When Professor Hertzberg mentioned in class that a key component to many upcycling projects is the volume of materials used, I knew I had to use a material I could get a lot of for cheap. It just so happened that my roommate had a hamper full of plastic bottles from a failed recycling project for his fraternity, so I decided to use those because they were already collected for me, I didn’t want them to go to waste, and I wanted all of these bottles out of my apartment.

There’s no overhead lighting in my bedroom, so I knew even before the start of the semester that I wanted to build a chandelier/lighting fixture for my room.

Once I had the material and the general idea, it wasn’t hard to develop a rough design; I had the idea to arrange the bottles into rings and then stack the rings on top of each other to create the fixture. I wasn’t particularly inspired by any individual designs I found, but in my research I found the following plastic bottle designs to be inspiring.

As I move into the production phase of my design and encounter difficulties, I may make alterations inspired by these images, but as of right now, the design is entirely my own.