Re-Using Packing Peanuts

Use those peanuts for your plants

If you were lucky, you received gifts that were sufficiently "high-end" to be packed with packing peanuts.  Before you take those packing peanuts out with the trash, consider how useful they may be as filler in your container gardens.

Huh?, you ask.  That's right--packing peanuts are light and airy enough to offr great drainage at the bottom of a container garden, such as the raised beds I show you how to construct elsewhere.  Why pay money for a product such as perlite to accomplish the same result you can get for free?  You could use crushed stone at the bottom of your pots; however, not only will you have to pay for it, but it's weight will make the container much heavier to move around.

Thus, this is one example of recycling information tht will help you save money, as well as "saving the planet".

If you have a “black thumb” and don’t garden, those packing peanuts can be turned in to any nearby UPS store.  They will reuse them.  Hopefully the next recipient will also be environmentally conscious and reuse or recycle them again.

Submitted by Jennifer Jones, World Bird Sanctuary Volunteer