We just moved and we love our new house. I was breaking down all the boxes and taking out all of the trash when I noticed a bird had already started making it’s nest on top of one of the columns on my front porch.  I stood there and looked at the small bird dragging sticks, pieces of cardboard, and other things that we generally consider trash to build it’s home.

I looked at the pile of stuff that I had just carried out to the curb and it made me feel sick that we waste so much.  Since we have been in our new home we have bought a bunch of stuff and all of it comes in some sort of packaging that has to be thrown out.  While we recycle most of the glass, plastic, and cardboard  there are still a lot of companies using Styrofoam to package things.  Styrofoam can’t be recycled to my knowledge so it just goes straight to the dump to sit there and never biodegrade or break down.

I was looking around the attic on a project a few days later. I found that instead of the usual roll out “Pink Panther” style insulation  my home has about 1′ of loose fiberglass insulation that was blown on top of all the studs.   I started thinking about what I could do with the clean Styrofoam that came as packing in many of the items we had been buying and I had a stroke of genius.

I remembered as a kid setting out 2 buckets of ice on a hot day, one in a Styrofoam bucket with a lid and the other in a regular metal pail with a lid on it.  I came back a few hours later and checked on them and the metal bucket was now mostly water but the Styrofoam bucket of ice looked basically the same as it had when I left it!

I looked in the attic again and it was just a cloud of loose insulation.  I started to think it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to just start throwing the clean packing Styrofoam up in the attic as extra insulation.  Now instead of throwing clean Styrofoam to the curb to go into a landfill I throw it into my attic to cut down my heating and cooling bills. Also as an added bonus if  I ever need the packing materials now I don’t have to go buy them I just look in the attic for something that will do.

Is this Green Genius? Have you thought of a way to reuse something that can’t be traditionally recycled?  Post your thoughts and comments below!