6 Cool Ways to Use Recycled Materials in Your Outdoor Landscape

You do not need to be a frantic environmental activist to enjoy green living, nor need to spend long hours in ecology readings to start shifting to green living seamless. You probably have not realized it already, but if you have ever saved an item from going to the trashcan, congratulations! You have started your way to live a more sustainable life that is ecofriendly.

Dictionary defines sustainability as the property of being sustainable; this is the ability to maintain an ecological balance of natural resources that surround us to avoid its depletion. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has encouraged the practice of three simple principles that all of us can easily introduce in our lives:

Reduce Reuse Recycle

By reducing, reusing and recycling you will not only contribute with environment preservation, but you will find cool ways to use recycled materials in your outdoor landscape, helping to reduce this way the need for incineration and landfilling that local governments perform to get rid of junk. When you recycle, you are turning that junk into useful items, which are practically free or require a very little investment to convert them into outstanding decorations that would be costly otherwise, if you would have to buy similar outdoor items at a decor center.

Idea No. 1 – Take a Tour around Your Kitchen

Your kitchen is a great place to find items that you can recycle. A cup or jar with a broken handle make nice pots for your outdoor plants, but are not the only items that can be turned into decorative pots, but also cooking ware. Making use of your creativity, you can mix and match kitchen items to make ornamental landscaping set for every day, or to embellish your garden for special occasions.

Idea No. 2 – Develop a New Approach to Junk

Taking a look into your garbage sounds like a very nasty idea, but you cannot imagine all the rewards that you can find inside. Coffee cans that you throw away make not only great containers for pencils and pens, but you can use them in your outdoor landscape. Gather as many cans as you can, wash them and fill them with pebbles of different colors, shapes and sizes. Arrange them in a visible area of your garden to simulate a cascade or an intricate road that will save you loads of money in getting a similar effect designed by an architect. For a best landscaping effect, make sure to get your cans surrounded by grass and if you can terrace them, they will look awesome when rain falls.

Idea No. 3 – Dress Up Your Outdoor Landscape

Do not get rid of your used clothes. You can give them away, but you can also turn them into decorative items, including hammocks for your garden. Hammocks are made with a macramé technique consisting of waving and knotting cords, but you can sew two or more clothing items together to get the fabric needed to bundle ropes in and hang it. You can find online further instructions on how to make your own hammock with a piece of fabric. An original way to recycle your clothes while giving your landscape a tropical ambience.

Idea No. 4 – Give Plastic Bags a Brand New Life

Talking about macramé techniques, why not start knitting outdoor decors using plastic bags? You can twist these bags to make them a sort of cord that can be knitted to make pot hangers. For a truly cool look, use bags of different colors.

Idea No. 5 – Flying Milky Way

Milk containers can be turned into birdhouses and bird feeders with very little effort. Let ideas on their shape and finishing flow into your mind.

Idea No. 6 – Devote Time to Online Research

The Internet is a useful resource to find almost anything. Therefore, if you want to continue discovering more ideas about the ways to use recycled materials in your outdoor landscape, spend some time doing an online search for them and let your own creativity contribute with derived ideas, or new ones coming to your mind.

Author Bio: Izzy Mackey works for Roof.net a roofing company located in the Fairfax area of Virginia.