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
• A slice of plasterboard can be used as a stick of chalk.

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 colours concrete
• Brick dust & grit can be used in papercrete

Broken tiles

• Smash 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.
• Upto 30% of cement powder may be substituted with a pozzolan.

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
• Novel bathroom lockbolt

Plastic tub

• General purpose bucket
• With lid: suitable container for lime putty
• With secure lid: add 1 or 2 strips of wood and use it as a cement mixer.

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 circuits to enable plugin 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.
• Round pin sockets can be used for loudspeaker wiring, particularly 100V line.

Paint

• Re-use small tins of grotty old (waterbased) colours by adding a little to white emulsion 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
• Metal pipe also makes various goods
• 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 very little. 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.
• Hand grindstone
• Dead Diamond Discs: Repair plates

Expanded polystyrene

• Insulation
• Papercrete
• Lightweight concrete

Silicone

• Make a mould of a small items, cast a few 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.
• blocks + sheet wood = basic bed. Make sure its stable.

Clinker

• Path surface
• Path base
• Crush & add to mortar

Ash

• Paths
• Woodash is an unbalanced fertiliser when used in small amounts. 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
• Small toughened glass sheet: hygienic chopping board
• Sparkly concrete surface for moulded concrete: break glass into small bits (mixer & brick), place some in mould & pour in concrete.
• use as a minority percentage of concrete aggregate
• Glass cullet is even being used as garden mulch now

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.
• Wood strips 4mm or more thick can be used as very light shelves.
• Large quantities of short pieces can make a shed or playpen using a lattice or geodesic dome construction. A good kids project.
• See Ash

Clay & Clay Subsoil

• Use in making concrete blocks
• Papercrete
• Adobe building blocks
• Cob walls.
• If you roll a sausage with it and can dangle the end of the sausage over the edge of your hand, and it bends over without breaking off, its probably good enough for pottery. Offer such clay to someone with a kiln, or a local organisation using clay.
• Clay subsoil also makes clay plaster, which is a perfectly good plastering material.
• Make a mud oven in the garden. (Cooks & looks better than barbecue.)
• Small clay goods may be baked by putting them in a coal fire once completely dry.

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.

See Also

Disposal Methods