what can i do with toilet rolls ?

[vannah]

I mean the card centre bit?

Feel bad always throwing them away. My DS is 2.8 and loves making things
any easy suggestions?

thankyou!

101 uses here

use them for seeds here, too!

perfect for peas and beans.

But if you make a fairy tale castle/snake/elephant/designer dress from old toilet rolls, you will throw it away a week later.

So why not just throw it away now?

i throw them on the compost heap.

I believe they are good for aerating compost expat

Desi, do you say the same about sheets of paper then - chuck em out before the kids draw on them?

Sorry Washer! I have a contrary nature, I'm afraid. If everybody recycles, I'll throw away.

Back in the 70s, when no one recycled, I made elephants

I use them to start the fire in the winter

they seem to be doing well in there, Washer.

it's our first go at composting.

the kitchen one is doing REALLY well.

eggshells, teabags and veg and fruit peelings.

In the 70s, everyone used to save all their vegetable peelings, etc., and the pig man would come around and take it off us. There was never any food waste in our bins.

For some obscure reason, this practice was banned.

Same with bottles. You'd save all your bottles, and get money back when you returned them.

Recycling has become big-business religion these days. It's Billy Graham, but with the re-usable bag.

Oh, yes, Desi, when we were kids we used to go round scavaging for glass bottles to take back and buy sweets with the money.

In the US, you get a few pennies for aluminium cans, well, based on weight. Lots of people go round with trolleys picking htem up and loading them in.

I can remember our school scraps going to the pig man.

You see, there's one thing I don't understand about glass recycling.

You've already made the bottle. Nowadays, we take the bottle, crush it, and make another one. That must take up a lot of energy, breaking something that wasn't broken in the first place.

Jobs for the boys?

The transport costs for unbroken glass far out way the cost of remaking the bottles

Think about recycling all glass the way the milkman does

Each manufacturer would only collect their own bottles/jars or one company would do it and sort - the costs would be astronomical

And anyway we are (apparently) running out of the right sand to make glass - so this may become an expensive commodity

To answer a couple of other posters

1. Loo rolls aren't completely banned from pre-schools etc. You do have to microwave them before you can let the children use them though. I can't remember how long for, but i think it was 30 seconds.

2. Scrap food is no longer collected and given to pigs because there's no control over what goes in there. It's a health issue.

There's loads of good ideas for recycling, not just loo rolls but other boxes etc here. They call loo rolls TP roll's for some reason.

My son used to love making the stars and stripes candles

TP rolls = Toilet Paper Rolls

I recently made a musical shaker out of a toilet roll with a group of small children:

Very simple, attach little craft bells (a bit smaller then cat bells) to some wool. Make a couple of holes using a hole punch in each end of the toilet roll. Tie the wool to the holes so that the bells are suspended within the toilet roll. Let the children decorate the toilet roll with pieces of crêpe paper/feathers whatever other craft stuff you might want to decorate it with.