Relative Something

Almost daily, two 6-foot lengths of polypropylene twine around a hay bale are getting cut in our barn and instantly become waste. That’s just at our place. Imagine how many get cut in the rest of the county and all the horse properties around the state. It does not feel right to me to have this end up in a landfill somewhere, or worse, forever floating in an ocean.

I checked locally for an option to recycle our accumulation of cut-up plastic twine and learned it isn’t financially feasible. The volume of twine that would need to be collected would end up costing more in handling than could be recovered if and when they could find a potentially interested party to accept it. The person I spoke with at our county encouraged me to search wider on the internet for other possibilities.

I thought I was searching for other collection options but I soon discovered a variety of ways other people were crafting uses for plastic bags and used bale twine.

To my skilled sisters, I thought you might appreciate how this person spins HDPE grocery bags into a cord that can then be knitted or crocheted into useful items:

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For bale twine, I was inspired by this video of uses that benefits horses:

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I started experimenting with braiding because the posts supporting our overhang often have horse hair caught in the splinters of the wood. Wrapping the posts with messy braids of plastic twine will be a great enhancement the horses can rub against with abandon.

It will require a LOT more braiding, but for each length of twine I can reuse, that’s one less ending up as trash.

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