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Has Anyone Tried Making a Greenhouse Out Of Plastic Bottles?

 
pioneer
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Has Anyone Tried Making a Greenhouse Out Of Plastic Bottles?  I'm a bit intrigued by this and wonder how well it works...
greenhouse.JPG
[Thumbnail for greenhouse.JPG]
 
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Neat idea. I’d really like to say it could work but I feel compelled to mention the possible issues. 1) While this plastic (named “PET”) has *some* uv resistance, it will soon degrade in the sun, likely within months, maybe a year.  Be careful, if it starts to get brittle and break apart, discard it before it makes a splintered mess. 2) Not trying to be alarmist but I’ve read it’s also associated with “microplastics”, if that’s a concern.

Generally greenhouse plastic needs to be “uv stabilized”, and/or made of polycarbonate/Lexan or acrylic/PMMA/plexiglass.

On the plus side, I think a structure like that could work very well with glass; any kind of glass.
 
master gardener
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On the one hand, I'm really attracted to novel recycling opportunities -- and my household does generate empty plastic bottles, but on the other, I'm trying to keep plastic out of the garden because I don't want it in my food.
 
master steward
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If I was going to try this, I'd look for clear glass bottles rather than plastic. Glass pop bottles have to be strong enough that they don't explode - yes, you don't want to drop them on concrete, but they're not fragile like a wine glass.

Glass bottles would be much heavier, so the support system would have to be beefier.

I have found that the garden life of plastic is highly dependent on the type of plastic, the thickness (pop bottles last longer than milk bottles), and the amount of sun exposure they get. I've been steadily trying to eliminate as much plastic from the garden as I can. I use paper pots for most of my seed starting as an example.
 
pollinator
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I have seen the ones built in Africa, I will search for ifo.
But look at this, it shows some neat PET greenhouses
PET Greenhouses
pet-grrenhouse3.jpeg
[Thumbnail for pet-grrenhouse3.jpeg]
 
pollinator
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I could see it if they were intact bottles filled with water (leaving 20% room for freeze expansion) and shielded from direct sunlight.

But clean PET #1 is one of the few plastics they can recycle in a practical way. I mostly prefer to work that back into the system.There are other discard plastics that would serve your experiment better imo.
 
gardener
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Those photos of the cool things built of the bottles are almost surely shot as soon as they were built. Plastic bottles degrade visibly in a few months in the sun (and if it's a greenhouse then by definition it's in the sun). By one year, they are visibly browned and some are cracking or crumbling.
 
steward
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Besides all the downsides already pointed out, these buildings seem really labor intensive.

Here is a youtube:

 
Mike Philips
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I don’t know how you feel about reusing old windows but they are almost always available for free.
 
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Voices of Transition--documentary
https://permies.com/t/143498/Voices-Transition-documentary
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