Upcycling ideas

[Anastasi55]

What do you guys do with leftovers or misprints? As a child of Depression-era parents, it's hard for me to just throw stuff away... I have found that large roll ends of vinyl are quite helpful in housetraining my new puppy, and adhesive-backed scraps are fun for my son's classmates to make their own sticker art. But now, I have an entire 55" x 74" perforated window decal that printed out streaky (after a second head cleaning, it came out OK), what would you guys do with it?

 

[Pewter0000]

We use some scraps around the shop when moving signs that we want to be careful not to scrape, or when a client comes by with a trailer and needs a bit of padding under it.. sometimes we use the backs for drawing diagrams at meetings, or for laminating (instead of kraft paper)... just as a replacement for scrap paper I guess.

 

[gabagoo]

If you own a cat or dog, they work great to get the hair off beds and car seats. I sometimes plaster the entire back of my suv with offcuts, let them sit for a few hours then pull it off and the fabric looks new again

 

[Anastasi55]

If you own a cat or dog, they work great to get the hair off beds and car seats. I sometimes plaster the entire back of my suv with offcuts, let them sit for a few hours then pull it off and the fabric looks new again

Excellent idea! I'd never thought of that! I keep thinking about art, but then there's good old basic cleaning...

 

[Boudica]

We donate a lot of scrap rolls of vinyl and substrates to my kids school. They have a printer and plotter and a laser cutter - so it's great for the kids to learn with, and free to the school. It's a charter school.

 

[FireSprint.com]

This is one of the great delemmas in our industry. So much waste. You buy a 40lb roll of vinyl, even if you used 100% you still need to throw away 25lbs of liner.

Donating to schools and daycares seems to be the only consistent thing we can do.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I

This is one of the great delemmas in our industry. So much waste. You buy a 40lb roll of vinyl, even if you used 100% you still need to throw away 25lbs of liner.

Donating to schools and daycares seems to be the only consistent thing we can do.

I Just wish the manufacturers would stop printing their logos on the liner... It makes great art paper for Schools when they are blank.

 

[Pauly]

I

I Just wish the manufacturers would stop printing their logos on the liner... It makes great art paper for Schools when they are blank.

A sticker inside a core is good enough to tell you what brand it is etc.

 

[Anastasi55]

Our big Canon printer's toner tubes come packed with a little cardboard tray. I used a couple to hold grommets, and a couple others for business cards and desk ephemera. The rest went to my son's daycare and they did crafts with them... the same for the piece of cardboard that's packed with plastic binder covers.

The one thing that keeps me from donating the adhesive-backed sticker media is that it's not water-soluble, and preschoolers really can't use any permanent media...

 

[FireSprint.com]

A sticker inside a core is good enough to tell you what brand it is etc.

Totally agree, what stinks in when they don't do this! Label the cores! (Labeling skids/pallets of material would be nice too...but that's not usually as hard to figure out)

 

[AMGearhart]

We also donate to schools. There is a central donation point in town that all schools/teachers can pull from. If I have time, I'll cut out 1" letters and numbers and various shapes, so that they can label stuff if they wish or teach the alphabet. I also try to reduce it to a size that fits in the designated donation box. Paper backer is also donated in rolls. The waxy backing is great for covering our paint tables at work. And sometimes I take reflective scraps to a local bicycle shop. They give it out to parents with kids learning to ride. Just a little extra visibility.

 

[MikePatterson]

We keep misprints for training our new hire people. Everything else goes in the dumpster. We do give rolls of liner to some fab shops for layout paper but they can't use everything we generate. Our schools started turning us down too after a while because they don't need any more.
We are looking at a small compactor to handle the non rolled liner paper. It fills the dumpster to quickly not being packed.