How to Change Polluting Plastic Bottles Into Pencil Holders.

Pollution caused by plastic materials, including plastic bottles and plastic cups have been alarming the world. Serious attention has been paid to lessen negative impacts caused by plastics,which are mostly non degradable. Many parties in the world take part in actions trying to cope with this problem. Worldwide awareness in controlling negative impacts of plastics can be more effective if it starts from every individual, so to make this idea works there should be people -empowering-activities which are applicable, practical, beneficial and profitable.

This hub is providing one of activities on how to change polluting plastic bottles and cups into something useful, like pencil holders,tissue holder, flower vases, piggy banks, or house ornaments.

Material and Tools You Need :

- 600 ml Plastic Bottle (wash and clean the bottle first to make sure that there is no rest of dangerous substance left in the bottle).

- Scrap paper

-PVA glue

-Water

-Compound powder

-Color paint

-Brush

-Cutter and scissors

-Compound Powder (sold at hardware store)

-Rubber spatula

1. Prepare A Plastic Bottle .

Prepare a clean, used 600 ml bottle of mineral water container, cut the bottle into 2 parts: lower/bottom and upper parts. Some bottles have nice curvatures, make some consideration before cutting so that those curvatures can add artistic shape to your pencil holder. We'll use the bottom part for this project while you can keep the upper part for another project ( we want to suppress pollution caused by plastic bottles, remember ?)

2. Make Paper Pulp :

Soak some scrap paper for one to two days, it depends on kind of paper you use, the harder the paper the longer it takes to soak. You'd better tear the paper into smaller pieces so that it eases you in making paper pulp. After 1 or two days of soaking, knead the paper so that it becomes evently tender. Add some PVA glue into paper pulp in 2 (paper pulp) : 1 (pva glue) composition. Mix it thoroughly.

Paste lower part of the bottle that you've prepared above with paper dough. Apply the pasting on the outer side, if you have difficulty in pasting the whole side all at once because of very soft paper dough , you can do it on half side of the bottle first. After the first pasting has hardened a little bit, you may continue pasting on the other side, then on bottom part. After the whole side walls thoroughly pasted, let it dry. It takes some days to completely dry.

While waiting for the paste to dry completely,  day by day checking can be done, to find if there are  parts that need trimming up,  additional pulp or give slight pressings on some other parts to make it more neatly when it's completely hardened.

It is not too late to add reliefs and textures on the holder's surface at this step

The paper pulp pasted leaves rough surface, that's why we need to polish it up using compound powder. Put some (around 150 grams) compound powder on a square-flat bottomed container, then add some water so that it becomes light dough. Use compound powder only as much as you need for polishing since we don't want to pollute sewerage  with the rest if make compound dough excessively. Using a rubber spatula, apply the dough on the whole surface, you have to use bare hands too once in a while, to get the touch of pasting so that the result can be smoother and applied more evenly. After you've done it completely, let it dry, it takes one day to dry.

If, after the polishing , you still find some bumps on it's surface, you can smooth it using sand paper.

White "color" of compound powder has given foundation to your pencil holder, then you can do coloring and decorating to make it more attractive. You're challenged to express your artistic touches in this step, beads, paint, mosaic,ornamental stones, sea shells, pictures in reliefs can be considered as alternatives for decoration.

In this hub I tried to use ornamental stones. To stick the stones around the holder, first you need to paste some wet compound (make the compound like when you polished the holder above) around the holder, then press every ornamental stone into wet compound one by one. Do it all around the holder's surface so that it is completely covered with ornamental stones. Finally, to conceal the dull look of dried compound among the stones I paint it in golden color.

The possibility of exploring your artistic skills is  widely open, don't hasitate to try your own creation and share with others, which means you also take part in decreasing pollution caused by plastics and give ideas to others to do the same thing.