How do you re-use banana skins?

Here’s a very useful and innovative site that teaches people how to recycle everything from corn on the cob to swimming caps. Good to know as we tend to covet and then throw away a lot of unapparent treasures that can be re-used in some other shape or form. Share with us interesting items that you’ve recycled.

green team

About www.Recyclethis.co.uk

This site started from a bowl of pistachio nut shells.

After we gorged ourselves on their lovely innards, they, the shells, just sat there, looking useful and versatile – but we no idea what we could possibly do with them. Just throwing them on the compost heap seemed a waste – all the effort to make them tough and solid, and here we were just hoping they’d rot back down to mulch before the potatoes needed earthing up.

When we thought about it, we were in the same position with lots of things: leftover bits of food, old household items, empty containers of all shapes and sizes…

And so this site was born.

How can I reuse or recycle banana skins?

We’ve covered very, very brown bananas before but I was reading a Mrs Beeton-style book on home management from the 1930s the other day (as you do), and I saw a reference to using banana skins to clean brown leather shoes.

According to the hefty tome (which also includes chapters on engaging servants, etiquette for women and fortune-telling – all essential to the 1930s homemaker), rubbing the inside of a banana skin on brown leather shoes helps feed the leather. A bit of Googling seems to corroborate this and adds that the same idea can also be applied to silverware.

Find out more recycling ideas here.