Re-use & Recycle
Here are a few re-use & recycling options for building & DIY leftovers.
DIY Uses
Plasterboard & plaster
- Add to heavy soils to improve porosity
- Papercrete
Lightweight internal doors
- Shelf units for garage/shed use
- Add legs or blocks for a kid's bed
Bricks, new
- Barbecue
- Parking stops for car wheels
- Flower bed edging
Bricks, damaged
- Brick dust increases the strength of cement by pozzolanic action. Tumble bricks in mixer to produce dust. Add a little brick dust to cement mixes.
- Red brick dust also colours concrete
- Brick dust & grit can be used in papercrete
Broken tiles
- Smash them with a hammer, use the small pieces for mosaic work. Put tiles upside down when breaking.
- Tumble tiles in mixer with a brick to produce dust and small aggregate. Add this to concrete, it acts as pozzolan and aggregate. (Any other hard weight could be used.)
Pozzolans
- These react with cement to increase set strength. They thus permit reduced cement use.
- Some ratios please.
Pallets
- 3 or 4 make a compost bin or potato planter.
12mm & 18mm chipboard
- Loft flooring (12mm is for non habitable use only)
- Shelves, either long ones or small corner shelves.
- Very narrow strips of chip, ply, wood & mdf can be used as card shelves. Fix with 1" brackets above.
Brick acid
- Descaler
- Pipe unblocker
Lime
- Paint
- Plaster
- Mortar for repointing
Earth rod
- Curtain pole
- Movel bathroom lockbolt
Plastic tub
- General purpose bucket
- With lid: suitable container for lime putty
Masonry nails
- Enable plants to climb walls
Cable offcuts
- Small pieces: as general purpose metal wire, for binding etc
Dead drill bits
- Regrind to make high speed wood bits. See Drill Bits
Dead power tools
- Extension leads
- Drill chucks are reusable. Open the chuck jaws, remove the screw down the centre, and the chuck unscrews.
Electrical accessories
- Re-use square pin accessories in outbuildings
- Round pin sockets can be added to new lighting cicuits to enable plug-in lamps to be controlled by the lighting wall switch. However the appearance of new ones is usually preferred.
- Round pin socket systems & fusebox can be left in place and supplied from 12v or 24v and used to run small appliances, lamps etc. Eliminates many wall warts. Alternatively round pin sockets can be used for loudspeaker wiring, particularly 100V line.
Paint
- Re-use small tins of grotty old colours by adding a little to white to make pastel colours.
- Re-use disliked colours of emulsion by changing the tint with other coloured paint, and adding white to lighten it.
- Donate to local school for art and craft use.
Weeds, leaves, clippings etc
- Apply to ground to feed plants & as mulch
- grow a new hedge: stick tree/hedge clippings in ground, keep shaded and watered
- Grow a new plant border for free: stick lots of assorted clippings in ground, keep shaded and watered.
- Nettle tops make nice soup if not old
- A pile of twigs & branches houses wildlife over winter that will eat lots of garden pests in the summer.
Paper
- Cardboard: weedkilling blankets
- Cardboard, b&w newspaper: Compost heap if torn
- Wallpaper, lining paper: kids art paper (use reverse of wallpaper)
- All paper: papercrete
Crockery
- see Broken tiles
Pipe
- Many things can be constructed from plastic pipe. See Make Things from PVC Pipe
- Cut into short pieces (2-3") and screw to wall as tool holder
- Cut into short pieces and let the kids solv weld them together side by side to make a desk tidy
- Large quantities of flexible pipe can make an effective solar preheater for almost nothing. Solar Preheater
Gravel
- Paths
- On flower beds
Sand
- Yellow sand: kid fun. Red sands tend to stain.
- Add to heavy soils to improve porosity/drainage
Grinder discs
- Small worn down discs enable a grinder to get into some places a full disc can't.
- Dead Diamond Discs: Repair plates
Expanded polystyrene
- Insulation
- Papercrete
Silicone
- Make mould of small items, cast replicas in cement mortar or plaster, build them into a new wall for decoration.
Expanding foam
- Make fake dog turds. Helps keep some kids off site.
Breeze blocks
- Kids can carve them with a breadknife.
Clinker
- Paths
- Crush & add to mortar
Ash
- Paths
- Woodash is a fertiliser when used in small amounts only. In bulk it kills everthing.
- Coal ash is a main ingredient in black mortar, but this is best only used to match existing pointing. Black mortar is prone to premature failure sometimes, so is not recommended for general uses.
Glass
- Secondary glazing
- Solar panel - a huge range of types and designs exist, see [1]
- Shed window
- Sparkly concrete surface for moulded concrete: break glass into small bits (mixer & brick), place some in mould & pour in concrete.
Timber
- A lot of substandard and damaged timber can be used in stud walls.
- Small pieces are usable as noggins
- Rarely it can be worth gluing bits together to use for stud wall uprights.
Subsoil, clay
- Subsoil containing clay: may be used in making concrete blocks
- Papercrete
- Adobe building blocks
Other Uses
Kids
- Kids are not usually recommended for re-use, but they can use many scrap building materials for play. They can learn to tile, make cement, plaster or breeze block ornaments, wendy houses, tree houses and so on. Some especially like creating mosaics.
- A small minority of kids have good concrete reinforcing properties.
Freecycle
- Offer your leftovers on Freecycle, Craigslist etc.
Firewood
- Sometimes people will take wood away free for burning.
Block filling
- Almost any non-expanding material can be put into the middle of concrete blocks to reduce cement use and dispose of it free.