Eco Trick #1 Recycled Bottles as Support for Gutter

Background

#Throw&Forget
Usually we throw them into recycled bins and happily felt assured that yes, they are all well recycled and the guilt melts away. Sound familiar?

#3R #Reduce #Reuse #Recycle
Reduce, reuse, recycle. The best way towards zero waste is to do very well for the first R. Embrace second R (reuse) in your daily life and recycle only as last resort. 

#DoYourPart #WasteManagement #CleanAfterYourself
Always make it a point to recycle the waste yourself first instead of outsourcing to others ( like give them to rag and bone man or recycle bins).

Clean after your own waste will give you a better appreciation of the actual challenges behind waste management.

#UseOwnBottle #TryToReuse
Just take simple drinking water as an example. Reduce: Always bring drinking water in a water bottle with you. In this way you reduce the chance to need to buy bottled water.

Reuse: should you need to buy a bottle of water ( always find a water cooler to refill first) or are given one at event and function, try to reuse it at least a few times before discarding it.

Recycle: think of ways to recycle them for other use in your daily life.  

# RecycleWaterBottles #DoOurLittleBit
For ourselves, there are near zero recycled water bottles generated in our daily life already. However, are we able to do something to the millions of bottles being discarded daily in the name of convenience or health control ( example covid )?

Events, functions, hospitality industries around the world distribute drinking water in one time used plastic bottles in huge quantity daily.  Other than doing our little bit to not generate waste, can we also showcase the possibilities of reusing waste generated, in our small way?

#CostvsRecycling 
Many around the world have already demonstrated how they can use plastic bottles to build houses, walls etc. But anyone that have tried it yourself will truly understand the amount of time and effort to construct such, is huge.

Hence, in modern urban settings especially in developed countries, where manpower is extremely expensive,  it may be more cost effective ultimately to fall back to using purpose built construction materials originally intended for that purpose instead of up-cycle.

#RecycleWithEfficiency #CostEffectiveRecyling
The question therefore is how to use those to be discarded plastic to build something that is cost effective, can build efficiently and yet aesthetically pleasing? In short, use for what, how to build easily and yet doesn't stick out like a sore thumb?

Gutter Support

#SupportWithBottles #BottlesDecorations

After some thinking, we decided to use closed to 1000 bottles to build a secondary gutter support/decoration system for our heavily sloped gutter in Fig. 1

Fig 1: Our sloped gutter for water diversion

The extensive slope minimised debris collection/stagnant water in the gutter, which may contribute to mosquitoes breeding. But this however also created stress to the bracket support system. Hence the needs to introduce secondary support.

We therefore used recycled  bottles wrapped around recycled metal rods to give that additional support to the gutter system. Fig. 2 gives the before and after look.

Fig. 2 The Before and After look

The bottles are definitely not strong enough to provided support without lots of work like re-enforce them with cement or sands or paper wastes. But using it in conjunction with recycled metal rods give the whole structure the strength and bulk that we need without spending too much time building them.

We do not compromise safety, yet is fast and easy to build. Moreover they actually look quite pretty, hiding away the ugly recycled rods as shown in Fig. 3

Fig. 3 Closed up on the bottles support

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