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#SmallChangesSunday features a guest spot in the form of a local producer or sustainability hero, bestowing handy reuse tips, mindful changes in perspective, or how to make steps towards being more sustainable.
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This #smallchangessunday post is with our own Alice from our Inchicore store. Every time I visit the D8 shop Alice is very creatively reusing something, and she had so much to share her tips really deserved a whole blog post…
ALICE:
“Re-using/Repurposing items has always been a part of my life, but has become a bigger part in the past few years since I decided to try to live a more sustainable/zero waste life. Growing up, my parents always found ways to re-use items about the house whenever they could, and found some great pieces of used and antique furniture in charity shops/auctions and even skips. You could probably say “One person’s waste is another person’s treasure” is a motto I live by! I try to find a use for everything and hate to see things dumped.
One of the best things I’ve come across in recent years are the ‘freecycle’ pages online in Ireland – there’s a freecycle website, with different county groups, and there are also facebook ‘freecycle’ groups – where you can post items for offer that you do not want any more but might be of use to someone else, or you can also make an ‘ISO’ (In Search Of) post if there’s something specific you’re looking for, and someone out there might be looking to get rid of that same thing.
Here are some of my recent examples of repurposed items:
– plastic yoghurt and berry cartons to grow seedlings from seed
– crates used as planters (and plastic to line them from a garden centre – was wrapped around bags of compost on a pallet) (and a pallet taken apart and rebuilt as planter)
– a cutlery roll made out of a teatowel ( also means I don’t need any single use cutlery anywhere)- you can find the pattern from @lauradebarra
– used paper coffee cups as plant pots for propogating plants/ potting up seedlings
– some old single use cutlery I had kept thinking I might have a use for again some time – used to label plants!
– toilet rolls filled with coffee grounds as fire logs…
– dry out flowers from a bouquet and you have dried flowers! re-use bottles/jars as vases.
So there you have it – oodles of ways to breathe life into items that may otherwise have gone to landfill. Alice takes the #WeChooseReuse campaign very seriously 🙂
Alice hails from the Rebel County and has called Dublin home for about ten years. She has a a BSc in Astrophysics & an MA TV&Radio broadcast production. She is a keen gardener (both indoors and outdoors), passionate about sustainability and living as green a life as possible. If you need to know a nice spot for a sea swim, where to go for a hike, have a chat about travel, how to grow any veggies/help with your indoor plants, or why isn’t your SCOBY working out, she’s your woman.
If you have some small changes you’d like to share, email us at jr@smallchanges.ie or post on instagram using the hashtag #smallchangessunday
