In 1956, Tressa Prisbrey turned discarded bottles into a 15-building folk-art village in California

When Tressa Prisbrey was 60 years old, she wanted to build a small shed for her large pencil collection. In 1956, she found that concrete blocks cost more than she could afford. Rather than give up, the California resident began collecting thousands of discarded glass bottles and household items from a nearby landfill. Over the next 25 years, she turned a one-third-acre lot in Simi Valley into Bottle Village, a well-known folk-art site with 15 structures, shrines, mosaic paths and sculpture gardens. According to historical records kept by Preserve Bottle Village, the non-profit organisation that looks after the site, the project began soon after Prisbrey and her husband parked their trailer on Cochran Street. After buying the land, she had little money left for building materials, so she turned to a local dump to find glass bottles.Constructing structures out of landfill scrapsSoda bottles usually had a two-cent deposit, so people rarely threw them away. Prisbrey instead collected discarded milk of magnesia bottles, alcohol bottles and other glass containers. She mixed mortar by hand and placed the bottles horizontally in the walls, with their bases facing outwards. The glass allow...