At last year’s Strange Folk festival, some Girl Scouts taught me and my kiddos the joys of #6 plastic. The basic concept: It shrinks! Like Shriny-Dinks! Equally awesomely! And because you get to draw your own pictures, not fill in some pre-printed coloring sheet, AND you get to re-use before you recycle, it’s a great activity to do with our budding little environmentalists.

There are lots of tutorials on the web for shrinking #6 plastic, all a little different, but here’s how my family does ours:

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Keeping the earth clean and healthy is not Right vs. Left, it is right vs. wrong!

We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat food that comes from the earth’s soil. It is my observation that my Republican brother-in-law needs the same clean water and air as I in order to live. It is also an observation of mine that the health effects of toxic air and water will equally effect the children of my bro-in-law as much as it will my own. Therefore, it is up to the majority of us whether right or left, liberal or conservative to join together as one group of people that inhabit one planet and address the degradation of our environment.

For the Environment, we are not red or blue, Republican or Democrat–we are the Purple (Blue+Red) Demoblicans (Democrat+Republican)!

Purple Demoblicans unite!

Power tho the Purple!

Purple is the new green!

Demoblicans are the new environmentalists!

The below average catch phrases are endless…

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If you are planning a company party, looking for thank you gifts for your whole department, or simply stocking the supply cabinets, re-sourceful by re-everything has it.

re-sourceful merges together charities, businesses, designers, artisans and artists for innovative and fresh promotional gift ideas for business. From left to right above are product examples of their resourceful mantra is re-use, re-cycle, re-think:

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The neat thing about Virgin Fest, is that they are committed to being as green as possible. They had a whole exhibit based on their efforts, called the Green Spot. At the exhibit you learned that all of the paper products, t-shirts and other “merch” were sourced from organic cotton, recycled content and corn based plastics. Generators used biofuels and composting bins were placed next to recycle bins.

It was wonderful to know that even though music festivals are large events, small changes can make a big difference. But what really got me going was an awesome bandanna skirt that I spotted in the crowd.

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While Jennifer discussed some ways of increasing the amount of recycling that individual households participate in, there are websites that are engaging with the ideas of finding new uses for materials that will otherwise end up as waste adding to the volume in our landfills.

Sources of material with a potential to be recycled are posted and discussed at Superuse. "Superuse is an online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling."

Some of the entries are simply documenting materials that are in need of recycling, such as tires, container ship cargo bags (huge nylon bags with a capacity of more than a ton that are used to load materials on board cargo ships rather than using the ubiquitous shipping container), and discarded wind turbine blades (which are unusable for their primary purpose due to cracks).

Sometimes, recycling ideas are documented, as with the "Trashforma 04" project which took 166 stainless steel sinks and created a cubic volume 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) on a side for a beachside installation. This installation is as much about art as it is about a practical form of shelter, but it engages with the idea of transforamtive use.

Superuse encourages designers who are looking for creative applications where existing materials, that would otherwise add to the waste stream, become the raw materials for other products that extend their usefulness.

At a more consumer level (but no less interesting), How Can I Recycle This? addresses questions about recycling consumer materials. Rather than dealing with industrial scale materials, the questions here tend to be more about ubiquitous household items and consumer goods. It's based in the UK, so some materials/uses may be a bit unfamiliar. The format is a very ordinary blog, with single issue entries addressing questions about how to recycle (or more often, to re-use) various unusual materials. Suggestions are found in the coments following each post.

The headline image for this article comes from a post with a question about reusing or recycling inflatable toys that have gone flat or gotten torn and are no longer workable toys. As a parent of two boys, I have already had a couple of inflatable pool toys that we have thrown away after they were punctured or torn. I'll watch this to see if someone comes up with a good suggestion on this one.

A more typical question asked "How can I reuse or recycle…an old wire waste paper bin?" and elicited suggestions including using it to collect recylable bottles, using it as a planter, using it as a sieve for rinsing root vegetables, as well as cleaning and repainting it.

Comments about these seem to come mostly from other users, rather than from designers, but the suggestions are no less creative or interesting.

Both sites are full of examples of the approaches people are taking to find more opportunities to re-use and recycle materials. Even packaging and"disposable" products can find new uses with some creativity. And these sites have plenty of creative solutions to offer and other opportunities awaiting discovery.