Environment

A Buddhist temple is built using 1.5million recycled beer bottles

by Amy Judd | February 18, 2009 at 12:14 pm

652 views | 33 Recommendations | 10 comments

A Buddist Temple inthe northeast of Thailand has been built using only recycled beer bottles. The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple got their bottles from the nearby community and they had already built shelters in this way as well.

It is sometimes called Wat Lan Kuad or 'Temple of A Million Bottles' and they provide the building blocks for everything. It took about 1.5 million recycled bottles to build the temple and the monks said they will keep collecting recycable bottles so that they can keep building structures.

Recycling doesn't stop at building the temple's buildings - mosaics around the temple, predominantly of Buddha, are made out of bottle caps.

Besides being ego-friendly, the disused bottles don't fade, provide good lighting and are easy to clean.

'The monks at Wat Lan Kuad started collecting the bottles they needed to build their temple complex in 1984,' said one tourist at the site.

1 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon

recommend This comment thread is now closed

lefty_liberated

at 13:38 on February 18th, 2009

so cool

Karenke4

at 13:45 on February 18th, 2009

Wow, this is awesome!

Pythiian1

at 14:55 on February 18th, 2009

Great - nice photos from original source

Barry Artiste

at 19:25 on February 18th, 2009

Gotta hand it to the Buddists they are pretty savy in so many ways

Rhonda J Mangus

at 19:29 on February 18th, 2009

Absolutely amazing, Amy. Thanks for posting!

Paschen

at 20:13 on February 18th, 2009

In Niger some one build his house with Beer Cans Max Schtrot did build that one, and I saw another such building in Arizona, but never a temple before.

lowjumpingfrog

at 20:55 on February 18th, 2009

Glass is a fantastic material to recycle. Ever imagine what the pottery cultures of the past would have thought of glass or for that mater plastic containers? We just blast these things in the bin and hope to never see them again. Just imagine handing one of these discarded containers to a person of yester-year who made clay pots for a living. Damm, I wish I could recycle these things back in time. These containers are really valuable, we just don't realize the value or perhaps even appreciate it. We can learn something from these creative people building shelter from valuable materials. Perhaps in time we will learn?

lowjumpingfrog has contributed a photo to this story.