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Heineken WOBO: A Beer Bottle That Doubles as a Brick
- pieterk 7y agoSo sad that this has to be a museum piece. The bottles could also double as water storage and a heating system. Or be plastic yet filled with sand or something. Wonder how much more expensive these would be to manufacture. Making no waste is priceless though.
- smitty1e 7y agoImagine if there were a collapsible filter you could push through then neck, along with a hole drilled in the bottom. You could get a few in series and have a hasty purification system.
- pieterk 7y agoSo many ideas! Where’s the Mechanical Engineers at? Coca-Cola or Pepsi better see this.
- darkerside 7y agoMany jurisdictions no longer recycle glass (considered too expensive), but will collect for upcycling. Could this be the right time for a renaissance of this type of design? It probably would require incentives from the government, which imo are merely manifesting preexisting externalities.
- bjelkeman-again 7y agoAccording to the European glass recycling organisation it uses 25% less energy to recycle glass than using sand as raw material (as I read their claim). [1] [1] http://www.ferver.eu/en/node/31 http://www.ferver.eu/en/node/31
- hedora 7y agoThere’s also an international sand shortage. It’s an ecological disaster.
- Woberto 7y agoAabsolutely. I use glass bottles for water storage, and while they're a bit cumbersome to refill, I won't ever use plastic for this again. It's nice to know there's nothing leaching into my drinking water, plus carrying them around is good exercise.
- harlanji 7y agoI did this for my first few weeks in construction, need a gallon or more so I end up with a $1 gallon in plastic every day, and recycling earns money for the agency I work through. I will look into a glass gallon when I get a place with a sink. With 1L glass I’d recycle them about weekly and get a fresh bubbly water and keep the bottle for another week.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI am no expert, but I can imagine they wouldn't be too much more expensive to produce; after all the mass production of glass (or plastic) bottles is a solved problem. In fact, square bottles might be cheaper because you can stuff more of them in a box, less wasted space.
- pengaru 7y agoRelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
- erikig 7y ago"Honey, I'm not a drunk - I'm just trying to build us a bigger house..."
- h2odragon 7y agoFill them, sand or sawdust or something, and fragility might be less of an issue? Even just for windows it's a lovely idea. I'd worry about the strength, people living in glass houses would worry about shards.
- verandaguy 7y agoNot to mention the evergreen concern of having stones thrown at their houses.
- karmelapple 7y agoThe Rhyolite ghost town near Death Valley National Park has a house entirely made of glass bottles. They’re round ones though! https://www.roadarch.com/h/rhyolite.html https://www.roadarch.com/h/rhyolite.html
- pySSK 7y agoGreat concept ahead of its time. However, I'd advise people who live in houses made of WOBO against throwing stones.
- FpUser 7y agoI remember in my school stairwell wall that faced the street was made out of glass bricks. 4 storey high building btw.
- tomc1985 7y agoI visited some friends in South America and they had just bought a property out in the countryside and were building a house. They had a shed for housing their dog food (they rescued street animals) and, to my surprise, the inside of the walls were built with stacked-up Jack Daniels bottles. They covered the outside with wood paneling so it looked like a normal shack from the outside. I have no idea where they got so many bottles (my friend had a whiskey habit but this would have been a lot of drinking), but apparently this is a common thing to do over there Articles like these pop up every now and then and I can't help but think of my friend's dogfood shack. (Oh, and the house was built by a proper construction crew, with wood beams and all, not bottles...)
- pengaru 7y agoIt sounds like the bottles were serving as insulation, nothing structural. Was there anything used as mortar between the bottles?
- tomc1985 7y agoI think so, though I couldn't remember what it was
- bacon_waffle 7y agoA friend built a log cabin in Kentucky with different coloured glass bottles and jars interspersed in the chinking so that light comes through. Really neat effect.
- HenryBemis 7y agoAny chance you can share a photo? It would be really interesting to see the result on a "real" house. I see some fine examples on duckduckgo search results, but they look too extravagant: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=house+made+of+glass+bottles&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=house+made+of+glass+bottles...
- jojo14 7y agoFrom design point of view this is cool. However it is just a lame PR story. First glass is one of the rare materials that is nearly 100% recyclable it would be a shame to sore it as construction material. Second beer vendors way prefer aluminum which is way toxic for the environment but also remarkably recyclable. The best materials are those not produced furthermore those not littered. Why Heineken just don't fund garbage collector in such areas ? Why not an incentive when people return used bottles or others wastes ?
- nitrogen 7y agoIt was the 1960s/70s...
- lcam84 7y agoAs is taught in schools, we first reduce, then reuse and only then recycle, in that order. Here we are already giving emphasis to reuse, but it is better than just recycling.
- jimbob45 7y agoHad a teacher come up with Repair to add to those. You could see the pride on her face the day she brought it up, as if she’d unearthed the secret that would solve global waste.
