BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Home Cooking Recycling when Home Cooking

When you're home cooking, do you recycle the tin cans and plastic containers you use as part of your ingredient set? What are some interesting ways you recycle or reuse those items?

Tin cans go straight into the bin, but plastic containers I re-use for fresh meat/fish in the freezer.

Noemi -

That's a great idea. We tend to use ziplocks for the freezer and that is wasteful because they can only be used once really. It makes much more sense to reuse those plastic containers you get!

Well, Lisa, you already know that everything my family can conceivably re-use at least gets the chance of being re-used.
Let's see, most recently, I posted a tuna can Easter basket project on my blog. But also we use cans as bases for pencils cups and my daughter likes to use the can opener to take the lids of the cans with the pull back lids, then washes them and packages gifts in them by hot gluing the lids back on the cans. Sometimes she will carefully remove the label so she can glue that back on when the can is filled with her gift so people wind up very confused about getting a can of soup as a present.

Plastic containers are food storage and also used as quickie bento containers. Packing your own crackers,deli meat, cheese and a treat separated by silicone cupcake wrappers is a lot more affordable than Lunchables and you get exactly what you want.
We also re-use salad containers from the Costco deli that way. Costco chicken Caesar salads have great containers for packing lunches to go.
My daughter saves tabs off aluminum cans, and they frequently turn up in creative use, like as eyelets for a pair of spats or on a corset lacing teeshirt modification. Since I found out that aluminum soda cans can be easily punched with hand punches, we also make garlands and ornaments using them.

Cereal box cardboard rocks. It's armatures in paper mache projects, used to create little notebooks with paper that's printed on one side only and junk mail to keep notes on and in making duct tape purses and other uses. I also use milk jug plastic as a stiff backing for beadwork.

Dear Shala -

I do eat tuna fish fairly regularly and while I recycle the cans, it never occurred to me to DO something with the cans!

I wonder what else could be done with a tuna fish can! Do you worry about the sharp edges?

No, I have a safety can opener, the kind that splits the seal? Mine is the good grips one. Easy to find and fairly inexpensive.

Tin cans and plastic containers in most cases also go straight into the bin, glass bottles be reused for jam and pickles.