13,500 bottles of wine are the wall
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What do YOU do with your empty wine bottles? I lament the demise of my local recycling every time I chuck mine into the trash.
But Peter Little in Western Australia has found a way of taking recycling into his own hands–he’s building a house out of empties. 13,500 used wine bottles to be precise. He’s filling them up with water since he claims that will provide insulation. “Water is probably, I think one of the miracle building materials of this century which nobody is using,” he told ABC News online. “From our point of view it can store more energy, heat or cool than any material we know.”
So let’s see, at a rate of one a day, it would take 37 years to drink that many bottles! Hopefully he was able to collect some from local restaurants to speed up the process!
Via Josh at Pinotblogger we now have the above picture of the Little house and links to other bottle houses. I’d bet their occupants don’t throw stones.
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On March 22nd, 2007 at 10:07 am ,Doug Smith wrote:
Are you in NYC? Then your glass bottles are supposed to be recycled, as of April 1, 2004. For full info:
http://www.nrdc.org/cities/recycling/gnyc.asp?gclid=CMivwafUiIsCFQwbgQodkDZ-Wg
On March 22nd, 2007 at 10:26 am ,Dr. Vino wrote:
Doug thanks for the tip! I live just outside the city where I guess my only recycling option is to save bottles for my next house, Australian style.
On July 11th, 2007 at 5:48 am ,Darby Higgs wrote:
Using bottles just once is a very wasteful practice, especially for everyday wines. The production of glass is an energy intensive process, so is recycling which involves melting the glass to make a new container
If you are a serious winelover who wants to see what will happen to a wine over an extended period then fair enough. But most wines are consumed within a couple of days of purchase. There are alternatives. Several Australian companies are successfully using reusable container systems to bring everyday wines to the consumer with a lower environmental impact. See for example http://www.rewine.com.au and http://www.bigbottlewine.com/