ThinkMills.Info^™Hub

© Richard G. Mills, ThinkMills.com, ThinkMills.info  All rights reserved.

[Many of these tips were first written for and published
on the Bourbonnais Township Park District website
as part of its “BTPD is going green~” promotion”]

Green tips you can use at home, at work, on vacation, just about everywhere! (page 9)

More Odds and Ends and Tidbits and...

How-To's, What-To's, and Things You May Not Have Known!

See How-To videos on pages 10, 11, and 12!

Remember to put out the recycling bin(s)!

Where I live, they "upgraded" our trash-collection service (and what we pay!) to provide bins. We used to put out garbage, cans and glass bag(s), and paper and cardboard bag(s) every week. The "upgrade" has us put trash in one bin and all recyclables in the other bin. Great, right? But the "upgrade" also limited recycling pickup to every other week. Neighbors are constantly getting confused and putting out an overflowing recycle bin on the wrong night. And then it often sits there for a week, since they don't feel like lugging it back to the garage!

How do I remember? Do I mark the days on my wall calendar in advance? — No, that wouldn't work: my wall calendar still says November 2012! (It is February 2013 as I write this.) Instead, I enter the date once in my on-line calendar, set it to repeat every two weeks and to send me a reminder in my messenger and e-mail the day before pick up (so I'll put the bin by the street that evening) and again the day of the pickup (in case I forgot the night before and can rush out before the truck gets here!). I have that messenger running all day, so I get two pop-up reminders, as well as the reminders in my regular Inbox. If I still forget, it's another two-week wait, but at least I'm not lugging the bin out to the street for the wrong week!

Repurposing bottle caps!

Some bottle caps have the triangled recycle number on their undersides, so they can (probably) be tossed in with your plastic recyclables, but you might want to save them and those without triangled numbers...at least some of them!

They can be used as "legs" to raise that one corner of the laptop or the printer that balances on the raised edge of your desk, etc. And, with minimal work, they can also be repurposed as stands. Take that orange bottle cap for a first example.

Make an inexpensive flag stand...

A small hole drilled in the center with a lightweight drill (see the bird water dish video) or maybe a corkscrew can turn the bottle cap into a stand for a small flag. If you're decorating a table or tables with flags for some special meeting or celebration and have saved a good number of caps over the past months, these make very inexpensive unobtrusive flag stands! (See photo ar right.)

...Or a card or picture stand

That larger, dark-blue cap above can be repurposed as a (perhaps temporary) photo or card display stand. Using your electric knife (see cardboard/metal coffee can recycling video) or a thin-blade saw, cut a slit across the top of the cap about 1/8" down into the sides as shown here:

You may need to stick a nail file into the slit to file the center opening a bit wider while smoothing off any rough edges. Then just take that recent photograph to want to display for a while before putting it in the photo album and slip it carefully into the slit of the bottle cap as shown here:

Or make several of these stands for displaying Christmas, birthday, or other greeting cards. — No more having them fall over or blow off the table!

If you're a true hoarder, you will have caps in various colors to match the flag or flags you're displaying!

Personalized Monopoly

Have you ever made one of those personalized Monopoly games? You design your own board, money, and draw cards and print out the various parts. I did this once, printing all but the money on stock-weight paper. I ran the stock-paper parts through a laminator, including 4"-high full-length pictures of real people. Then I took 8 plastic bottle caps the next size smaller than the orange one above, cut slits in them as in the large cap, and slipped the cut-out laminated figures into the slits, turning them into game pieces!

Coming soon!!!—

Submit your own tips, pics, and videos, and see them published here with "Contributed by" [your name here!] added to the submission!