How to Recycle and Reuse Toilet Paper Tubes and Paper Towel Rolls

Are you searching for ideas on what to do with your toilet paper tubes and paper towel rolls? We use quite a few rolls of toilet paper each week in our family. Try some of these environmentally friendly ways to get rid of them.

Small animals love to tunnel through and chew up paper tubes. Give them to your mice or hamsters. If you don't have a small pets, donate them to someone who does or offer them to a pet store or breeder. The animals will thank you.

If you have a worm bin or a compost heap, you can add your paper tubes as dry materials. This is excellent for us because we usually have too many wet materials in our heap.

Gardeners also love toilet paper tubes for another reason. They are excellent starter pots for seedlings. Cut them in half and each toilet paper tube makes two starter pots. Just take a seed tray and line it with the homemade pots, then fill each with a seed starting mix. Once your seeds are ready to plant out, all you have to do is set the whole pot into the ground. It is biodegradable and great for your garden and the roots can grow right out through the bottom.

Another great gardening use for your paper tubes is to make them into mulch for your plants. They will keep the soil moist and keep it form washing away in the rain. Paper is biodegradable and, perhaps best of all, it is brown, so it looks more natural.

Kids can make use of paper tubes for all kinds of things from crafts to pretend play. A paper towel roll becomes a telescope or a tunnel for die cast cars to drive through. I used to love playing with toilet paper tubes as a kid. I would draw two buttons on the side - "on" and "off." Then I would hold it up to my eye and pretend that it was a video camera. Glue two of them together and you have a pair of binoculars.

You can make party poppers and Christmas crackers from toilet paper tubes. Place a folded paper crown, a fortune written on paper, a prize or two, and a little confetti in each one. Wrap the tube in colored wrapping paper and tie the ends with ribbon. These make fun party favors or you can share them over your holiday dinner or put one in a Christmas stocking.

Paper towel tubes and toilet paper rolls are also recyclable in many areas and can be recycled either with cardboard and boxes or with paperboard.