Dog Bean Bag From Recycled Materials

I wanted to try my hand at making a bean bag for the dogs and had an idea of how to make beans from recycled polystyrene.

• Polystyrene packing material
• Coffee Sacks
• String
• Wool, various colours
• Sacking needles
• Leaf Vaccum

You can easily get polystyrene packaging for free, most appliance stores have to pay to dump it and are happy to give you as much as you need.

The first step is to quickly break up the larger pieces of polystyrene into pieces small enough not to get stuck in the leaf vacuum. This only takes a few minutes to break the polystyrene up and fill up a few cardboard boxes.

Now for the magic! Leaf vacuums act as small chipping machines to grind up the leaves before blowing them into the bag and will grind up polystyrene just as well.

The trick is not to rush it and not suck up too much at once, this doesn't take long to fill up the coffee sack with your homemade polystyrene beans. The pieces come out pretty good, but if you wanted to you could run it through the vacuum a second time but I didn't bother.

You can probably just use a single sack, but since my dogs like to dig around in their beds a bit I wanted to double-bag everything rather than have the beans go everywhere.

While you can probably use any large needle I managed to find some decent old sacking needles which make sewing up the sacks much easier.

You just need to sew up the first sack at this stage to stop the polystyrene beans from getting out.

While this is optional it does make things look much nicer. It's fun to sew in the dog's name on the sack or even some basic pictures.

Now place the inner sack inside the outer decorated sack and sew it closed, you now have a really cool Bean Bag for your dog made from recycled materials.