Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Prescription Bottles

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Prescription Bottles

There's no better way to save money than to find creative ways to reuse the things we already have. So often we don't even think about the stuff we're throwing away. Even if you're a vigilant recycler, once something leaves your hands, it's going to cost money to do something with it. But if you can find a way to put it to good use, well, that's killing two birds with one stone.

I bet if you gathered up all the prescription bottles you and your family (extended) used in a year, you would come up with a basketful. We just throw those little suckers out without much thought to how we could reuse them. Since most drugstores won't take 'em back – they don't have a system for sanitizing them adequately, or collecting them for that matter (which they should) – you can get creative yourself.

My friend, Kath, is an avid gardener and she always keeps one or two of these in her handbag for when she goes walking – in the park, in friends' gardens – to collect seeds for future garden projects. First she makes sure she's washed off the labels and cleaned out the insides. Then she applies a new label so she can make a note of what she's collected. It got me thinking about what else you can use an old prescription bottle for.

You could glue different sized bottles together to store change in the car. Or you could use them to store things like paperclips, safety pins, and rubber bands. If your kids play board games and the pieces are always getting lost, you can use these bottles to wrangle them all into one place. Whenever the kids and I travel, we always take a cribbage board and this would be a good place to stash those little pieces.

Maybe your local vet would like the bottles to use for dispensing animal meds.

If you're really creative you can turn those bottles into crafts – or use them to hold craft supplies like glitter, buttons, and all the other stuff crafties love. Just glue a sample of what's in the bottle on the lid.

Here's an idea I once saw in a magazine: For Valentine's Day, fill up a bottle or six with chocolate kisses and re-label the bottle: "Rx for a Happy Valentine's Day." Cute, eh? Hey, be careful about putting candy in a prescription bottle for kids. You don't want them getting the wrong message.

A well-washed prescription bottle is the perfect size for that salad dressing you pack to go with the salad you make for lunch at work.

You could build a mini sewing kit. Thread a couple of needles with different coloured threads (white, black, red, green), wrap the threads around the needles and pop into the bottle. Add a couple of safety pins, a button or two and you've got a portable sewing kit. Ditto for an emergency medical kit: a band-aid, cotton ball, Q-tip, and a packaged alcohol wipe will fit into one of those fatter bottles.

See if there's local company like this one in Vancouver that will work with pharmacies to recycle plastics including prescription bottles. Then suggest to your pharmacist that (s)he start a recycling program for these bottles.

Okay, now it's your turn. What do you reuse that other people just throw away? Give us your best ideas for ways to put things to work a second time.