by Joe Laur

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Came across a very cool story on Ecoscraps today. Turns out that in the 1960’s (remember the 1960’s? If you can, you weren’t really there), the head of Heineken Brewery, Alfred Heineken was vacationing in the Caribbean. He saw beaches littered with beer bottles (including some of his) and a lack of affordable housing. His solution? Make beer bottles in the shape of interlocking bricks.

Now people that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, but apparently people that drink beer can live in glass houses. After a bunch of experiments they came up with a useable brick/bottle design. Only a few houses were built, some of them still standing on the Heineken estate.

And then there’s this very cool Buddhist temple in Thailand built entirely from one million recycled beer bottles. Buddhist monks built the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in the Sisaket province of Thailand from Heineken and Chang Beer bottles.

Must have taken a lot of beer to even come up with the concept, and then well, being good holy monks, they must have all pitched to do their part and drank enough to finish the project. Which probably took 367 years to build in the process. Probably a few pretzel bags and hangover remedy bottles mortared in there somewhere too.

Thanks to Jennifer Lance and Wikipedia for the source materials. Oh, and thanks to Greenopolis Partner Molson Coors for the beer required to round out my research. And my belly. Please drink and build responsibly.