack mailers, Tyvek pouches, padded envelopes and boxes because we receive so many of them. As a small production company, why buy new ones when plenty come in the door?

“Because they’ll look used and that won’t be professional if you reuse them,” you might say.

Since we’re all about reuse, there’s no problem gussying up a used envelope to resend to a client or partner, especially if we bring attention to the fact that we’ve given it a second life and ask them to reuse it, too. We have no problem reusing boxes for shipping, why not reuse padded envelopes? When I see a corporation reuse an envelope, I try to let them know how cool I think that is. A few weeks ago I received some of my hard drives back from WGBH/NOVA and it came in a box that was reused. It was probably the box I sent it in.

Simply sticking a new address label over the old one doesn’t take much thought. We often use a little piece of scrap paper and some glue or tape to cover over the old address and make a new label. Staples or tape can be used to reseal the mailer.

Share Your Excess Mailers: I save up my mailers so I can share them on my local Buy Nothing group. Neighbors are happy to come and get them, for reuse. Just before Christmas, I was able to offload a pile of padded envelopes to a neighbor who needed them for a company mailing. Using my old mailers definitely saved him some money. I included some blank mailing labels so he could cover up my address, but I often use a Sharpie to black-out the addresses and bar codes on previous mailers.

You can add a small heart to the envelope with the words “Reuse Me” in it to encourage the recipient of your envelope to reuse it, too.

If you are a company that regularly uses padded envelopes for shipping, ask for them in your Buy Nothing group and get the good word out to others that stockpiling them, for sharing, is a good idea, rather then throwing them away.

What about Tyvek plastic envelopes that have logos on them or come from FedEx, yet you want to use the USPS instead? I simply turn them inside out!

A plastic padded envelope can be used both inside and out.

Turn Your Padded Envelope Into Something Cool! Creme de la Craft has a great tutorial for transforming your padded envelope into an ipad case. Simple. Smart.

Recycle Tyvek Plastic Envelopes & Mailers: If you ever have too many to use and can’t offload them, did you know you can recycle Tyvek envelopes through Dupont? For small quantities (less than 25 envelopes/month), turn any Tyvek® envelope inside out, so the unprinted white surface shows on the outside. Stuff the inside-out Tyvek®envelope with other used Tyvek® envelopes for recycling. Address and mail the envelope to: Tyvek® Recycle Attn. Shirley B. Wright 8401 Fort Darling Road Richmond, VA 23237. Easy!

Make Your Own Mailers: If you’ve run out of mailers and no one has them for you on your Buy Nothing Group, make your own using cereal or cracker boxes. Adventures in Fluff has simple instructions on how to make your own paperboard envelope. You’ll wonder why you ever bought them in the first place after making one or 2. And they’re very cool because they send a message of reuse to your mail recipient.

Now your shipping is getting closer to zero waste!

If you’re looking for more ideas on how to make envelopes or reuse those you receive in the mail, please visit our Trash Backwards app where all items in your home and office can be reused, recycled and rethought.