The most ambitious step when it comes to egg packaging is to skip it altogether. However unless you have your own chickens and can thus ‘grow’ organic eggs or have an excellent farmer’s market that sells bulk eggs (which you can place in a basket to purchase) you will have to deal with packaging. That said, your first step should be to buy organic eggs that come in easy to recycle packaging. Avoid those icky old Styrofoam egg cartons at all costs.

After making sure you get eggs in recyclable packaging you can still reuse the cartons a few times before you recycle. Here are 16 ways to reuse your egg cartons.

1. Seed starters.
2. Concrete slabs for the garden.
3. Paint trays – these are excellent for this because kids get lots of space to mix different paint colors up.
4. Totally AMAZING fairy lights – swoon!
5. Organize any old small item. Nails, earring, marbles, tacks, and so on. This list goes on and on.
6. Compost them.
7. Use a tool to get little kids to eat. If I were you, I’d make sure the cartons are spotless though, because leftover egg bacteria makes me a little nervous.
8. Make some adorable tulips or cute little bugs for the upcoming spring.
9. Create a recycled bulletin board.
10. Egg carton made stools – ok, this is a cheat because you’re not likely to make them, still it’s pretty cool.
11. A super fun egg carton camera.
12. I’ve heard around (more than once) that you can use egg cartons as wall insulation – say if you have noisy neighbors or a basement rock band. However, I’ve never tried this myself, and heard from a pal that they can cut echoes but not necessarily loud sounds so please test run this first if you’re going to make a lot of noise drumming or what have you.
13. Make an insanely cool outdoor table that eats itself. No joke.
14. Make a Mancala egg carton game – my son loves Mancala!
15. I also recently saw a pretty slick journal made with reclaimed egg cartons. You could probably make one yourself.
16. Dollhouse furniture – in this craft project the blogger used styrofoam cartons, but I think your furniture would look great made with cardboard cartons too.

I bet you can think of a lot of other projects too. Such as…?