On Sun, 3 Jan 1999, Ken Follett wrote:

> Our basement is filling up with empty beer bottles that I dream
> of building a garden wall with.
[...]
> Which brings up that at one time Heineken designed a
> bottle where the neck would nest in the body of another bottle for
> easier building. -- ][<en Follett

The story of this is told in the book "Garbage Housing".  Supposedly one
of the Heineken family was visiting a Third World location and noted the
poor housing conditions alongside huge mounds of discarded bottles. He
thought empty bottles might make a far better building material than
tarpaper and cardboard.

So, he set engineers to work designing a bottle that would interlock with
its neighbors to create a simple building technology.  They came up with
one, but the marketing department rejected this design as being "too
feminine" for a beer bottle.  So, they settled on a squarish form that
could be used with mortar to build something akin to glass block walls.

The bottles were manufactured but for some reason never sold -- perhaps
the marketing department objected again.  The book says that the bottles
are still stored in a warehouse in Rotterdam.  Other sources (I forget
where) deny this, saying that the bottles were recycled into new glass
years ago.

Supposedly, too, a small building on the Heineken family estate was built
of some of these bottles.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com/