This Is Brilliant
This is recycling that actually works
Perhaps you’ve performed that old camping trick before, where you created a lantern by shining a flashlight into a water-filled bottle. While that may have helped you find your marshmallows in the dark, imagine how much brighter that bottle would have been if it were lit directly by the Sun. Bright enough, it turns out, that it could brilliantly light up the interior of a one-room house. That’s the idea behind the Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light) project – it’s bringing daytime indoor lighting to the homes of the poor in the Philippines, by installing water-filled plastic pop bottles through holes in their roofs.
Pretty damned cool.
Public Service Announcement, World Stuff | Mr. Bingley | 
September 15, 2011 9:57 am
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Apparently, Solyndra had a similar product, however, they filled the bottles with Dr. Pepper and cash. The project was discontinued due to poor results.
Wow – I like. It’s too bad the really innovative stuff seems to get lost in all the dreck.
Syd, a slight correction: Solyndra supplied the Dr. Pepper however the US taxpayer ponied up the cash.
…and then there is this breaking story: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/15/lightsquared-did-white-house-pressure-general-shelton-to-help-donor.html
I can see the Impeachment Tree from my house.
I remember a catalog that sold these prisms that had been fashioned for use in ships. They would be installed in the upper deck, so that the sunlight would be refracted down below.
When I was little, my grandfather had coca-cola bottles in the roof of the coffee warehouse and would use them in the same manner. It’s sad when such technology that has been around forever is shelved, only to be made new again because we didn’t learn it the first time 😉
And those water-filled pop bottles are mercury-free.
Only if that water never came anywhere near a tuna, Ave.
Read the DB article, Syd. It’s not a smoking gun, but that sounds like The Chicago Way™.
Obama is surely building the stairs to his own impeachment.
That’s a fantastic project, Mr. B. Thanks for posting it.