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Paper

Burn it, pulp it, compost it, origami it. Easy DIY transformational material.

Paper and cardboard mixed with grass cuttings in the compost heap.

Card - homemade paper, shell, ear plugs, wire, and ink pen drawing. (By me).

 Chocolate paper origami eagle by Jazzy Cousins.

Wallpaper paste it.

Wood

Woodstoves offer excellent exercise possibilities - chopping, stacking etc. Are cheaper than gas, oil, or electric, and you're paying your cash to a near neighbour rather than a global energy corporation. If you've space for log heaps there's no downside here.

Green Waste

I forgot to even put this one on for a year, compost heaps are so easy, you can work out a system for even a tiny garden. Composting gets rid of a large part of your waste, takes nominal effort, helps your garden grow, turns waste into fertility. It's obvious, not to compost if you have a garden is madness, literally, a mark of some sort/degree of insanity.

Satelite Dishes

Satelite dishes are the bizzyness (when not used for communicating with rocket launched satelites obviously). This one could boil a litre of water in 10 minutes if the sun was shining when I re-used it as a parabolic solar cooker. Unfortunately that's infrequent here in the UK so it got re-re-functioned as a pond. Low eco gain option, but very pleasant.

Tin Can Sculpture.

Metal's kind of fun to mess around with, especially for kids, all that's required is a soldering iron and tin snips, though a braising kit opens up all sorts of opportunities. Bob Rowberry's the bees knees at this -

http://www.hardcorecarvers.co.uk/bobrowberry/bob.html

Dalek by Laurie Cousins. Tin can, bottle top and solder.

Knight - braising, copper, money, nails etc, by Jazzy Cousins.

Glass Jars

The problem with jam making is that what ever quantity you make, it takes the best part of a day, to gather, prepare, cook and clean up, and then you've got too much jelly/jam for personal consumption and run into distribution issues/cupboards full of the stuff. But if you make a jelly, 2/3 of which you remove from the heat at before it reaches it's setting temperature, you can then use this as a kind of cordial (ribena substitute), or add it to yogurt and cream at a later date to make ice cream. You quickly get through 200 gram coffee jars of the stuff if you've a couple of kids and begin to make economic and cupboard sense of this pleasant activity. My recommended jelly of 2010 is apple and mixed hedge fruits, making child pleasing toast spreadable jelly, cordial and ice cream.

Plastic milk bottles.

These versatile shapes have obvious re-use value for mural painters as paint pots (especially those who work in schools), but can also be re-fashioned for a wide variety of purposes.

The pipe did take a lot of time, and only gets the water half way to where I really want it, I think I'll have to use discarded gutters to get it the rest of the way. This one is definitly more effort than it's worth, but it has taken on a symbolic meaning for me, plumbing is one of the main benchmarks of civilisation, I'm getting water from my drains to the veg patch using rubbish.

Scrap food - chickens

Chickens'll scoff most of what you'll turn your nose up at, make eggs, and are a total laugh. This is Reaper, she roams free in the garden during the day and sleeps in the garage at night, though she'd prefer to move in with us. Bit fussy as chickens go, she dislikes mackeral skin.

Scrap food - Bio Gas

I was so inspired by this website for Arti Biogas Plant for processing food scraps, I designed and built my own biogas plant.

http://www.arti-india.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=52

Plastic bin, ply wood lid, gaffa tape, shower pipe,

 rubbish sack, and carpet insulation layer. 

Only trouble is I didn't read the small print, biogas activity only happens over 15 degree C. My garage isn't that hot so all I got was preserved food scraps sourced from the pub. Despite my best debating skills my family wouldn't let me install it in our bedrooms so it went onto the compost heap. But I love the idea, if this country was hot enough I'd apply for a part time job as school cook just so I could build a biogas plant and cook from it. So all of you tropic dwellers check out this site.

Humanure

In 'The Humanure Handbook' Joseph Jenkins describes his compost toiletry and scrap food system. To comply with UK Health and Safety legislation you would have to do shed loads of paperwork to follow this system, so you're not going to find any Brits confessing to crapping in their compost heap.

But I have spent some time imagining doing it, it costs next to nothing, is odour free, reduces water bills, creates compost, and in my imagination I combined it with cleaning out the chickens, a well earthy experience. Seems rationally near perfect as far as I can make out - big eco gain, bill reducer, reasonable time consumer - but it is culturally and legally challenging in the UK.

http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html

My work waste: plywood off cuts from sheep, wild boar and rhino.

I ended up with a lot of plywood off cuts, and eventually I came up with the idea and got around to turning them into a range of shelves.

Painted in white Green Paint gloss, or Danish Polish.

A mildly satisfying engineering challenge, and I quite like them, but dead hard to find homes for.

Click on image to see more.