Ecobrick Bottle-to-Bottle funnel adaptor

thingiverse

TL:DR - I made an adaptor to enable you to use the cut-off top of a 5 litre bottle as a funnel to connect to another 5 litre bottle. The print requires some support, unfortunately, although later refinements might be able to reduce this. I also printed with a brim, to aid adhesion to the bed (no heating required for this). The context, if you're still reading. I was recently inspired when I discovered the Ecobrick movement (https://www.ecobricks.org/), which encourages directly reusing plastic wrappings and packets by using them to fill plastic bottles and then make these into bricks for building. In this way, we take something that would often go to landfill (even if first sent for recycling) and instead use the very fact that it won't break down for hundreds of years to make it into a building material for housing and other construction projects. The problem for me is that the contents needs to be cut up very small or it simply doesn't pack in densely enough to make a brick. Having tried and failed to fill an 5 litre bottle without shredding everything (and despite the instructions from the site and advice from Abigail Pedrick (https://pedricks.co.uk/), who introduced me to Ecobricks), I sighed and set about a second attempt. The first bottle was impossible to unpack, so I was forced to cut it open, then started cutting up all the pieces of plastic as I'd originally been told to. With my tendonitis, however, this was taking forever and proving to be very painful, so I took to using a paper shredder. This, however, left me with loads of shredded plastic and a tough job getting it into the bottle without it going all over the place and leaving microplastics all over the house (and then the vacuum and ultimately landfill if it continued). I tried making a paper funnel (it needed a big hole at the bottom), but this kept falling apart, then 3D designed a bespoke funnel, which would have used a lot of plastic to print, before finally realising that I had a solution right in front of me: The best funnel for a 5l bottle was another 5l bottle, but without a stable connection, they would tend to misalign and get plastic everywhere again. Of course, the disadvantage of this is wasting another bottle, but since I already had a damaged one, this was OK, and it allowed me to reuse a large portion of it (and recycle the rest). Cynically-speaking, I’m sure there are plenty of bottles around that could be used, at least in part, rather than being sent off for (hopeful) recycling. So in the end, I designed an adaptor that allows you to connect two bottles and use one of them as a hopper/funnel to feed shredded plastic into the other one (picture attached). It prints in a couple of hours and uses around 15g of corn-based PLA plastic (7g for the actual adaptor, plus a little more support that is used to stabilise the print), which is compostable in a hot composter. With this in place, I am able to shred the plastic, tip it into the hopper and then simply poke it in through the funnel using the handy stick that I picked up from Abigail's shop (from Ecobrick).