Wired's How-To Wiki guides newcomers gently into the soft terrain of composting, a great way to recycle biodegradable goods and create some of the best growing soil around. You can get started with something as simple and low-cost as a trash bag, the authors note:

Just fill it up with a good mixture of browns (paper and plant pieces) and greens (kitchen scraps), soak it down, punch a few air holes and wait three months. Viola! Compost.

The wiki has more detailed advice for those who want to keep a tidier pile, or learn more about what makes for great material—one easy-to-find example, as previously posted, is non-glossy, low-colour junk mail. Are you composting? What's your setup? Let us know in the comments. Photo by normanack.

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We asked earlier this week what disposable items you had found creative re-uses for, and the answers are in. Not surprisingly, some of you have some pretty crafty uses for household goods that usually end up at the curb. From CD-R spindles to corks, twist-ties to tissue boxes, lots of supposedly one-use items can save you money, free up space, and be seriously handy when the need arises. After the jump, a roundup of our readers' waste-reducing reuses. Yogurt photo by Dan4th, all others by How can I recycle this.

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Walk by most office's shared network printer and chances are you'll see a stack of discarded extra pages the person who printed them didn't need after all, or print jobs that were so "important" they were abandoned. PC World suggests three easy ways to reduce the amount of "Whoops! Didn't need to print that!" moments, like making liberal use of Print Preview (and selecting only the range of pages you need) and printing documents to PDF instead of paper. We like the free doPDF Windows utility for saving paper and printing documents to a searchable file instead of filling up printer trays.

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Green publication E magazine says you can recycle more stuff than you might think, and offers a reference on the right places to recycle everything from iPods to record albums to styrofoam to batteries to cars. If you've got old office supplies and miscellaneous materials, you may be able to recycle that, too:

Many states have "material exchanges" where odd stuff is collected and made available to the public for use. Outdated calendars, office paper that is used on one side, wallpaper, flooring samples, crayons and other stuff is gladly accepted by Materials Exchange Centre for Community Arts in Eugene, Oregon. [...] To see if there's a materials exchange near you, search Google.com for "materials exchange" or call your local hazardous waste department.

Looks like a useful bookmark to check out before you order up the dumpster.Photo by diongillard.

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Save some system resources and share multiple printers between more than one machine by recycling that old "junk" system sitting in your garage into a dedicated print server. eHow has a step by step tutorial that takes you through exactly what you need to do to accomplish this; the process is a bit lengthy, but well worth it if you share printer resources. FYI, this also frees up counter space since your printer can be wherever you want it with this setup—and it will work even more efficiently if you network your printers.