The SearchVoat Forum

Package design as building material
On at least one occasion, a bottle was designed to later serve as a glass brick. Excerpted from Inhabit.com “HEINEKEN WOBO: The brick that holds beer,” by Ali Kriscenski:
…the idea of turning waste into useful products came to life brilliantly in 1963 with the Heineken WOBO (world bottle). Envisioned by beer brewer Alfred Heineken and designed by Dutch architect John Habraken, the “brick that holds beer”…Mr. Heineken’s idea came after a visit to the Caribbean where he saw two problems: beaches littered with bottles and a lack of affordable building materials. The WOBO became his vision to solve both the recycling and housing challenges that he had witnessed on the islandsThe final WOBO design came in two sizes—350 and 500 mm versions that were meant to lay horizontally, interlock and layout in the same manner as ‘brick and mortar’ construction. One production run in 1963 yielded 100,000 bottles some of which were used to build a small shed on Mr. Heineken’s estate in Noordwijk, Netherlands…Despite the success of the first “world bottle” project, the Heineken brewery didn’t support the WOBO and the idea stalled…
Today, the shed at the Heineken estate and a wall made of WOBO at the Heineken Museum in Amsterdam are the only structures where the ‘beer brick’ was used.

‘Rising Moon’ is the name of the installation by Daydreamers Design in the ‘Wonderland 2013 Lantern Festival” at Victoria Park in Hong Kong. This item, in the form of an hemisphere, is composed of plastic bottles illuminated by LEDs

“Rising Moon” is a hemispheric installation measuring 10 metres in height and 20 metres in diameter. In addition to about 7,000 recycled plastic bottles, other recyclable and reusable materials, including steel frames, cable wires and energy-saving LED light bulbs, are used to construct the lantern. The lantern will sit on a pool of water, where lighting effects will allow it to join its reflection to produce the different lunar phases. After the exhibition, the plastic bottles will be collected by the Yan Oi Tong EcoPark Plastic Resources Recycling Centre for recycling.