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Jutta : We seem to have no category for environment, recycling and all that, which is where this idea belongs...It requires finding a global corporation of the beverage kind, which packs its product in more or less gallon [four litre] sizes of clear plastic already...Then the corporation has to be green
enough to consider re-designing these containers so that when empty, and refilled with water or left empty, they serve as building blocks [or modules thereof], of international standard size...Caps and handles would have to be recessed in some way of course and no doubt the containers would all display the corporation’s logo...Some distributors, without realising it, are more than halfway there already, with their stackable containers...And wouldn’t you guess it - I’ve even got a design waiting in my own workshop.
Earthships
http://www.earthship.org/
Houses built of tires, cans & concrete [hello_c, Sep 10 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]
[link]
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[Admin: to make administrative requests,
send email to bakesperson@halfbakery.com.
Created Public: Recycling, largely a spinoff
of Public: Ecology.] |
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Requiring users to refill with water would be a handicap in water-poor parts of the world. Sand or gravel would be better. |
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Maybe you can figure out how to do something similar with old tires. |
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Cob builders use bottles like glassbrick embedded in their walls. |
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Are you proposing that the redesigned bottles snap together? Be mortared together? Be used for light penetration, thermal mass, aquaculture... come on, out with the design. |
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What's a cob? Aside from the storage method for corn... |
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I've seen several buildings made with bottles embedded in the walls, and there's something really pretty about them. |
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Rayfo said 'stackable', so I'd suspect probably just shaped to pile ok, maybe with some mortar. |
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Thanks for the thoughtful comments ... My design is half- baked insofar as I failed to give it away, let alone sell it, ten years ago ... But in the sense that it works, in polystyrene prototype-container-form blocks, it's very well baked. and made the wall which is in daily use as a 10ft high room-divider behind me ... The "blocks" slide-lock together vertically and horizontally, therefore being self-aligning ... To build a complete house minus roof I included in the original design a certain percentage of corner and crossing blocks and
half-depth blocks for starting and finishing ... Mortar is not essential but probably needed to draught-proof any container- versions ... That's the best I can do without graphics ... Building experts have studied the actual wall behind me and walked away muttering "ingenious" but in fact showing later that they hadn't a clue as to how they locked together
... But ten-year-old kids, and experts, can see instantly how, if they build a LokBlok wall hands-on. |
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I skimmed this first, and thought - Giant styrofoam legos! I've used syrofoam concrete forms for foundation, left in place as insulation, and I've heard of concrete blocks that use recycled styrofoam aggregate, light, insulating, and cutable with a handsaw, and know of a guy locally who is having some success making blocks out of newsprint slurry, and I see a lot of houses going up with hay-bale construction, and there are earthship developments outside Santa Fe, tin can shingles, etc, and I've studied muslim and middle eastern architecture, adobe with no wood, built in approxomately ten Foot Sqare modules with igloo style roofs - but this is the first time I've heard of using empty Milk jugs, and soda bottles. My objection would be that this type of plastic tends to break down under UV, although with stuccoing, their life could be extended indefinately. |
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If one could come up with an inexpensive method to chop-and-form post-consumer styrofoam, you'd have the perfect emergency housing - stucco for permanence. In fact, I now dimly recall a homeless development in California, outside Pasadena, I think, that used styrofoam construction modules. Legal problems as I recall, though not with the material. |
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Thanks Scott D. but it's the shape not the contents that signifies ... My blocks can be made out of anything, and be solid or hollow, because they lock together by sliding not deform-clicking together like Lego etc. ... They're "halfbaked" until made permanent with cement/glue spray/coating or whatever. |
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I'd love to have a picture of this, I am having trouble visualizing it with the existing shapes you are using, unless you are talking about syrup containers for soda fountains - all the ones I've seen use plastic bladders inside a cardboard box. The idea remains one of great merit. I take a lot of heat for re-using discarded things- I make furniture and boxes out of discarded oak pallets in a hobby sort of way. It's amazing what people throw away and I've built several bicycles, including 18 speed mountain bikes, donated to charity, from bikes discarded, often for no more than a flat tire and a rusty chain. |
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