Think fast, what can I do with these?

Think fast, I need help....
Dumpster diving, found clear plastic tubes. 18 inches long, 1.5 inch diameter, soft plastic, deflects easily, won't hold up against the sun for long. I snagged 1 bag of them, 150+ in the bag. There are at least 6 more bags. Typing this at dawn on Tuesday morning, that dumpster gets emptied Friday morning. Can we come up with a good use that makes me want to go get more of them? We have till Thursday night!

I came up with slit them, put them around the stems of plants to protect from nibblers. That's not a real good use, as they aren't going to hold up against sun for more than a couple months.

I was sword fighting with one of the neighborhood boys with them. The only kids on this street are 5 boys between 8 and 13 years old, I'm not a parent, but I suspect arming the boys with new weapons is NOT an appropriate use of them :D

Think fast! What can I do with them?
:D

They fit in my hand perfectly, and deflect easily.

Waterers?  Pushed into the ground beside a plant and filled with water so the roots can draw from it?  Thinking of when people say to do this with old pop bottles, etc, though I've never tried it...

Fill with sand? earth?  And use to edge something?

Need more coffee...

They look like florescent light covers.  We have them where I work.
Light sabors would be a great use for them.  Tape a flashlight to one end and cover the other, colored paper inside?
Roll up maps to keep them in better shape than folding.
Ebay?
Good luck with them!!

Rather than use them outside where UV would break them down and pollute the garden, they'd make good map/plan/artwork holders - rolled up and kept free of creases. Endcaps could be fashioned from a variety of things.

They could be laid flat and stacked in a pile for easy access.

Similarly, to store knitting needles, crochet hooks, paint brushes, etc.

Some type of flute, duck call, didjeradu

Stick in ground/pot next to plant and fill with water.

Cut up like crystals on a chandelier

Maybe there's a bag/box of caps in that dumpster? this would expand the possibilities...
What's the business/location of the dumpster? as a clue to their intended/former use... if there might be caps to be found.

as a component of a bird feeder, so you can see the seeds
as a component of an air to air heat exchanger
a way to keep tall boots from flopping at the ankles
fill with colored glass/seaglass to make suncatchers
knife/sawblade sheath
some kind of sorting/storage system?
for golf balls? maybe poke holes and tie a string to keep them from rolling out... a way to package and resell found golf balls?
as a roller placed over another rod/pipe/bar?
a mold for forming something round
a void creator, for leaving open channels? like in a cob wall, concrete blocks, etc..
a marble machine where you can see them roll through the tubes
homemade "habitrail" for small pet rodents.

Maybe knock on their door and ask what they used them for, and if they have caps, maybe that information could lead to an opportunity to resell them...
It could be that they just didn't have the time/space/or a person to try that avenue, and instead threw them away?
If you could make them into dollars, that would be cool. Dollars store easily...maybe even rolled up in plastic tubes. ;-)

Kenneth Elwell wrote:lead to an opportunity to resell them...

My personal favorite. If there are six more bags, that's about a thousand of these things. Maybe $50 on Craigslist, and hopefully someone out there wants them, converting found plastic garbage into cash for your homestead!

Lay a knot in one end and sell them off on ebay as budget condoms.

I'd use them for growing tree seedlings. Then I'd sell the seedlings at our local farmers market.

If cobble together a box to pack them into, in an upright position. That way the light won't get to the developing roots. I'd then full them with a potting mix, just like you would with a tray of tree pots. I'd most likely use promix bx because it's fine enough to fall down the tubes and fill them. Then I'd seed or transplant coffee or papaya, since those sell well in my area.

I might leave them full length at 18" or I might cut them in half lengths. Full length would give me a taller seedling and more flexibility in time to get them sold. Smaller/shorter pots = more perishable. Longer pots = more room the grow and thus less perishable.

I bet many forest oriented trees would grow fine. I once bought some redwood tree seedlings in tubes like those.

My apologies for forgetting to reply, I was reading responses as they came in, but had no writing time.
I ended up keeping the ones I had gotten, 150 ish, and not getting any more. I put them with my (drum-roll please!) potting stuff to use as tree starter pots! Thank you Su Ba!!

So to satisfy curiosity, the dumpster in question is at the local recycle place. The guys say they came in one morning to all this junk, and it wasn't a type of plastic they could recycle, so it hit the trash. They have no idea where it came from, and we had a good debate on it all. Besides the thousand or more tubes, there were packaging clamshells, stacked tight and hard, several thousand of them, yellowed with age, very specific about what went in them (and we have no clue what it was.) There were lids that did NOT fit the tubes, and possibly the most mystifying, thousands of plastic things, some in a box labeled "home base" that were baseball base shaped, about 1.25 inches across, the "home base" ones were blue, there were thousands of white ones too. Parts for some toy, only thing I could think of for them is they had a round dent shaped like a worry stone. Weirdness. Where all this came from, and why it was tossed to recycle in backwoods Missouri, we'll never know.

Baseball bases:


Looking at that pic, these were slightly askew, they didn't fit together nicely like the real bases would.
I didn't have time or space or energy to deal with anything but the tubes, and just stuck with what I had already dragged home.

Thank you all SO much for the ideas (condoms, ow, not THAT soft!)  (habit-trails! I love that!) I think they are a bit too soft for concrete work, I may try some though. A bit short for a good tone on a digeridoo, and wouldn't melt well to make the bell (pvc pipe works lovely for that though!) They DO make good swords, but I think I should not be arming the neighbor boys with new weapons.
Lots of good ideas, and I appreciate them!

I curtsy nicely at you all!! Thank you for playing!!
:D

A couple weeks later update: I went to the recycle place, looked in the dumpster, there was a box the size of my desk (maybe 3 foot by 5 foot by 4 foot deep?) filled with the white bases. No clue how many in that box, 20,000 minimum I'd say. The other dumpster had thousands of the clamshell packaging things. I asked the guy "Who is dumping this? Where does it come from?" He said' We have no idea, and we haven't seen them, we cant recycle any of this, and we have filled both dumpsters solid every week! We have no dumpster space for our usual trash!"
So puzzlement on all sides, and oh my, what a weird mess to see go by. Not anything I have energy to deal with. Not anything they can recycle here. Just, wow.