In the early 1960s, visiting the Dutch Antilles (now the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten), Dutch businessman Alfred “Freddy” Heineken encountered a surprising problem: waste. The islands lacked proper infrastructure to collect and reuse empty beer bottles, a significant portion of which were his own Heineken brand. The sheer volume of discarded … Continue reading From Bottles to Bricks: Heineken’s 1964 Effort to Build Homes with Beer Bottles