Earthship Temples – Sustainable Buddhist Temples

The Earthship is making a comeback in an unlikely place – Buddhist temples. Earthship Temples Built with Recyclables Earthships: For a while, they were a hot trend. We remembered what we have learned about the sustainable houses built from trash. The Earthships are mainly produced from natural, recycled and upcycled materials; old tires and aluminum cans, and glass bottles. They are not only self-sustainable, but they can thermoregulate themselves and are generally cheap to build. Earthships tend to be produced by those who want to live an alternative lifestyle, often in remote areas where there are no utilities, to begin with. Now, add a new level to that: The building of sustainable Religious Buddhist Temples.

Despite the efforts of Pope Francis and his “Laudado Si” essay about the perils of Climate changes, it seems that the Buddhist decided to take concrete actions about that.

Now, these 0therworldly “Earthships” meet other genuinely earthly and peculiar structures: The Sustainable Buddhist Temples.

Two Earthship Buddhist temples, Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew in Thailand and Wat Charok Padang in Malaysia, are built entirely with glass bottles, and because of their unique aesthetic characteristics, they have become popular tourist destinations as well as examples of waste recycling.

Wat Charok Padang, also known as the “Glass Bottle Temple,” is located in the state of Kedah in northwestern Malaysia near the border with Thailand. Inspired by Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew, the head of the temple, Datuk Phrcaathikan Nuemarutthammo Nuemchaiwan, adopted the idea of using a combination of bottles and cement to build the primary structures of the temple.

The Earthship temple is constructed using more than one million bottles. It’s located in Khun Han city in the southern part of the Srisaket province in northeastern Thailand. Khun Han is about 28 km from the Cambodian border. These monks of Sisacet province gathered a million bottles of beer and established the ‘Wat Pa Maha Chedi Cave’ temple. From this temple’s bathroom to crematoriums are made of greenery of all beer. This temple built of green and brown glass bottles is a different example of artwork. The designs created from these bottles in the walls will be in your heart. Seeing this beautiful temple made of these spare bottles, one thing became clear that the garbage does not happen, only some essential things are in the wrong place.

Since the bottles are durable, inexpensive and relatively easy to obtain, using them as a building material has offered a new way to reduce the waste of glass bottles in the area. The initiative drew praise from the monastics and local people. In 1999, Wat Charok Padang was built using 200,000 bottles of green and brown glass collected by local villagers. The Charok Padang Siamese Temple in Sik, Kedah still attracts visitors from near and far. Situated at 80km from Alor Setar, this Siamese temple incorporated the bottles to its design. 

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