“Less than 1 percent of all plastics is recycled. Therefore, almost all plastics are incinerated or end up in a landfill.” Source: Earth911.com
Image courtesy of Urban Organic Gardener
Do your part and help to keep plastic soda bottles from being incinerated or from the landfill. You can check out one of these reuses or reuse them in your garden.
If you don't drink soda, you can still easily find and save soda bottles nearly anywhere. During Keep America Beautiful’s 2009 Great American Cleanup, volunteers recovered and recycled 243,000,000 PET (plastic) bottles that littered highways, waterways and parks.
So there is no shortage of plastic bottles out there. You can use some homemade eco-friendly soap to rinse them out and reuse them.
This list includes ways that I've used them in my garden and other creative ones from across the web. Whether you have a backyard or a windowsill, you can utilize one of these low-cost ideas in your garden today.
- Drip irrigation system
- Kitchen carrot garden
- Hanging soda bottle planter
- Mini greenhouse
- Shovel
- Make a garden trellis
- Upside down tomato planter
- Self-watering container
- Seed starter
- Herb garden on shipping pallet
How else can you reuse soda bottles in your garden?
It's so simple - just fill your bottles with water, poke an appropriately-sized hole in the soil and insert the bottles upside down into the plants to create a self-watering system that not only works, but keeps your plants happy and hydrated and allows you not to worry about them while you're away! Of course, you'll need to make sure the bottle is the right size, and temperature and humidity play factors in the decision on which bottles to use - common sense and knowing your plants are the rules: larger bottles for your most quickly dehydrated plants and/or longer trips, and smaller ones for those plant friends which don't require as much water or don't get a lot of sun. We all need to do our part, and not only keep our plant friends happy, healthy and hydrated but also keep as much green growing as we can to combat the effects of global warming and help oxygenate the planet! It's so simple, so satisfying and so rewarding in the same breath!