The Heineken "World Bottle" was never manufactured in large quantities.
Good intentions run deep in the Heineken family. In 1864, when the Dutch brewery’s founder, Gerhard Heineken, worked to convince his wealthy mother to bankroll his brewery start-up, his pitch was that there would be fewer displays of drunken behavior if there were a lower-alcohol alternative to gin. It is with the same spirit of societal improvement that his grandson Alfred “Freddy” Heineken (1923 – 2002) came up with the concept of the World Bottle (which became known as the “WoBo” for short), a beer bottle that could be used to build structures for human habitation.
While on a worldwide tour of Heineken distributors, Freddy visited a factory in the West Indian island of Curacao where he was dismayed to find the beaches of this impoverished island in the Dutch Lesser Antilles littered with discarded beer bottles. In most countries at the time, beer was sold in “returnable” bottles that would make their way back to the factory and refilled up to 30 times. The economy of Curacao, however, lacked the resources to do so and the bottle-strewn beaches were the unfortunate result. Freddy’s solution? Create a Heineken bottle that could do double-duty as a building material. Freddy teamed up with young architect N. John Habracken to design, “a brick that holds beer.”
After a variety of designs they settled on a square bottle, which had a neck that would fit into a cavity in the bottom of another bottle, and interlocking pegs on the sides. Freddy and Habracken approached Royal Leerdam to produce a limited run of 60,000. The WoBo were produced in two sizes, the dimensions of which matched a standard full brick and half brick. Because they were square, the world bottles required more glass to be structurally stable, and were more expensive, slower to produce, and heavier to transport.
Heineken eventually abandoned the WoBo because company managers and marketing advisers thought it would damage the brand’s image. At the time, Heineken was the number-one imported beer sold in the U.S., and it’s iconic round green bottle (another of Freddy’s ideas) was seen by management as a success story not to be tinkered with. Potential news photos of recycled WoBo shacks in the third world were deemed a potential liability for Heineken’s new global success.
In an excellent article in Architecture magazine, Habracken recalled, “They didn’t think it was a good idea to associate with rubbish and poor people.” Still, the architect on the project persevered. Habracken managed to convince Freddy to revive the WoBo idea in 1970, and he teamed up with designer Rinus van den Berg to produce a building constructed almost completely of recycled products. It included oil drums, roofs of VW buses and of course, the WoBo, however, the building never materialized because they were unable to find sponsorship for the project.
A green glass WoBo wall at the Heineken Museum in Amsterdam.
In the end, only two WoBo structures were ever built: a shack at the Heineken estate (which was torn down in 2002 after Freddy’s death) and a wall made from WoBos at the Heineken Museum in Amsterdam. Today there are only a handful of individual WoBos left in existence.
Because of its stuctural, optical, and practical qualities, glass is frequently linked to both utopian architecture and green design. However, even Habracken noted, “glass is not a friendly material. The inhabitants could never even have put a nail into a wall!” Ultimately none of the WoBo’s promises of helping the impoverished were ever fulfilled. And though 60,000 bottles of this ingenious design were produced, the population of Curacao isn’t living in an emerald citiy, nor does every drinking party resulting in a new home addition.
Although unrealized, the WoBo dream still stands as a pioneering example of sustainable design and enlightened industrial recycling. And although brand managers helped to kill the WoBo project, they nevertheless seem to never completely forget the concept. A 2008 print advertising campaign “built” landmark city skylines of Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and New York City out of Heineken bottles. If only we had stayed New Amsterdam . . . .
For more on this story, see John Drury’s article “BYOB: Reconsidering the bottle as building material” (GLASS 112, Fall 2008) in the print publication.
—Kim Harty
