Shari Mendelson

Shari Mendelson has achieved this with the humble plastic bottle, cutting it up into pieces to form ornate vessels that even your gran would be happy to have on her windowsill. I particularly like the pieces where the provenance is clear, with the original shape forming part of the sculpture or the print on the bottle remaining as part of the piece. Not only highlighting our wastefulness, this simple idea also alludes to the value we place on objects.

Further reading: www.sharimendelson.com

Bottle filter

Design by: David Rainbird from UK

Designer's own words:
A 2 litre plastic drinks bottle is easily converted into a 1 litre water filter. This reduces the waste of plastic and water, recycles a bottle and rethinks what we drink. Using the same pattern and waterjet cutting, it would be possible to make a version from a glass bottle.

PET and the art of reuse of Eduard Aldrovandi

We have seen many ways to reuse Pet, all very good and interesting, some certainly lofty, including entering of law and the work of Eduard Aldrovandi.

Home from PET botles

PET bottles can replace the bricks in the construction of houses?  You can build up a wall since the whole house using PET bottles instead of bricks.The bottles do not stand up for themselves, it takes a reinforced concrete structure (columns and beams)
See the pictures below:

1,603 pieces of plastic!

From BestLife: “All over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.”

QUICK FACTS ON PLASTIC POLLUTION (from greenfeet.com)

-A plastic milk jug takes 1 million years to decompose.

-A plastic cup can take 50 – 80 years to decompose.

-Recycled plastic can be used to make things like trash cans, park benches, playground equipment, decks, and kayaks.

-Special fleece-like fabrics used in clothes and blankets can be made out of recycled plastic bottles.

-Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every HOUR.

-Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures every year.

-Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

-A United States law, implementing an international agreement called MARPOL Annex V, became effective on December 31, 1988. It prohibits the disposal of plastics into the marine environment and requires ports to provide reception facilities for ship-generated plastic waste.

-Today, Americans generate 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year but recycle only 1 or 2 % of it.

-An estimated 14 billion pounds of trash, much of it plastic is dumped in the world’s oceans every year.

-The worldwide fishing industry dumps an estimated 150,000 tons of plastic into the ocean each year, including packaging, plastic nets, lines, and buoys.

-About 1,200 plastic soft drink and salad dressing containers could carpet the average living room.

-Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.

-Nearly every piece of plastic EVER made still exists today!

Photo Source: Wired magazine

Wedding dress made from recycled bottles

Made from recycled bottles, this wedding dress was designed by UK-based eco designer and artist Michelle Brand in honor of the recent wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William. Using about 1,110 bottle bases, 6,512 bottle tops and 9,440 tags to create this one, the dress weighs in at 10kgs (22lbs) and is christened Green with Envy.