Page 20 - REN July-Aug 2021

Message in a Bottle

Jules Torti courtesy Realtor.ca
he reincarnation of items destined for recycling or landfill has become a clever and cost-efficient venture for
builders. As climate change awareness escalates, the consideration of environmentally responsible building
Tmaterials is paramount. Globally, bottle houses provide financially attainable solutions for housing shortages,
community greenhouses or pure whimsy.
Discarded plastic bottles filled with sand are being repurposed as “bottle bricks” in India, South and Central America
and northern Nigeria. The bottles of compacted sand are 20 times stronger than brick, bullet-proof and a fraction of
the cost of a traditional build. In developing countries, inventive minds and patient hands have diverted countless
bottles from landfills with architectural pizazz. The concept isn’t new and here’s proof that the dreamers behind these
structures refused to be bottled up:

on Flickr, Image 2; via greezer.ch on Flickr Collage image 1; Heineken WOBO brick bottles, via Aaron “tango” Tang

In 1963, brewer Alfred Heineken and Dutch architect John Habraken created the Heineken WOBO, a brick that could
hold beer. During a trip to the Caribbean, Heineken observed a lack of affordable building materials and beaches
littered with bottles. He decided to marry his two observations in the WOBO design and produced 100,000 bottles
in two sizes that could interlock. He built a small shed on his estate in the Netherlands but his concept for the “world
bottle” project didn’t advance further than his shed and a WOBO wall at the Heineken Museum in Amsterdam.

Tom Kelly’s bottle house, Rhyolite, Nevada

Via Ken Lund on Flickr Tom Kelly’s epiphany was indeed found in the bottom
of a beer bottle in Bullfrog Hills in 1905. In an area
where the Joshua tree was the only viable lumber
supply, Kelly did the quick math. Rhyolite was a thriving
gold mining camp and there were 50 saloons in his
radius. In less than six months he collected over 50,000
bottles and built a three-room house with ornate
gingerbread trim and a veranda to boot. He completed
his bottle house in 1906 and raffled it off at $5 a ticket.
By 1920, the boomtown became a ghost town with
only 20 residents remaining. The house has seen a few
incarnations since, from a movie set to a museum.