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Great documentary called Garbage Warrior for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
I want one of these so bad
I think I’ve heard there are concerns about recycled rubber off-gassing, but otherwise I think it’s a really cool idea as well. The sculpted-looking exterior gets bonus points for style.
Perhaps, but they’re old tires, not new. Most of the outgassing happened years ago. But these structure are designed to regulate temperature with constant airflow. If there are any fumes, they’re going outside.
Step one - get a shovel.
Is step two get friends with more shovels?
Probably!
Made sure to visit earthship central outside of Taos, NM and my favorite part of the architecture is the permanent garden in the front. One definitely needs to make peace with the odor, but I love the smell of a greenhouse anyway.
Is it the rubber that smells?
no, the tires are well sealed behind adobe. The smell is from the huge amount of super healthy wet soil all along the windows, its the primary thermal sink for the passive solar and there is a LOT of it. IIRC, the guide said there was about 10 cubic yards in the planters, which is a standard dump truck.
I eventually figured out that NM stands for New Mexico but for several seconds there my brain would only give me “North Marolina”.
You never know. It could be New Mork or North Makota, Nest Mirginia or even Nomtana
Nom nomtana
Unfortunately, zoning laws make these impossible in most places. The side of me that believes in individual liberty thinks that if you own the property, it should be your damn business what you build there. The part of me that believes in having a functional society sees all the ways that kind of lack of regulation could be abused.
I considered trying to incorporate a lot of ideas from this and build a place here in Japan, but the insurance side of it made things basically impossible, especially given how prevalent large earthquakes are here. That’s not to say there’s nothing to take away from it here, it’s just that certain materials and design choices shouldn’t be done here. There are a couple of earthships in Japan, but IIRC they’re not insured at all and every single one has to be approved by an independent architect and engineer or be in questionable legal status.
The tires are a really terrible idea that makes it much harder to ram the rammed earth. That increases the labor demands of something that’s already extremely labor intensive (not to mention what trying to swing a sledgehammer at an angle into the wall of a tire you’re standing over probably does to your back).
They also can only really be used in the desert.
But the way the various parts of the earth ship support each other’s functions is pretty good. We really ought to make our city’s systems work like that though, instead of building isolated self-contained houses.
My first thought was I thought this only works in the desert. I sometimes thing cities should be in the desert rather than using more fertile land though. Then again deserts have their place.
Its true that earthships really only work in the desert. But I think that there are analogous processes that work at the city scale that are much more adaptable. Also I think the general ethos of feeding the waste products or side effects from one process into the inputs of another is applicable to a wide range of things. For instance:
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Earth ships use thermal mass to even out the desert fluctuations between hot day and cold night, keeping the house at a comfortable medium temperature. Because of the square cube law if you build your thermal mass storage at the city scale it is actually possible to store thermal energy across summer / winter fluctuations without much loss. Such thermal stores can be connected to buildings through a city thermal grid. A system like this is already being built already being built in Vantaa Finland, and while to my knowledge this hasn’t been done before I see no reason you couldn’t have a cold store on the other side of the city for cooling in the summer. Of course these systems aren’t totally passive like the Earth ship, but they have coefficient of performance of around 30 (that is for every 1 kWh of electricity you spend pumping glycol solution through pipes you transfer 30 kWh of thermal energy between seasons). Compare that to the CoP of 3 to 6 for heat pumps.
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An earth ship uses a greenhouse to enhance its solar thermal capture and grow food for its inhabitants at the same time. In certain places like Spain, China, and the Netherlands they are beginning to use greenhouses for farming on a large scale, enclosing square miles of land within an envelope. Experiments have been done with using seasonal thermal energy storage to heat greenhouses, so I think you could potentially tie such greenhouses into a thermal grid as described above. If they were double walled and soap bubble insulated you might be able to keep them warm all year around or even have them act as net positive solar thermal collectors.
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An earthship uses gray water to water the plants in its greenhouse. There is a sewage treatment process called supercritical water oxidation that produces, as its outputs, mineral water, CO2, and heat. The process destroys parasites, bacteria and viruses, drug metabolites, and even “forever chemicals”, as its akin to incineration. The mineral water doesn’t contain nitrates, but it does have dissolved phosphorus and potassium compounds, making it a sort of fertilizer. CO2 can be added to greenhouses to increase plant’s photosynthetic efficiency and raise their yield. Finally, the heat can of course be used to help heat the greenhouse.
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The earth ship gathers water from its roof. This can be done in an urban context too. Additional, in the summer the thermal exchangers that pull heat from the aforementioned greenhouses would have water condense on them (from the evapotranspiration of the plants that were watered with mineral water). In the winter I think there would instead be condensation on the greenhouse roof. In either case the water could be captured and reused for drinking.
Of course to make things like the thermal grid practicable you’d want to have a fairly dense urban area (to decrease the length of piping needed to serve each person).
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