Hello everyone and have a great green day! You might think you had enough green yesterday because of Saint Patrick’s day, but it’s not over: Today is Global Recycling Day 
I want to commemorate Recycling Day by sharing with you an special recycling option we have in Argentina:
Love Bottles 
- or “Botellas de amor” in Spanish -is a way of disposing single-use plastics by filling plastic bottles with them.
The organization that founded them, which is called “Fill a bottle with love”, organizes the collections of the bottles and gives them to a company that recycles them into plastic wood.
That’s not all! With the plastic wood from the bottles, and a few other materials, the company turns them into furniture, which is then donated.
What kind of bottles can be used?
The bottles we can fill can be of any shape or form, as long as they are plastic ones. And they can have the cap or not, they even recommend that you don’t put them on, as there is another project that “turns” plastic caps into donations for a hospital.
The bottles I choose are usually 5 liter ones that I get from floor cleaners, as we don’t usually buy plastic beverage bottles in my household.
There are people that take care of the environment so well that they don’t even have bottles to fill out, so some places even organize ways for people to donate their plastic bottles!
How do you fill the bottles with love?
It’s very easy, it’s just putting the (clean) single-use plastics in and then compressing them with some sort of stick you have. It can get rough but you just have to put your heart into it 
Most of the single-use plastics I use come from chocolates and sweets, so I have to clean them up or the bottle will contain materials it shouldn’t, like melted chocolate.
They recommend compressing the insides every time you add new plastics to the bottle, you can check if it’s filled completely and well compressed if you step on it and it doesn’t dent.
There are more techniques people recommend, like rolling the plastics, but as long as it’s compressed, the space inside is used well, and it weighs enough considering the size of the bottle (it should weigh at least some amount per cm2 if it’s well compressed), it’s good.
That gif shows me adding the last pieces of plastic to a love bottle! I usually collect the single-use plastic residues, clean them so they don’t have other materials, and then put them in the bottle.
How do you donate the love bottles?
It’s another very easy part again, because the organization set up a My Maps with all of the collection points where we can take the filled bottles, they aren’t just thrown in recycling bins.
What is done with the love bottles? How are they useful?
As I mentioned before, the love bottles turn into plastic wood.
This wood is mostly used in furniture that is donated to the choice organization that collects them, but in Buenos Aires city the bottles taken to one of the city’s mobile “Green spots” can also be turned into benches, playgrounds, and more things for our public spaces.
They even reconstructed the floor of our Woman’s Bridge, an important landmark in the city, with plastic wood made out of 100 thousand love bottles.
It’s awesome to know that they even used it for such an important place instead of regular wood, but I think it’s bittersweet too, as that the plastic wood that was used on the bridge is made out of proportionally only a small amount of the plastics we consume everyday, that aren’t being recycled. But I think that by spreading awareness about recycling (maybe with posts like this?) and the consequences of not taking care of the environment, more people will do it and we will make a bigger change together.
That’s not all about the love bottles, as there is a lot to say about it, but I did try to summarize the main points of it to share this awesome project. You can find more information in this Instagram page, in Spanish, where they answer lots of specific questions people might have about this.
- You can also find more (fun) ways in which Local Guides recycle by searching for #LetsRecycle here on Connect, which was last year’s Writing Challenge organized by the Spanish speaking Connect Moderators (yes, this is a long overdue post originally thought for that, but better late than never!) -
On a final note, I want to add that even though recycling is an important step we can take to care for our planet, reducing our consumption and reusing products we buy are equally, if not bigger, parts of doing it.
Recycling, after all, is the last of the three Rs, and we should take it as a last resort. The three Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - is a rule of three steps we can take to take care of the environment by changing our habits reducing our consumption of unnecessary materials or products, reusing what we own, and finally, again, as a last option, recycling what we can’t use anymore.
There are many ways to take care of the environment, and a lot more are about prevention and avoiding certain actions we unfortunately might be used to, rather than about dealing with the consequences of our daily choices, like this one.
I hope to share about some actions I have been taking to reduce my negative impact on the environment soon, with related places that are on Maps. I already have an awesome place I’ve been going to that helped me a lot 
Thank you for reading! I have some questions for you about this special day:
- Do you recycle? If you do, in what way?
- Is there an initiative in your country similar to Love Bottles? Please tell us about it!
to keep our environment clean.
