This tidbit is too intriguing to pass up. We know monks make beer, why not make their temples from beer bottles?
TreeHugger reports on a monastery in Thailand made from over one million green and brown beer bottles. According to TreeHugger, the green bottles came from Heineken beer; the brown from a local beer called Chang.
Evidently in the early 1960s, the Heineken Brewing Company explored ways to reshape its bottles into useful building blocks. Heineken aborted its efforts. Somehow many green bottles were discarded in Thailand.
Heineken bottles or not, a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand used over one million discarded green and brown bottles to build its temple. The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple is located roughly 370 miles northeast of Bangkok in Sisaket province.
A Reuters article provides a bit more background on the inspiration behind the structure. In 1984, Monks began building walls with discarded bottles as a way to decorate their shelters. People liked what they saw and began donating their own bottles. Subsequently a temple, pagoda, and toilets grew up bottle-by-bottle. Locals call the temple “Wat Lan Kuad” or “Temple of Million Bottles.”
Buddhist monks do not consume alcohol, but clearly others around them do. One monk told Reuters that they intend to keep making buildings from bottles, “the more bottles we get; the more buildings we make.”
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