Water, Wine and Other Liquids

The joy I've found in making my first ecobrick has forced me up a gear, and now I'm thinking about water.  Allow me to explain.

As a brown bottle collector (as the joke goes, it sounds so much better than alcoholic, doesn't it? ha ha.  Ha ha ha.  Ha.) I've re-purposing the empty beer receptacles into a border for next year's herb bed down on my allotment:

Already in place, as you can see here, rosemary and thyme; and here's that spot from wider angles, where you can see another bed taking shape around the shed, with a path forming in between:

This makes me happy, and I hope it makes you happy too.

My £1.00 a day eating challenges of recent weeks brought a halt to my home beer consumption (the cheapest beer available in glass bottles anywhere near me costs £1.49) which is no doubt a positive thing from one point of view, but less so from this one.  Where and how to source more brown bottles to have the pathways and beds marked out in the allotment in time for spring?

Well, one thing I've trying to do at home more is reuse my water as much as I can within the confines of conventional plumbing - from cooking, unfinished tea and coffee, and so on - for watering my plants, and I've set aside about 8 beer bottles or so for this purpose.  But these brown bottles take up more space on shelves and window sills than wine bottles, and when Sarah passed a few empties on to me (along with a bag full of eggshells - another great allotment food) it occurred to me that these might be a better bottle to store my plant water in.  Two other advantages: 1, they usually come with screw lids (most wine does these days doesn't it?) which means they can be stored less smelly-ly indoors near to plants (old vegetable and tea water, remember) and 2, they're easier to source from recycling bins, litter picking and friends.  Just this morning taking out my own recycling, I found two wine bottles (lids included) and three more plastic bottles, which I can turn into more eco-bricks.  Everything's coming together nicely.

So, wine bottles for water, beer bottles for borders, plastic bottle for bricks.  Water, plastic, plants, alcohol.  The circle of life.

How many bottles would I have to have around to store all used water from cooking, washing and so on to be transferred onto plants or into the toilet?  (Here's an interesting YouTube video by someone who has collected 67 bottles of urine, and although it's somewhat ambiguous as to whether it's all his urine, it's heavily implied).  On the subject of plumbing, might future dwellings be set up to allow for the transfer of grey and black water from sinks, showers and bathtubs into plants and toilets?  Are there any architects out there already designing buildings like this?  I'm not thinking just of earthships and other off-grid homes, but tower blocks and urban environments.  It seems like this should be legally required.  And could old buildings be converted to those kind of set-ups?  That would be wonderful.  In turn, new buildings could be built out of ecobricks, squaring another circle of waste.

As I said, everything's coming together nicely.

Related posts

More Wine!
Ecobricking It
£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge Update
A Quick Water Hack
Consider the Toilet


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