Plastic bottles, reshaping for irrigation (waterboxes) to regreen the desert, for tree survival

Hi,

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Or course, reducing the consumption of plastic bottle is the best thing to do. But we now have waste bottles everywhere, and not recycling facilities everywhere. The problem is the solution... Using the bottles can be something to do.

There are some ways to reuse them by reshaping the bottle, for example by making bricks like in the link here. It allows to stack the bottles, which are filled with  sand or soil
www.hmw.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/i41_hmw/08_Plastic_bottle_bricks_V1.0.pdf
Sounds interesting, but the microplastic from the UV-degradation does not seem nice.

Or to cut the bottles into pieces, melt them, and pour them into a mold like here.
https://sciencing.com/kids-science-projects-things-melt-8544326.html
They warn however about toxic fumes, which shouldn't be inhaled.

I heard that some people are tinkering with reshaping/melting? plastic bottles to make a kind cheap waterbox: a broad bucket, with a lid that capts rainwater, and which irrigates through capilarity with a wick.

Then, the bottles would serve to establish a tree first, allow it to survive, before desintegrating into microplastic particles... or be recycled.

Anyone has an idea on how to make this in a low-tech way?

Hans, you need to read about this new process of steam cracking plastics at high temperatures, making their component molecules return to their original form so they can be reformed into the same quality plastic as before.

By optimizing the parameters of the process, to a temperature of 850°C and a sufficient rate of heating and time in the reactor, the research group was able to recycle over 200 kilograms of plastic waste and recover their carbon components in as little as an hour. The plastics are then back to their original quality as when they first left the processing facility.

They found that switching to plastic waste as feedstock, instead of virgin plastic, for creating new plastics provides economic advantages and is technically feasible. However, implementation of the system relies on several factors, such as the regulatory framework in place to support these systems.

Thanks James, sounds interesting! I hope it leads to more recycling of plastic.
The method however seems impossible to do on a small scale, on the cheap, somewhere in a village, without significant financial input and technical knowledge. More for like medium to large cities.