Don't Throw Away... Used Chapstick Tubes

This is probably a the most cheapskate thing I have ever done.  It was kind of fun, though.

I have been saving my used chapstick containers for a couple of years because The Magician has been talking about making our own chapstick for a while.  I gathered together all of my chapstick, and just counting Burt's Bees, I had 37 empty tubes.  (You can see why he is interested in making our own since one tube costs $2.99.)  I had discovered, however, in the mad hunt through the house for chapstick, that I had lots of non-Burt's bees tubes of chapstick that could still be used.  So I thought we should go ahead and put off making our own big batch, especially since the supplies were going to come out to about $50.  (This seemed like a lot to me, until my beloved pointed out that those 37 tubes of chapstick had cost $110.63.)

 

So anyway, we decided to melt the chapstick that remained in the tubes and see if we could replenish any of the empty tubes.

First, we removed the labels.

Then we cleaned the chapstick out of all other used tubes using those little picks intended for removing meat from nuts.  (We microwaved them at first to melt them a bit, but it didn't make much difference so we skipped that step.)

 

This is how much you get from 37 used-up chapstick tubes.

We boiled the tubes to sterilize them, even though I was the only one who had used them.

We melted the blob of chapstick wax on the stove in a frying pan that we didn't need any more.

Then we carefully poured it into some of the tubes.  It helped that the frying pan we used had a little pouring spout on it.

After it cooled: 2 1/2 tubes of chapstick.  Mostly just because melting things is always cool!

Update: Our re-melted tubes are not quite as ... cohesive as the originals.  But 2 minutes in the microwave persuaded it to hold it together more.