“Reuse and recycle” is one of the mantras of environmentally-conscious people, but it's also great advice for survival. If you can take a raw material, especially one that's overlooked or discarded, and convert it into a valuable resource, that's a win-win. Sometimes this requires outside-the-box thinking, both for materials to select and ways to reuse them. Unfortunately, empty plastic bottles can be found in almost every environment, whether they're washed up on beaches, left at camp sites, or thrown in trash cans. Russian YouTuber Advoko MAKES created a video that shows ten ways to reuse their PET plastic material as survival/bushcraft cordage.

You've probably seen plastic-bottle-cutting jigs in the past, since numerous viral videos have circulated with various designs for cutting thin strips off these bottles. We previously featured one that used nothing but a scrap of wood, a razor blade, and some bolts and washers. However, the Advoko MAKES video shows a more sophisticated folding design that fits in a pocket or pack, and features notches to cut plastic in varying widths. It's constructed from a piece of C-channel aluminum with an attached razor blade and telescoping antenna bottle holder. Blueprint plans for the tool are available for free on channel creator Max Egorov's Instagram account.

Max demonstrates the plastic bottle cordage tool in action in the following video, now available with an English voiceover. Some of his uses are pretty creative, such as binding bushcraft furniture, tying together an improvised kayak frame, and wrapping tool handles for extra grip:

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For more from Advoko MAKES, check out some of our previous posts on his log cabin build and scrap metal bearded axe project.

Written by Patrick McCarthy