Old tires are carcinogenic and microplastic nightmares. One should be very cautious about living in structures made of them.
I really like the idea but I get the feeling that the Earthship org is a sex cult. The guy running it exclusively recruits college aged people and he sends the men off to ram earth in tires. I think the idea needs to be modernized. Using a sledgehammer to ram earth is extremely laborious and the whole "only use found materials" thing is kinda dumb.
From what I've watched/read the builds are using at most 50% recycled materials, which is still pretty good.
As for the cultish aspect, I think anyone can enroll in their "courses", and considering how many tires need ramming nobody would say no to lots of helping hands. I haven't heard of any abuses or scandals regarding those, but feel free to share them as a warning to anyone who might be intrested in attending their courses, including me.
I think when they invented the idea back in the 60s/70s that it was a great idea to just use found materials. Land is expensive enough - so if you could just build an awesome house out of crap... then go for it!
But today we have new green building technologies. Like... they used to just use tar and gravel shingles to roof the buildings and that was where water was shed into their drinking water cisterns. Yuck. We know better. Why are they still advocating for using rammed earth tires? We have new green cements that are low psi but they suck CO2 out of the air and they have plenty of thermal mass.
Honestly I want to see the next generation of earthship inspired dwellings. Use modern materials and construction techniques. Maybe one off-shoot will be 3d printed earthships.
'Ship' means 'vessel for navigation' so I do not like - if it doesn't travel
The earth is winding its way through the universe. Then again we don't exactly have a steering wheel or brake pedal.
We are navigating to a better more sustainable world.
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