This is an Open Thread / Coffee Hour. All topics of conversation, community links, your images & videos etc are welcome.
<big><big>WORLD COAST WATER LEVELS ARE RISING,</big></big>
and at the same time, plastic waste across the globe is set to triple in this decade, shoving up to 12 million metric tonnes into the oceans and across the landscape, because the world’s material economy is mostly linear: we take a substance out of the ground, make something out of it, and then most of it gets thrown away.
Closed-loop recycling that requires reprocessing isn’t enough to rely on — it’s necessary, but that’s a whole industry requiring fuel/energy, it’s still in its infancy, and even before used materials can reach it, those materials (e.g., plastic bottles) are still very expensive & footprint-heavy to collect and move from individual to industry, with maaaany kinks and glitches still to be worked out.
And for most people in the world, its products may be unaffordable.
Meanwhile, most people in the world also have urgent life needs that smaller closed-loop innovation can meet, by repurposing common plastic products at high speed, low cost, and zero carbon footprint.
Ismael Essoume is a young businessman in Douala, Cameroon, cleaning up the country by collected bottles littering the natural environment, and turning them into boats. To help local fishermen and the environment.
"The pollution affected the river and you cannot catch fish because the fishing area is full of plastic," he says. "So I thought to help not only clean the rivers but also to provide boats because it's not easy in the villages for someone to buy a simple boat. So, now we build cheaper eco-boats that could be useful."
With his first 37 boats alone, he removed over 24,000 bottles from Douala's rivers.
And created Cameroon's first recycling scheme by establishing eco-bins - made from 255 bottles each - where locals can discard used plastic bottles. Made of bottles, they announce their own purpose.
It’s changing the way Cameroonians approach waste.
"We want to be the example in Africa," he says. "We aim to supply eco-bins on all the corners in front of all the shops, the supermarket, the school, so it will be easy to come and pick up the waste and recycle it. That is the vision."
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Is it a perfect solution? No. Deterioration will still put some microplastics into the environment. The same as nearly every human activity everywhere puts micro-substances into the environment. Only population decrease can solve that.
But with ocean levels rising all over the planet, floods increasing even in places we think of as “desert” (e.g., Palestine & Israel), fishing areas clogged with junk where people need food and need fishing as an economic activity, bottle boats might be a very damn-near perfect solution.
They are assemblies of closed-cell air-containers that don’t sink if this or that cell is damaged, damaged cells can be replaced, they’re lightweight to carry for transport to wherever they’re needed, they can carry a tremendous amount of weight themselves (fish and people in a boat are hefty), the assembly can be learned by almost anyone, and the connective material can be pretty much whatever kind is available, including twine and braid made from low-tech recycling of plastic bags into fiber (people all around the world are already making knitted, crochetted and macrama’ed hammocks, water-repelled rain-clothes, carry-bags, window-screens, privacy-curtains, door-mats, bed/pallet under-mattresses, and other things out of plastic bags carefully cut into a single spiral/strand and twined/braided as a textile fiber to work with. And the fashion industry making clothes...).
What may be the maximum size of a bottle-boat seems unknown as yet, although a 60-ft catamaran dubbed Plastiki (in honor of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki) —floated by 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles— in spring 2010 crossed the Pacific from California to Australia.
So, super-low-cost readily-made personal and family-size emergency and daily water-transportation may be the, um, wave of the future in more and more coastal and island parts of the world, instead of waiting for too-little too-late help from the fancy tech of The Advanced West™. Could just be that low-tech recycle flotillas of the developing world will lead us all to higher ground.
What else can be made from plastics and other common discards as-is? Some images are below the fold.
Urinal for boys in corner of toilet cubicle (to collection below) - very clean, no odour, Kibera, Nairobi, KenyaOctober 2013. The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) is a network formed by organisations active in the field of sustainable sanitation. The secretariat is currently located at Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ, German Agency for International Cooperation) in Eschborn, Germany.
Olipe trap made with a PET bottle of mineral water that has been painted a yellow band to attract more dipterans and to which four holes of about 5 mm in diameter have been made. It is barley with 4% biamonic phosphate. It can be used in catches of olive fly (Bactrocera oleae), fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) and other dipterans.
(Other forms of fly-catchers have the cut top half of another bottle upside down eck-to-neck with the whole-bottle, to funnel bugs in. In areas where flying insects transmit disease and parasites to humans or to trees and crops, fly-catchers are part of the life-&-economy-saving arsenal.
Window-farm made of repurposed PET bottles, the higher rows allowing excess water to drain into the lower containers to conserve water and dissolved nutrient, from the original bottle-openings pointing downward. Rectangular sections have been cut out of the sides of the bottles for planting and harvesting, and apertures cut in the original bottoms for the higher rows to drain into.
PET bottle used as a squirrel feeder, with a section cut out of the side for the squirrel to reach in (similar can be made as bird-feeders), Prague, Czech Republic, April 2009
Here are also images of how used truck and car tires have long been excellently repurposed. I had one of a schoolyard where a raised-bed flower-&veg-garden was made of truck-tires filled with brought-in-earth (they had no other garden-space), for student ag projects and food for the lunch program, but I can’t find it now. So, anyway:
1,200 old tires emplaced above a 42" water transmission main to protect it from the Fulton Road bridge demolition, Cleveland, Ohio 2007. The main loops back under the bridge, so this was repeated at another location further south.
And while we’re here (the reprocessing industry is making strides):
Please send michelewln more get-well wishes, and see her fiction tomorrow, 2:30pmleftkost/5:30pm east, at this group:
Kosmail to me (click on diary author name) if you’re interested in writing for that group yourself. I might be a little late here myself — make yourselves comfortable, pour another cup!