There are a lot of things you can do with a 2l plastic bottle, and that's a good thing, because there are an awful lot of them. Its estimated that in North America alone, 3.1million tons of PET gets manufactured each year, and a lot of that goes into the single use bottles that we get our fizzy pop in.

Where possible, I like to avoid soda. That's partly because it is terrible for you, and partly because of the waste it generates. But occasionally the wife will bring home the odd bottle of carbonated water, which we then try to recycle in the usual ways.

The problem with recycling is that, well, things don't just magically become other things. Plastics are difficult to recycle [read: repurpose] on an industrial level, they require a lot of energy to process, and the byproducts aren't always needed. Sometimes you just have to take things into your own hands and do something at grass roots level.