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Comment by jacob171714 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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

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

Having toured a couple, they also smell like farts.

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