Tired of filling the recycling bin with empty, perfectly good bottles, I went researching things to do with them instead:

• If you have a polyester factory, you can make textiles out of them. Recycled bottles are used to make polyester. But the bad news is it still takes considerably more energy to make even recycled polyester than to make cloth out of natural fibers like hemp, cotton and wool.
• You can make a solar water heater out of them, like the Chinese man who now famously made one so his mother could shower in hot water. The heater was so popular that ten other households in his village now have them.
• You can use them to build walls. I went to a ghost town up in the wilds of Nevada once, which featured a house made entirely of bottles, plus cement. Not quite as posh as the Thai monastery temple made from a million glass bottles, but very nice, especially as the old American glass turned a gentle purple in the sun because of oxidation of the lead in it. Bottles look especially nice embedded in cob walls, where they give a stained glass effect. They also look good in an igloo.
• David de Rothschild decided to make a modern version of the Kon-Tiki, out of plastic bottles. It’s called the Plastiki, and its mission is to draw our attention to the fact that 90% of the waste in the ocean is plastic, which is devastating the ocean’s ecology. The Plastiki should set sail around the Pacific in late 2009.
• On a smaller scale, you can do the old hippy trick of making glasses out of bottles too, or you can make a musical instrument by filling them to different levels and playing them with a spoon.
• You can use them to make small terraria. This last one is my favourite: Put a layer of small round pebbles, then a layer of activated charcoal, then a thicker layer of compost. Using chopsticks you dig a small hole in the compost and lower in a very small plant–a slip of moss, or a tiny fern work well–and then you dribble in a little water. Cling film the top, or cork it. You’ll need to adjust the moisture for a while until you get it right, but then it will create a little, misty, rain-forest eco-system that requires very little adjustment.
• Re-use the same glass bottle, refilling it with filtered water, rather than buying more bottled water. More than 70 million bottles of water are consumed each day in the U.S. It’s vital that we all stop doing that!