Naptime DIY-What to do with old cans of paint

I needed a little polyurethane for a project.  Any good DIY-er buys in bulk, so I didn’t have a quart of poly, I had a gallon; even though I only needed a little bit when I purchased it originally.  When picking up my gallon of polyurethane I noticed it was heavier and less fluid than when I last used it.  This was not a good sign.

I jammed a screwdriver under the lid and had to do so all the way around the lid.  It’s not that I had sealed it that tight; the liquid had somehow sealed the lid to the can.  Once I pried the lid off I saw a solid sheet of ember.  The bucket felt very solid, but just to be sure I pushed down on the top of the solid sheet of poly.  Enough liquid came out from the edges that allowed me to do my very small project.

That little amount of liquid made me wonder just how much poly was still in the gallon?  I drove the screwdriver into the ember and it was only about .25 inches solid, the rest was still liquid.  I knew that home improvement stores sold empty gallon containers and could easily transfer the remainder of the poly.

I immediately thought

After realizing that all of the liquid wasn’t dried out I wondered how many gallons of paint I had prematurely thrown away.  I went through the paint containers in the garage and none of them were hard to the kick.  I know that many years ago I had incorrectly diagnosed the entire can as being dried up, when in fact; only the top of the paint had solidified.

What to do with old cans of paint?

In a perfect world we’d use all of the paint and only have empty gallon cans.  However, even if we did that the issue of where to safely dispose of the cans would rear its ugly head.

One option is Earth 911.  Simply type in your location and it’ll bring up the closest place for you to recycle paint cans near you.  That’s an option if your cans are empty or still have product in them.

If the cans still have paint in them you can try FreeCycle or Craigslist, just in case anybody needs paint.

In our area Boy Scout troops hold paint recycling drives once or twice a year.  It’s worth contacting them just to see if they’re doing that in near future.