Recycled Plastic Bottles

The United States uses 129.6 Million plastic bottles per day which is 47.3 Billion plastic bottles per year. About 80% of those plastic bottles end up in a landfill!

I love this story that I spotted on themindunleashed.org. Here is an amazing way of using up the plastic bottles and creating homes! 

By filling plastic bottles with sand, and molding them together with mud or cement, walls can be created, and a home can be built that is fire proof, and will maintain an comfortable indoor temperature of 64 degrees in the summer time.

To build a two bedroom, 1200 square foot home, it takes about 14,000 bottles.

We throw away enough plastic bottles to build 9257 2 bedroom houses per day! That’s just over 3.35 million homes, the same number of homeless people in America!

Please watch this inspiring video for an amazing solution to the millions of plastic bottles that fills landfills.

 

BAN ON PLASTIC BAGS

San Francisco is debating whether to extend the ban to cancel plastic bags to include all retailers, including bookshops, clothes shops and department stores, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The California Legislature currently is debating a statewide barring of disposable plastic bags and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed his support of the bill.

Current San Francisco law requires large supermarkets, such as Safeway, and chemist chains, such as Walgreens, to give customers only three types of bags at checkout: compostable plastic bags, recyclable paper bags and reusable bags. Single-use disposable bags are banned completely.

THINK BEFORE YOU THROW

A typical family consumes 26 gallons of bottled water, 182 gallons of canned drinks, 104 gallons of milk a year!

We can recycle these items (as we should), but if we think about it we could also make things out of them.

Before you throw away just think!

Have a look here at these people that have put these containers to good creative use.

I also am a HUGE fan of Elbow Grease Designs (two images above). Everything on her site has been designed and; hand sewn in the San Francisco Bay Area from discarded vinyl signs and banners. Originally printed for local trade shows, conventions, municipal or private advertising, these ENORMOUS banners would otherwise end up in the landfill. Jenny Say's "It is our goal to make beautiful and practical items out of what has been discarded".

Harriete Estel Berman Makes wonderful teacups, pots, jewellery, sculptues all out used food packaging. The cups above were constructed from recycled tin cans.

I love the look of this Fishing tackle by Tedd McDonanah. I actually think they would also make great keyrings!

I even love the above artwork created by Children out of food packaging.

ROBERT BRADFORD

Remarkable recycled art from Robert Bradford

Discarded plastic toys makes a great basis for an arresting sculpture: it's tough, comes in every colour of the rainbow and scores highest in recycling points as it would otherwise take so long to biodegrade.