The entry on Bottle Alley Glass has got me thinking about glass recycling.
Many moons ago I was travelling in Amsterdam and toured the Heineken brewery. I remember hearing about how, with a little cleaning out, they could reuse the bottles something like 17 times (I’ve probably grossly over-exaggerated that figure, but I can’t find anything to verify it and that’s the number that sticks in my head, so please let me know if you know something different). When at university (or college as Americans say) in Minnesota, we would buy cases of beer and then return all the bottles to get a deposit from the liquor store. The bottles would then be reused by the manufacturer. How did we get so far away from that? Does anyone still do it?
A few weeks ago on Grand Designs (I do love that show), they spotlighted a couple making an earth ship house (made from old tires/tyres and dirt) which included glass bottles embedded into the wall. Kevin gave them a lot of grief about that…it was more hippie than grand design, but even so, as it does everywhere, the glass added some nice sparkle to the space.
Taken to the extreme, in one of the many internet tangents I get myself on, I came across this Buddhist temple in Thailand made entirely of glass bottles…
Photo by Cheryl Kempton.
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