Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Green Wall from plastic recycled bottles

My Project was to create a Green wall / living wall using recycled plastic water bottles, I wanted to use as many waste product parts as possible.
                                        
I started with drilling a 1" hole in bottom of bottles and 2 x 2 1/4 " holes in sides, then joined them together end to end.
I realized that the only way water would travel all way threw would flood the bottle to half way making it to wet to grow so used a plastic drip pie cut in lengths and L corner joints to complete the loop, I then made lots of drip holes in each growing area for water to leak threw.
I built a wooden frame to fit snug to the size of bottles and brackets on back to support them ( This was a mistake, next time ill use something like peg board to give more support)
I used zip ties to attach each neck of bottle to back support straps
I sprayed  everything Matt black to make it look nice.
sprayed back too
then i filled with a light peat mix and vermiculite growing compound ( the weight made all the bottles sag a great deal)
finely added as many green house plants ferns etc as i could get, I really didn't get enough to make it fully covered but it still looked cool!


I them drilled small hole in top and added a tube to top pipe for watering, the last bottle was left uncut as a collection chamber, i originally intended to attach a solar water pump to the collection chamber to re-pump to top again but never completed it!

This is the Green wall several months latter!
The main problem was watering! the water would pass threw the pipe too quickly and not allow enough to soak threw drip holes, My next one I will cure this by adding a piece of sponge in the tube at every joint to slow the water transfer process down, You can also see the support wasn't adequate and the weight crushed it all down. The angle of the bottles holes should have been more upright too!

1 comment:

  1. Please let me know how your Green Manure experiments have gone. I would love to hear from you.where can i buy matcha green tea perth

    ReplyDelete