Do you have a big bucket (or several big buckets, or even garbage bags) of sawdust from your woodworking projects and you have no idea what to do with it? Try out one of the many uses below!

First-rate firestarters
Pack sawdust into paper muffin cups, above, or a cardboard egg carton. Melt paraffin wax or old candles in a double boiler, pour over the sawdust and allow to cool. Slow-burning when lit, these hotcakes make great starters for a fireplace or campfire.
Cold-weather mastery
For traction, sprinkle sawdust on icy walks and driveways. Darker shavings absorb sunlight to speed melting.
Mulch
On established garden plants, sawdust suppresses weeds. It robs nitrogen from the soil as it breaks down, stealing sustenance from shallow-rooted weeds. Particularly toxic to plants, walnut sawdust should be avoided as a mulch, but as a weed and grass killer, it shines.
Compost
Mix a ratio of three green (lawn clippings, kitchen scraps, etc.) to one dry (sawdust, dried leaves, etc.) in your composter for garden-enriching compost.
Meat smoker
Pile slow-smoldering sawdust among your smoker's chips to ramp up the smoke output. Hint: Use apple, pear, and cherry-wood sawdust for fish and poultry; hickory, maple, and oak for beef and pork.

As it turns out, sawdust has some pretty remarkable uses in and around the home. Perhaps you already knew the trick about the firestarter, being on a survival website and all, but did you know you could mix sawdust into your compost to make it more effective? Or that you could sprinkle it on your walkways to remove ice in the winter? Your car will thank you to stop using salt.

There are far more sawdust tricks than this out there; if you want to learn them all, check out the original article at Wood Magazine.