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Making due is one of those things most of us don’t think about much, given our society’s affluence and excess.  When we do think about using items we already have, it tends to come from a concern about the environment, instead of finding a way to create what we want and need with limited resources.

I was reminded of this after a family member sent a picture she took in Africa—the building was modest, but bright colors and decorations made from old soda cans made it beautiful. And over the years, people have been using bottles and cans they already have to create what they need, whether that’s construction, decoration, or something that manages to become both.

Bottle as Building Material

Since the early 1900s, people have been building with bottles, using them just like bricks bound together into structures with mortar. According to agilitynut.com, the earliest bottle house was constructed in 1902 by William F. Peck in the mining town of Tonopah, NV. Since saloons were some of the first commercial structures in mining camps like Tonopah, empty bottles were plentiful, and bottle houses were born.

While that house was torn down in the 1980s, you can check out a bottle house that currently serves as a store at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, CA. Though you probably shouldn’t leave your empties behind, even there.

Bottle Bricks

Upping the bottle building ante, in the early 1960s, Alfred Heineken of Heineken Beer visited the Caribbean where he noticed that not only was there was an excess of old bottles littering the beaches, but there was also a shortage of affordable building materials. As a result, he hoped to solve with both problems and asked Dutch Architect John Habracken to design a “brick that holds beer”—the “WOBO” (world bottle).

According to Inhabitat, the bottles were designed to interlock and came in two sizes, and while 100,000 of them were produced in 1963, only a small shed on Heineken’s estate and a wall at the Heineken Museum in Amsterdam were ever built with them, and the brewery stopped supporting the project.

It was a brilliant idea, and surprising that this failed—after all, what’s more perfect for a frat house than a beer bottle house? Time to teach those boys some building skills and get these bottles off the ground and out of the trash.