Chronically aware of my lack of posts in the first half of 2015, I've been thinking about adding links to other interesting websites, in the interest of at least posting something.
Instead of that, here is a link that you may not want to visit. It pretends to recommend ideas for recycling and repurposing, and there are one or two interesting ideas, but a lot of them are fairly ridiculous. Some ideas are using things that are not really rubbish. For example they find various uses for bulldog clips. I have never seen cause for throwing bulldog clips away, since they have several uses. The only situation you'd want to throw one away is if it was broken or had a part missing, but in all the ideas here, they need to work properly.
Some of these don't look like you would need or want them. Would you really want an old bicycle as a basin stand?
One of them I have tried and tested: producing guitar picks from old credit cards. In the picture, they seem to use a very fancy pick cutter, which I imagine would cost a few hundred times more than a pick. I used a pair of scissors.
The site calls this "upcycling", which wikipedia defines as "the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value."
A lot of the ideas may be more usefully called "downcycling", since they are converting perfectly good materials and useful products into uses for which they may be less suited, and which will use more envrionmental resources.
