Joseph returned from foraging, with a massive pile of
empty plastic water bottles, bundled in an old fishing
net.
He'd collected them from the tourist area of town, down
by
the old Portuguese fort. Then he'd washed them all clean
in the ocean and drained them as dry as he could.
First,
he cut a hole in th bottoms of about 400 of them
and
screwed the top of one into the bottom of the next,
filling
each one with clean sand as he went, until he had forty
stacks of ten, to make part of a wall. That was his
water
filtration plant, done.
For the walls he had packed many hundreds of bottles
with
mud and cemented them together into a wall, with mud
and straw and cow manure. Windows were similar
bottles,
left empty.
Hundreds more were filled with earth and buried, neck
down, to make a tiled floor of plastic bottle bottoms.
Cut and laid flat and overlapped for roof tiles were
several
hundred more bottles that fed water into a gutter of split
bottles and through a complex network of short plastic
hoses to fill a "water tank" made from even more of
Joseph's carefully cleaned bottles.
Joseph was already planning to paint some bottles black
and fill them with water, to heat water he planned to run
through coiled copper tubing inside the black bottles, for
running hot water.
Finally, 20 bottles, split and fashioned into the blades of
a
windmill, powered a small DC generator for rudimentary
lighting, day and night. Another windmill powered a
small
pump, to carry water from the tank up to the top of his
sand filtration plant. Being near to the ocean meant
there
was usually enough breeze to power both consistently.
Not all plastic water bottles were evil, concluded Joseph.
Why, even his fishing boat was made from them, tied in
bundles, with lids screwed tight.