Making Cedar Chip Pouches by Reusing Spent Dryer Sheets
Are you one of those people who use commercial dryer sheets to help your clothes feel soft, smell nice and so they don’t cling?
If so, how often have you stated to get dressed only to be greeted by the abrasive patch of porous material left over from the last drying cycle?
It’s a simple fact that many people use commercial dryer sheets several times during any given week as they complete their laundry chores. Each time they complete a load, another swatch of crinkly scrap is produced.
Ever since they were first introduced over twenty years ago, people have been either chucking the spent sheets into the trash can to head off to the local landfill. After realizing that many of the commercial brand’s sheets are not readily biodegradable people started to find new, innovative ways to reuse them.
Reuse ideas range from dusting your TV screen; wiping up spills of powdery substances (like flour or body powders); stuffing them in sneakers or hampers to help control odor; use to remove pet hair from clothing; clean the chrome on your cars; and the list goes on and on …
Well here’s another tip for reusing those scratchy little swatches that is spun from an earlier post on home-brewed pest control tips.
Reusing Spent Dryer Sheets to Make Cedar-Chip Pouches
If you are anything like our family, closet and dresser drawer space is often at a premium. So each Spring and Fall we pack away one set of seasonal clothing and break out the next seasonal wardrobe.
A few decades ago, we typically added moth balls to the clothes being packed away reducing problems with moths and other pests. That was until we learned of the potential health effects from the chemicals in moth balls (naphthalene and dichlorobenzene), especially on our kids and pets.
From that point on we started using cedar blocks or cloth bags filled with cedar chips. As it became more difficult to find small cloth bags, we looked around for an alternative and came up with the idea to take a handful of chips, place them between two spent dryer sheets then sew the seams together. You can also easily change the shape of the pouch (square, rectangle, circle, oval) for any specific need by leaving a little extra room around the edges and trimming accordingly.
Since the sheets are extremely porous, the cedar gets to do its job and help keep more waste out of the landfills.
And we even keep the pouches out of the landfill by recycling them at a local facility as part of an alternative energy project ….
