Ecobrick Bottle-to-Bottle funnel adaptor

thingiverse

TL;DR - I made an adaptor to enable you to use the cut-off top of a 5 litre bottle as a funnel to connect to another 5 litre bottle. The print requires some support, unfortunately, although later refinements might be able to reduce this. I also printed with a brim, to aid adhesion to the bed (no heating required for this). The context, if you're still reading, is the Ecobrick movement, which encourages directly reusing plastic wrappings and packets by using them to fill plastic bottles and then make these into bricks for building. I was recently inspired when I discovered the Ecobrick movement, which takes something that would often go to landfill (even if first sent for recycling) and instead uses it to make a building material for housing and other construction projects. The problem is that the contents need to be cut up very small or they simply don't pack in densely enough to make a brick. Having tried and failed to fill an 5 litre bottle without shredding everything, I set about a second attempt. I was forced to cut it open, then started cutting up all the pieces of plastic as I'd originally been told to, but this was taking forever and proving to be very painful due to my tendonitis. So I took to using a paper shredder, which left me with loads of shredded plastic and a tough job getting it into the bottle without it going all over the place and leaving microplastics all over the house (and then the vacuum and ultimately landfill if it continued). I tried making a paper funnel but this kept falling apart, so I 3D designed a bespoke funnel, which would have used a lot of plastic to print, before finally realising that I had a solution right in front of me. The best funnel for a 5l bottle was another 5l bottle, but without a stable connection, they would tend to misalign and get plastic everywhere again. So I designed an adaptor that allows you to connect two bottles and use one of them as a hopper/funnel to feed shredded plastic into the other one. It prints in a couple of hours and uses around 15g of corn-based PLA plastic (7g for the actual adaptor, plus a little more support), which is compostable in a hot composter. With this in place, I am able to shred the plastic, tip it into the hopper and then simply poke it in through the funnel using a handy stick. I was recently inspired by the Ecobrick movement's direct reuse of plastic wrappings and packets to make building materials for housing and construction projects. The problem with the contents is that they need to be cut up very small or they don't pack in densely enough to make a brick, so I set about making a second attempt after failing to fill an 5 litre bottle without shredding everything. I was forced to cut it open and started cutting up all the pieces of plastic as I'd originally been told to, but this was taking forever and proving very painful due to my tendonitis. So I took to using a paper shredder, which left me with loads of shredded plastic and a tough job getting it into the bottle without leaving microplastics all over the house (and then the vacuum and ultimately landfill if it continued). I tried making a paper funnel but this kept falling apart, so I 3D designed a bespoke funnel, which would have used a lot of plastic to print, before finally realising that I had a solution right in front of me. The best funnel for a 5l bottle was another 5l bottle, but without a stable connection, they would tend to misalign and get plastic everywhere again.