[jacob171714]

Its best to take and use the principles of it in another house. I personally don't want a bunch of tires breaking down and leaking chemicals and fumes into my house over a couple decades. Also much of the savings are from using your labor or volunteer/intern labor rather than paying someone else.

[seltzered_]

There's a good critique of the earthship from a decade ago called 'hacking the earthship' : http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Earthship-Search-Earth-Shelter...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170505101559/http://archinia.c...

[zo1]

Its such a shame that a great sustainability project is ruined by some weird drive to "recycle" something stupid like tires. Just buy the effing bricks, have a construction company do it, have a factory safely recycle the tyres, and we can all save the environment. It strikes me as a very, for lack of a better term, misguided "hippy" commune kinda thing.

[datavirtue]

Yeah, and it will never get approved in any of the 10,000 zoning districts in the US. You should grab a random township zoning PDF and read the entire thing before even thinking about building something under 1600 sq ft, and that doesn't use materials from your local building supplier.

[spacecadet]

People have built earthships without tires to great lengths and personal energy expenditure.

[jacob171714]

If its worth it for you then thats great. But at least the original earth ship requires packing like a hundred or two tires without power tools. There are machines that make bricks out of earth and there is probably a way to use recycled material to hold those to together in the same way as tires

[RosanaAnaDana]

Having toured a couple, they also smell like farts.