More Americans are recycling than ever before. In fact, 63% of America’s communities are now recycling plastic. And yet over 205 million tons of garbage will be produced this year by American homes and businesses, and over 75 % of it will be thrown away.
With your help, things can be different. Plastics can be recycled, since the grains and fibers don’t break down easily and stay strong enough to create new products. But recycling isn’t the only option.
Juice bottles could be reused each day for juice, made into rain gauges, or used to store writing utensils. Even a plastic soda bottle can be reused in many innovative ways. Why not make your own new products? Here’s how to make: A Bird Feeder:
Ingredients: 2-liter soda bottle, a knife, birdseed, a funnel, string, chopstick
Use a knife to punch about 15 centimeter-wide holes in the bottom half of the 2-liter soda bottle. Cut two holes on opposite sides of the bottle. Push a disposable chopstick through the holes, so that the birds can have a place to perch while eating. Use a funnel to fill the bottle with birdseed and tie a string around the bottleneck and hang it up on a tree.
A Bike Fender
Ingredients: 1-liter soda bottle, plastic drinking straw, 3/4″ x 6″ Milford copper-plated pipe hanger
Use kitchen shears to cut off the stiff plastic bottle bottom, then slice the bottle in half, lengthwise, starting with the neck. Cut off and discard the neck of one of the halves, then set aside what’s left. On the other half, cut a 3/8″ hole in the center of the threaded part of the neck. Cut a hole the size of a drinking straw on either side of the bottle, 3″ to 4″ down from the bottleneck and about 1″ in from the edge. Now insert the straw through both holes. Bolt the bottle to the pipe hanger approximately 2″ in from its end. Glue the other half of the bottle to the bottom of the first to form a long, half-bottle column with a neck at the end that will attach to the bike. For reinforcement, duct-tape the halves together to seal the seams. Then attach the pipe hanger seat using nut and bolt.
Junior Liz Nemitz had another creative idea for reusing bottles. “I once saw this raft with a frame made out of bamboo,” she said. “The whole floor of the raft was all plastic bottles strung together. It worked really well. Ever since I saw that I’ve always wanted to make it.”
Several artists have used trash to create masterpieces, including Mark Dion, who went to the dump and to tag sales collecting unwanted old things and trash that he then incorporated into his art.
‘One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,’ the saying goes. You don’t have to be an artist or especially creative to create things out of trash, as long as you have an idea you’ll do fine.