- itronitron 7y agoI guess you could add Return to that list as well, although more likely to be applied to clothing than alcohol sales.
- jmiserez 7y agoA lot of returned items are simply destroyed. Or in the best case resold. So instead of returning you could Resell them, but that's basically the same as Reuse.
- stevekemp 7y ago
- markvdb 7y agoA large fraction of the one time use glass at least in Europe is recycled into foam glass [0]. A wonderfully versatile and ecological insulation material with slowly but surely increasing popularity. There's factories in at least Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Switzerland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_glass
- teruakohatu 7y agoAnyone know why it isn't more popular outside of Europe? seems like a perfect use for recycled glass that is not suitable for glass bottles.
- vanderZwan 7y agoMy guess would be that insulation wasn't taken that seriously until recently, and construction probably isn't the most fast-moving industry out there. It also has some extreme insulation properties: it doesn't look like it really absorbs or lets through any moisture or air. There might be cases where that isn't ideal. But living on the fourth floor of an old building with central heating in the basement does make me wish all the pipes were insulated with that material instead - it's absurd to have to wait many minutes for warm water to come out of the tap or shower because so much heat is lost along the way.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rini17 7y agoEven if it was insulated, you don't want warm water standing in pipes for a long time. This is usually solved by adding a pipe from the farthest point back to the boiler and circulation pump.
- vanderZwan 7y agoHuh, hadn't considered that, but yeah, that would definitely be a health risk. Thank you!
- itronitron 7y agoInstead of a message, you can include blueprints in the bottle.
- yuchi 7y agoMods, please add (2012) to the title. I remember when they published it at the time :)
- HenryBemis 7y agoCorrect: 05/11/2012 under Architecture, Features, Green Building, Green Materials, Innovation
- zbrozek 7y agoCloudflare strikes again. Access denied based on my IP address. Thanks!
- lstodd 7y agoYup. Same for me. What is it with them?
- _Microft 7y agoA very popular reuse of an item in Germany is using the glass that a certain brand of mustard comes in as drinking glasses. It even says, or at least used to say, on the label that this is a popular thing. Most people I know have a few of them. [0] https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=senf%20tommy%20glas https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=senf%20tommy%20glas
- m4rtink 7y agoCucumber glasses make nice (big) drinking glasses as well. :) You can even put a lid back on it if you fear it might spill (eq. on a cluttered desk).
- baud147258 7y agoThere's the same thing in France too
- moron4hire 7y agoHere in America, we use recycled glass jars to hold bent nails and rusty screws.
- _Microft 7y agoYes, that too, or for storing wood glue for example.
- rauhl 7y agoWhen I was a boy, we used to use empty mole jars the same way! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mole+jar+glass&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mole+jar+glass&t=h_&iax=images&ia=... It never occurred to me back then that it was unusual …
- flyingfences 7y agoThere's a brand (French, I think) of Jam [0] that's widely available in stores here in America; I've found that their jars make fine rocks glasses once the jam is all used up. [0] https://assets.bonappetit.com/photos/5981f6d764829819a9174b46/16:9/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Bonne-Maman-Lede.jpg https://assets.bonappetit.com/photos/5981f6d764829819a9174b4...
- koonsolo 7y agoThere's an error in the title: It should read "A water bottle that..." ;). Hahaha! Context: As a Belgian we like to make fun of Heineken not being a 'real' beer, because Belgian beers are way better. This is of course all relative because I know some Belgians picked Heineken as their favorite beer in blind tests (shame on them! ;)).
- reaperducer 7y agoAs they say, "What once was old is new again." Beer bottle houses weren't uncommon in the late 1800's and early 1900's in the mining towns of the American deserts. There wasn't enough water to make bricks, and wood was scarce and needed for other purposes. But where there are men, there is beer. So beer bottles were used to build homes. I've seen at least four, including one preserved by the State of Nevada in a ghost town outside Beatty.
- redsparrow 7y agoThe Twelfth Apostle Church in Berlin has some windows made out of gin bottles. After the second world war the church needed to replace some windows. The Gilka liquor factory nearby donated gin bottles. Exterior Photo: https://media04.berliner-woche.de/article/2018/01/30/8/8798_XXL.jpg?1563576966 https://media04.berliner-woche.de/article/2018/01/30/8/8798_... Interior: https://media04.berliner-woche.de/article/2018/01/30/6/8786_XXL.jpg?1563576966 https://media04.berliner-woche.de/article/2018/01/30/6/8786_... Article (in German): https://www.berliner-woche.de/schoeneberg/c-kultur/alfred-kothes-katzen-in-den-fenstern-der-zwoelf-apostel-kirche_a141839 https://www.berliner-woche.de/schoeneberg/c-kultur/alfred-ko...