Rubber band re-use

Since the mid-19th century, stretchy, sometimes colorful, loops of rubber and latex bands have served many purposes in making our lives easier and keeping us organized. They hold newspapers together as they’re hurled through the air from the carrier’s hand to our porch or driveway. They keep our hair out of our eyes as we’re digging in the dirt or tinkling the ivories. They’ve kept bags of chips and loaves of bread from going stale and made many a child giddy as the key ingredient in a homemade slingshot. But no matter that we find their ingenuity undeniable and their uses innumerable, we also easily find them disposable. In the U.K., unwanted rubber bands have caused such a problem that in 2009, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign included rubber band recycling, resulting in some 13,000 bands being collected by the public and returned to the Royal Mail, which uses an estimated 342 million bands annually. The largest consumer of rubber bands in the world is the U.S. Postal Service, which annually orders millions of pounds for sorting and delivering mail piles. Other big commercial users of rubber bands include the newspaper industry, agriculture and the flower industry. More than 30 million pounds of rubber bands are sold each year in the United States. While there haven’t been any widespread reports of rubber band litter issues in the U.S. as in the U.K., it’s always smart to consider the mantra, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Here are a handful of handy ideas to help you look at rubber bands, not as disposable, but as completely indispensable. 1. Chill Your Chimes: Wind can easily tangle wind chimes, or even damage them if it gets too gusty. To keep this from happening, gather chimes together with a rubber band until the wind dies down. 2. Cut Down on Handwashers: Many hand-soap pumps (and other types of soap pumps) often dispense too much liquid. To make your soap last longer, wrap a rubber band around the space where the pump contracts into the container to save your suds. 3. Get a Grip: Wide rubber bands for celery or asparagus are great for opening lids. Wrap the rubber band around a lid that won’t budge to get a better grip. 4. Monitor Your Liquid Levels: For bottles that are hard to see through, mark the volume of liquid remaining by wrapping a rubber band around the bottle at that level. 5. Put the “Tie” in Your “Dye”: If you’re thinking of delving into a tie-dyeing project, you’ll need rubber bands. When making your design, you must tightly wrap pieces of the fabric with rubber bands, which keeps the dye from penetrating the fabric in those areas. 6. Send Them to School: Teachers will most likely be more than happy to take excess rubber bands off your hands. From keeping craft items organized to sending posters home with kids, teachers will love the resource. 7. Keep Spoons from Disappearing: Prevent your spoons from slipping into the messy abyss of pancake batter or soup pot by placing a rubber band around the point where the spoon touches the bowl’s rim. 8. Make Tacky Hangers: Frustrated with hangers in your closet that aren’t doing their job? To keep clothes from slipping to the floor instead of hanging neatly where you left them, secure rubber bands from top to bottom, at the shoulder areas of a hanger, and your clothing will stay nicely put. 9. Send Them Back: If you really don’t think you’ll use that 5-pound bag of rubber bands, consider how you got your stash in the first place. If they came with a newspaper paper or the mail, offer to donate them back for reuse. 10. Control Your Frosting: Ever try to decorate a cake but frosting ends up coming out the other end of the pastry bag? Tying the “other” end closed with a rubber band will let you focus on making your cake spectacular rather than a spectacular mess! 11. Keep Your Place: Rubber bands make great bookmarks because they won’t slip out like paper ones do. Just wrap the band around the page you ended on, and around the cover of the book, and you’re set to pick up right where you left off! 12. Hold on! If you have trouble with your pencil/pen slipping when you write, wrap a rubber band around where you like to hold for a good grip. 13. Sort it Out: To keep cord chaos to a minimum, wrap your cords with rubber bands. This will keep your storage organized and tidy up those long cords that are in use. 14. Keep Fruit Fresh: Some kids prefer apples sliced, but for cold lunches, however, apple slices can turn brown! Instead, arrange apple slices into the original shape of the fruit, and secure it with a rubber band. 15. Steady Your Cutting Board: If your cutting board isn’t staying put when you’re slicing and dicing, it can be a safety hazard. Remedy it quick by fastening a rubber band around each end of the board and it won’t be going anywhere. 16. Make a Bouncy Ball: Bouncy balls are always fun, for kids, pets (if they’re not so small, they could choke on them), even you if you need a little stress relief during the day. Make your own from your collection of rubber bands. Each time you get a new band, add it, and your ball just gets bigger and more colorful! This keeps them all where you can easily find them, provided you remember where the ball bounced off to.