When using a bottled water cooler or small bottles of water you’ll end up with a number of empty water bottles. The best and most ecological thing to do is to allow Eden to collect them, and they can then be cleaned and reused up to 50 times. However when they come to the end of their life cycle there are lots of innovative ways to reuse water bottles, aside from standard recycling. Here are a few examples:

1. Build a house

Building a house with plastic water bottles is not as crazy as you might think. In fact, it’s been done before by a German man called Andreas Froese who has a company in Honduras called Eco-Tec. Plastic bottles are useful for building because they are not expensive, they’re not brittle, they make good shock absorbers and they can be reused. All you have to do is fill them with mud and you have the perfect brick replacement. Check out the Eco-Tec site to see pictures of houses built using plastic bottles.

2. Make insulation

This is related to the first use and is an inspirational example of how to solve two problems at once. Volunteer Laura Kutner was working in Guatemala when she realised that the bottles she was drinking from with the same size as the frames for the walls in the school where she worked. She started a project to fill the bottles with the trash that was littering the town and then encase them in chicken wire and cement them to make insulated walls. The project brought the community together and is now ready for duplication in other parts of the world.

3. Create your own island

Many of us dream of having our own private island but how many of us know exactly how to get one without spending a fortune? Richard Sowa created his own private island off Cancun by using empty plastic bottles in nets piled with bamboo, plywood and sand. The island included beaches, a house, a solar oven and the composting toilet. When that island was destroyed by hurricane in 2005, Richard Sowa set about building another one. The new Spiral Island includes a couple of ponds, a solar panel and a solar powered waterfall. Many others are now building their own islands from plastic bottles and other materials

4. Make art and craft

For some reason plastic water bottles are great for artistic endeavours. Whether you choose to cut them up to make vases and plant pots, use the ends of PET bottles to makes pseudo flowers or do larger exhibitions and installations, reusing plastic bottles is a wonderful way to make an eco-artistic statement.

image courtesy of www.dailygood.org