Vertical Garden from Juice Bottles

thingiverse

My household, like many others, has a waste stream full of plastic bottles. Were it up to me, we'd all just be drinking water from the tap, but my housemate's kids like fruit juices, my wife like's a particular, fancy, asian aloe vera drink and I drink water from the tap via my Sodastream to reduce the already massive demand on single use plastics at home. Plastics are one of the most marvellous inventions ever. They are a wondrous engineering material, no need to tell that to people here at Thingiverse, right. They last "forever", yet we use them once then throw them away. Most plastics in the world, despite the little recycling logo on them, are never recycled. Most go to landfill. Too much ends up in our oceans, choking sealife and creating "garbage islands." They're not so dense that you could actually walk on them like actual islands, but they run to megatons of plastic wastes floating in the eddies of ocean currents. So, how do we fix this?! This is almost as serious a problem as carbon pollution. Unlike carbon pollution, planting trees isn't going to help. The answer is simple... 1. Reduce our purchase of single use plastics where we can. Choose compostable packaging, like uncoated paper or useful, reusable packaging, OR no packaging at all. After that, 2. Reuse your packaging as much as possible, and this is where this vertical garden comes in, 3. Then, and only then, send it to the waste stream. So, how this system evolved was, a friend who is an avid gardener, read an article about using soda bottles to create pots for a vertical garden. I mentioned that we were "drowning" under good sized 2 litre (a little over 3 pints) bottles at home. We played around with 5 of the special, Aloe drink bottles, my wife favours, using zip ties to hold them fast to an existing (EXPENSIVE!) vertical garden rack, alongside the pots in that. The system was east facing, so lettuce was a good choice, and Alison planted some seedlings in the pots. The lettuce was amazing. Next, we began wondering about how to expand the system, when I came across some galvanised reinforcement mesh on hard rubbish. I live in Melbourne, Australia and we have a civilised system where we get regular collections of stuff that's too good to throw out but that people no longer want. They leave it on the footpath in front of their homes, and call council to come and collect it. The unspoken rule for scroungers like me, is leave the pile tidy and leave some for the next scrounger. The stage 2 prototype had begun with this particular find! So, the "reo" mesh was fastened to Alison's back fence, and we began cutting the rectangular, clear bottles, drilling them to be zip tied to the mesh. It bugged me we were using zip ties, because they're a single use plastic, so I designed a hook. I did look into carabiners, but even small ones are expensive, and a small investment in long lasting plastic hooks to keep long lasting plastic bottles out of the waste stream is worth every penny. So, here is the recycled bottle vertical garden hook, along with an optional wall bracket that can be screwed to a wooden wall or fence, or dynabolted to a brick wall. The prototyp hooks are printed in PLA, which is weathering well after a full year in all of Melbourne's hot and cold and wet weather. My preference would be to print them from recycled PETG, but Refil have shut up shop. As a result of the success of this gardening system, which could just as easily be used for cosmetic vertical planting, or herbs, I've also set up Own Your Plastic, a facebook page and discussion group (Own Your Plastic Community) to help people share their plastics reuse ideas, from gardening, to arts, to tech. Own your plastic before it owns you. Come over and enjoy the fun! https://www.facebook.com/ownyourplastic https://www.facebook.com/groups/ownyourplastic/