heineken bottles as building bricks!

Apparently, in 1968, the founder of Heineken's grandson, Alfred Heineken came up with an idea to make heineken bottles square so that they could be used to make buildings with.

He was visiting the caribbean and came across that famous green glass but he couldn't go fifteen feet without seeing it littered everywhere. He realized that the region did not have the infrastructure to re-use the bottles like other less impoverish areas so he came up with a solution: a brick that holds beer! Viola!:



It even has the little notches on the side to make it easy to hold together with mortar or what not.

Sadly, this bottle never got to the market and the closest thing to it that has been talked about more recently is this little heineken cube, but it is more for saving space than anything functional.



You can read the full article about this here!

(images source is from that website)

OK, not Heineken bottles, but pretty cool. From "Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village" in Simi Valley, CA.

I found it here.

I apologize for the stupid question, but every time I see a picture of a building like this I wonder what the other side of the wall looks like. I think these sort of buildings are beautiful and I would love to build one. Is the open ends of the bottles on the other side just open or are two bottles fitted together? How does it work?

sometimes the bottles can stick out the other end but there are a lot of ways to do it where the bottle does not stick out in the end

this web page has tons of pretty pictures showing both sides of some walls and showing different configurations for glass bottles.

http://www.inspirationgreen.com/glassbottlewalls.html

A temple in Thailand constructed largely out of bottles.

http://inhabitat.com/temple-of-a-million-bottles/


After cleaning up a fair many pounds of broken glass, my questions go out down the ages to when the wall comes down, or needs to move, or gets rebuilt.


I wonder if a glass slumping oven could work to build passable glass bricks from a standard bottle waste stream... hummm...

Thank you Meryt Helmer. Those buildings are all beautiful, and it makes a lot more sense to me, and there are a ton of great ideas. I think I'm going to start planning my own little building 😃

Some ways to use them:

https://permies.com/t/7617/building-block-beer-bottle#1741992