Heineken WoBo

Alfred Heineken was visiting his beer factories around the world, when he found many beer bottles littering the beaches of the Caribbean island of Curaçao. He discovered that the island's lower-class lacked affordable building materials and had inadequate housing, so he asked Dutch architect N John Habraken to design what he called "a brick that holds beer". Thus was born the stackable Heineken WoBo (World Bottle), which has been used to build bottle walls for houses. This is a fantastic example of upcycling, a design strategy fostered by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their book Cradle to Cradle.