This Gorgeous Thai Temple Is Made From Recycled Beer Bottles

Flickr/Mark Fischer

Four hundred miles outside of Bangkok, Thailand’s most inventive temple is also one of its most sustainable. The entire intricate temple is made out of recycled beer bottles.

The temple has a few names. Officially, it’s Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew, but often you’ll hear it called Wat Lan Kuad or the Temple of a Million Bottles.

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You might be thinking that a million bottles sounds impossible. And you’d be right. There are actually more than 1.5 million beer bottles in the temple.

The entire process began in the 1980s when Buddhist monks began collecting empty beer bottles. They recycled enough to build 20 buildings, including the main temple, prayer spaces, a water tower, a crematorium, infrastructure for visiting tourists and small bungalows where the monks live.

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The unique building materials actually make the perfect bricks for constructing a temple. The green Heineken bottles and brown Thai Chang bottles let light shine through — perfect for creating a bright, meditative atmosphere.

And it’s not just glass mosaics. In order to reuse every part of the bottle, the monks even used beer caps to create statues of Buddha.

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Even better, the monks of the Temple of a Million Bottles are still collecting bottles to expand the temple and create even more recycled art.

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If you’re looking for a sustainable (and off-the-beaten-path) outing, The Temple of a Million Bottles is located near the Cambodian border with Thailand. It’s a seven-hour drive from Bangkok and a three-hour drive from Cambodia’s Siem Reap.