How to make a fully reused/reusable plastic bottle raft?

Question

"Recycle" is the last in reduce-reuse-recycle triad, and though it's an obvious choice for plastic bottles, there are ways to make the most of every bottle. I drink from every bottle for some time and still I slowly make a deposit of such bottles. Many of my friends are not so eco-friendly and they buy a lot of these containers, so there is enough plastic bottles for something bigger to do with them before recyclation.

One of my ideas is something like this - a raft:

Normally I would join the bottles together by some kind of an adhesive tape. It has some advantages - it's easy to use and it can be recycled along with the bottles. But still it's a significant amount of material used with no sensible reuse option (if you know some, it counts for an answer!).

There must be some alternative way to join the bottles using just reused materials and/or materials that can be reused later (preferably but not necessarily if it's salvage is not almost as difficult as the raft construction). Do you now any examples of such a material, tell me!
If some more difficult task is required, please add a how-to paragraph and/or link to some tutorial to do it.

Answer 1

There is a nice and quite detailed tutorial on how to do this on Instructables.

They are solving the problem of holding the raft together by using garden mesh. If you have a garden, or know somebody who has a garden, it shouldn't be hard to get your hands on some of this and I'm pretty sure you can use it again as garden mesh once you don't use your raft anymore (so no resources lost there)

Also their design is somewhat different from the one on your picture.

Answer 2

Plastic bags can be cut into strips and made into rope of various thicknesses and durability. You could then tie the bottles together.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Useful-Rope-or-Cord-from-Plastic-Shopping-Bags/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KiZXRK5h44

Answer 3

One possible problem: plastic is usually photo-degradable.

It doesn't matter when you keep a plastic bottle in your house, but if your raft stays 12 hours/day in plain sunshine, it may leak within months.

I had similar experience: the cheap plastic hose I bought lasted only 2 months under Indonesian sun.

Answer 4

I was on this quest myself a year ago and found articles like this made with 55-gallon barrels like the ones used for rain collection. I still want to do this - good luck with your quest!