5 Household Items You Did Not Know You Could Recycle

Recycling household items doesn’t always mean checking for triangles on bottles and sending newspapers to a recycling bin. Recycling, at its heart, entails reusing items so you don’t waste money and contribute to the landfill unnecessarily. Here are five recyclable items apartment dwellers usually have that they may not have thought to reuse:

1. The Last Bit of Soap

Don’t just toss the slivers of bath and hand soap once they get too small to use. Put leftover soap slivers in a lightweight (clean) sock or a loofah hand mitt. The more slivers in the sock or mitt, the better. You can use the sock or mitt as a self-lathering sponge. You can also adhere old soap slivers onto a new bar of soap. If pushing the soap sliver on the soap bar when wet doesn’t work, wet just the area of the bar on which you’re going to stick the soap sliver and put in the microwave for 10 seconds.

2. Bath Mats

Household items like bath mats can actually have a new life after they’ve worn down. Use old bath mats as replacement mop heads. Fold the mat to fit around an old mop handle and tie it down with string, rubber bands or staples. (Face the absorbent side you used to step on outward.) 

3. Coffee Grounds and Tea Bags

Coffee grounds and tea bags are common household items usually just tossed in the trash after a single use. Tea bags can actually be used for two to three cups of decreasing strength tea. When you’re finished, you can sprinkle coffee grounds or the loose tea over the dirt surrounding potted plants and gardens to act as natural, effective fertilizers. Tea left in bags can be used to line the bottom of potted plants’ containers to help keep the dirt moisturized.

4. Clothes

When you’re tired of your old clothes, you can of course donate them to charity organizations, but if you want to start saving money by getting more use out of your old clothes, you have a few options. Hold a “swap party” with friends in which you all bring a few clothing items to a party and you all leave with your friends’ old clothes-clothes that are brand new to you. You can also turn beloved souvenir t-shirts into pillows, framed wall decorations or other household items with a little cutting and/or sewing work. Cut-up clothes even work as attractive reusable gift wrapping so that you don’t have to waste paper!

5. Old Shoes

Too worn and dirty to donate to charity, old shoes usually make their way to the landfill in droves. Some famous brands take old athletic shoes to be torn apart and turned into athletic court, running track and playground flooring. You can also turn old shoes into potted plant holders (use a plastic cup inside so they don’t leak) or clean them and then dip them in plaster, preserving them to use as desktop organizers.