In 1905, a Nevada miner collected 50,000 discarded bottles in less than six months; he turned them into a three-room house

In the middle of Nevada’s desert, where timber was scarce and mining towns could disappear almost as quickly as they appeared, an unlikely building material began piling up in the streets of Rhyolite. Discarded glass bottles, emptied in the town’s saloons and homes, were usually little more than rubbish. Around 1905, the elderly miner began collecting the bottles, gathering tens of thousands in just a few months.

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