Waste plastic is polluting the world we live in. There is an island of plastic floating in the pacific that has reputedly grown to an area larger than the continental U.S. and weighing in at 100 million tons.
This vast floating mass of toxic waste was predicted as early as 1985 and yet nothing was done to prevent the catastrophe we witness today. Society in general either didn’t want to know, or didn’t want to face the inconvenience of what preventing it might mean in their daily lives.
What can we do to save the planet from this choking plague of polution?
Obviously, riding our lives of plastic would be the ideal solution. However, as this is something we cannot accomplish in one step, there are baby steps that everyone take today to make a difference.
Firstly, use your shopping dollar to send a message to greedy corporates that we don’t want excessive plastic packaging, or plastic junk churned out by the boat load for kids, kitchens, and the person who has everything (else).
Secondly, we look at ways of recycling plastic already in production so that it doesn’t end up in our oceans and piled up in landfills. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Recycling Plastic Bottles Ideas
Idea number one to use plastic bottles in a creative way to enhance your garden. Use plastic bottles to create vertical or hanging gardens.
In this video thepocketpcman describes how you can build a vertical garden out of recycled plastic drink bottles. The network of bottles includes an automatic watering system.
This is a relatively simple project for the home handyman to begin reducing plastic waste.
The next idea is a slightly larger project, but well within the reaches of a home handyman (or woman). It is a plastic bottle greenhouse.
Once again using plastic drinking bottles the people of bluerockstation have constructed a working greenhouse. The interlocking plastic bottles provide good insulation with the pocket of air trapped within the bottles. The insulated environment created helps with greatly extending the growing season in your garden.
The next great idea to reduce the plastic waste in our environment and provide low cost shelter and housing at the same time is to use plastic bottles as a building material. As in this video uploaded by Eco Techonologia, there are many creative ways of using plastic bottles when building structures. They provide great low cost insulation in walls and are an abundant source of building materials even in areas where other building materials are hard to come by.
Although this kind of project may be beyond the average handyman, there many smaller scale projects that could be accomplished with this idea – such as animal shelters, fencing or pond surrounds, and even perhaps a garden gazebo or two.
Finally we have an idea to recycle another form of drink container. The metal soft drink cans, while not as environmentally hazardous, can still be utilized in a productive and low cost way to enhance your living environment. Jim Meaney has come up with an automatic home heating solution that can save you 20% to 30% on your current standard heating solutions.
By creating a solar heated wind tunnel out of soda cans Jim says he can create an environment in your house that will not trip the heating thermostat costing you large power bills. These systems would no doubt work well in greenhouses for all year round controlled growing temperatures.
These are just a few ideas to stimulate your imagination as to how you can start recycling plastic and other waste materials to help save the planet, and help save yourself some money in the process. Environmental improvements need not be an extra expense, they can be a win-win situation. And in fact they must be a win-win situation if we are to see any appreciable difference in the way people live their lives. So put your thinking caps on and see what creative solutions you can come up with around your home.
