Hot on the heals of my last post, I thought Id share the method I used last year to up-cycle an old olive oil bottle into a nice slim tall vase for the kitchen window (pic to follow).You can use this technique to make cool drinking glasses, vases, storage containers, pencil holders, etc Some pretty cool looking pieces could be had with a little bit of elbow grease.
An awful lot of resource goes into making a glass bottle, and then transporting it to point of sale. Thats the explicit resource, then there is the implicit resource cost, that is to say, all the people and energy that were involved in ancillary processes e.g. marketing effort to advertise the product to get you to buy it. Collectively on a big picture level, every product has a huge amount of resource ploughed into it. So I think its important we choose to re-use wherever we can, so that overall cost is not repeated again. Consideration of Recycling or Up-Cycling shouldn't just be about the raw material element.
But, I digress, you want to the goods on how to make it happen..!
'Instructables' on how to cut glass bottles is here.
Below are two Youtube vids which describe different techniques to achieve the desired results:
In my instance the bottle was square, so I simply drew a line with marker on the bottle and placed it on a workbench whilst I scored it with a hand held glass cutter. I then used my multi-tool with sanding attachment to get a smooth finish on the edge, however, thinking about it maybe should have done it by hand to be more environmentally friendly?!
Please remember to wrap the discarded part of the bottle in newspaper or similar to protect from the sharp edges before putting it out for recycling.
Peace to all.
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