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.
-- infidel, May 27 2011

sign the petition for better funding while you're there please http://www.deencity...y&PID=5070&Items=12
[po, May 28 2011]

bottle house stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall
Stomach Bitters which were 90% alcohol and 10% opium (what!!!) [not_morrison_rm, May 30 2011]

This is already extensively Baked using glass bottles.
-- 8th of 7, May 27 2011


Bunning for the water filtration plant, especially.
-- baconbrain, May 28 2011


Using glass bottles for walls is certainly baked, [8th]. I have not seen them used for water filtration or generator/windmills, as yet.

I just set to thinking of ways to use a common pollutant to benefit mankind.
-- infidel, May 28 2011


Impressed, [po]. I wasn't aware someone had done a roof from them.
-- infidel, May 28 2011



random, halfbakery