Creative Recycling

Recently I have been looking around on the internet at personal finance blogs because I, like every other American, want to pay down my debt until it's gone and improve my credit score. I find that these personal finance blogs are really useful in giving advice that I can actually apply to my life, and that I might want to use it because it has obviously worked for other people in the past.

So, on one of the personal finance blogs I found a highlighting of an Australian site that encourages people to stop and pay attention to what they are throwing away and make something from it instead. Check it out here. Anyway, if you look a ways down the page you'll see a "bean" bag that is in fact filled with old plastic shopping bags.

Now, I have a ton of plastic bags hanging around my house. I hate throwing them away because I use them to line trash cans and carry stuff from my house to my parent's house when I need to. But I also have two dogs who would like to have new beds. So I think that I am going to make them dog beds that will be stuffed with old plastic bags. In fact, I made a return to a store yesterday and when she asked if I wanted her to throw away the plastic bags the shoes that come in, I told her no and that I was going to recycle them. I felt SO green and eco-friendly, which doesn't happen very often.

I want to be sure that who ever reads this doesn't think that this is something that every dog in the world needs to have. I know that it would be ok to give these plastic stuffed beds because they don't shred their bedding. If you have a dog that you might like to make a bed like this for ... please consider their chewing habits before doing anything. If your dog likes to chew or has a habit of destroying their bedding, this is a BAD idea for your dog. Ingesting the plastic could cause all kinds of problems and could possibly kill your pet if a piece of the plastic manages to cover their windpipe.