What do you do with your old glass bottles? Do you recycle? Do you sell them back at five cents a bottle? Or do you build a monumental, gorgeous work of art? The monks of Sisaket province, Thailand, decided to choose the third answer. Welcome to Wat Lan Kuad, or Temple of a Million Glass Bottles.
Situated roughly 370 miles northeast of Bangkok is the Wat Pa Maha Chedio KaewSisaket temple, nicknamed Wat Kuan Lad, which literally translates to "Temple of a Million Glass Bottles." That's because everything in the temple--and we mean everything--incorporates glass bottles.
From the outside of the temple, to the surrounding shelters; from the toilets, to the crematorium, literally everything in the temple is constructed from the ubiquitous bottles. (This beats the tower of beer bottles my roommates refused to take down from our kitchen table in college, by a long shot.)
Although seemingly fragile, the beer bottles are a surprisingly efficient building material: easy to clean, and sustainable, they let light in and their colors don't fade. So ironically, (or fittingly, depending) the glass bottle temple is not only ecologically sound, but also a building of extraordinary beauty.
And not part of the bottle goes to waste: even the bottle caps are incorporated into the building in the form of a beautiful mosaic. Talk about practicing what you preach.
The monks started collecting bottles back in 1984, to decorate their shelters. Once visitors saw the awesomeness of the monks' initial decorations, they started bringing more bottles to the temple, adding on until they reached today's current total of more than a million. A little something to think about while you're cleaning up from your next party. MR
del.icio.us
stumble
technorati
digg
reddit
twitter
