Wait! Don’t throw away that used wine bottle. Just close your eyes, open your mind, and envision all of the new ways you can repurpose that bottle. Instead of contributing to the landfill, or even sending the bottle to your local recycling center, there are many types of recycled bottle art that can add beauty and functionality to your home and property.
Did you know that glass does not break down in the elements? It can survive in a landfill for, well, we don’t really know…maybe thousands of years. Made from silica, same as sand, a glass bottle is much like a rock. In fact there is a 1,685 year old wine bottle in the History Museum of the Pfalz, in Speyer, Germany that dates back to 325 A.D. (It still contains wine, though you probably wouldn’t want to drink it.)
All over the world people have been finding ways to upcycle glass bottles for thousands of years. At times for architectural and decorative interest and sometimes from necessity, beer and wine bottle art has been incorporated into everything from actually building homes to making houseplant watering systems.
Intriguing Examples of Recycled Bottle Art
Here are just a few examples of creative recycling found in a quick search:
* A beautiful Thai temple built from over a million beer bottles.
* Beautiful outdoor grills using wine bottles.
* Photos of houses from the early 1900s in the old American west made from beer bottles (not so much for the purpose of recycling, but because lumber and other building materials were hard to come by in that area.)
* Even a Christmas tree made from green bottles stacked in circular layers
Artistic Recycling on a Simpler Scale
* Hummingbird feeders
* Wine bottle cheese trays (flattened wine bottles used as appetizer trays or spoon rests) These can even be custom etched for special occasions!
* Plant watering globes (insert a water filled wine bottle upside down into a plant watering stake)
* Wine chimes (lovely wind chimes made from cross slices of a bottle)
* Necklaces, earrings, and other jewelry
* Sculpture and decorative pieces for the home
* Lamps of many descriptions
Make up your mind today to keep your empty bottles out of the landfill. Whether you decide to send them to your local recycling facility, collect them to build your next home, or use them for wine bottle art pieces you can know that your old bottle is realizing its full potential and not laying around aimlessly taking up space in the dump for the next thousand or more years.
Patrece McCrary is freelance writer and a long-time educator with a passion for teaching young children and a love of art.
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