Helping or Harming...Hmmmmm?

What some folks see as simply trash, I see as future art pieces. I suppose this is due a lot to my upbringing since on the farm, art supplies were deemed as a luxury. Money was not spent on any such items as it was far more needed for necessities. Therefore, either I was to allow my creativity to be squelched before it ever got started or I had to be frugal! I was recycling before it was the "cool" thing to do! Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and most adults passed on the knowledge of how to use things for a multiple of purposes. You never threw anything in the trash! That was most wasteful and there was always the old standby quote "Put that up, you may need it some day!" So...I save things..everything! Most of these things, I do eventually use and those that I finally do toss....I most definitely then find that I need it the very next day! Today's trash to treasure material?...plastic drink bottles!

Son drinks a lot of the flavored water, Propel, and occasionally a ginger ale. The Propels come in a pale blue bottle and of course the ginger ale is in a lovely green bottle. I must admit that if I saved every one of these plastic bottles, we would be blocked from our home in just a matter of months! So...I have always begrudgingly discarded a lot of them (but only because until recently, I had not found an craft project worthy of the effort!) Now, that has all changed! Maybe......

I say "maybe" because even though I now can use plastic bottles in a crafty way, I have no idea just what to do with what I create! If you remove all labels from the bottle and cut it into shapes, the plastic can be melted to make faux-glass flowers! The plastic can be "colored" with permanent markers to enable a wide variety of buds to be made. Shaping them while the plastic is still warm adds to that variety as well! The melting done over a candle and is best done outside to assure that asphyxiation from some deadly fumes does not take place! Tweezers are a huge help in keeping the fingers from becoming scorched little digits!

The crafty project made me feel quite warm and fuzzy about recycling and saving the Earth. (Or was that the fumes that were clouding the brain?) This good feeling lasted just long enough for me to realize that perhaps releasing probable toxic gases into the atmosphere was not helping the green situation one bit. I was pondering the possibility of a no-fume melting process which seems highly impossible at a home level. So I guess it is back to the drawing board on finding a use for all the plastic bottles that clog the landfills! Hmmm...the mind turns to gardening. Maybe..just maybe I can somehow use all of these water and drink bottles as some sort of gardening aid! I will keep you posted on the saga of recycling plastic bottles as soon as I figure out just where I am heading with this one! The flowers are pretty, though....ponder, ponder.