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Would you live in a house made of empty beer cans, old tires and discarded soda bottles? Garbage like this is what renegade architect Michael Reynolds transforms into "earthships" — eco-friendly homes with surprisingly pleasing aesthetics and tiny (or nonexistent) power bills.
Author of six books on green building and energy-independent, eco-friendly homes, and the subject of the Earth Cinema Circle film "Garbage Warrior", Reynolds has experimented for 35 years with radically sustainable architecture and off-the-grid, energy independent communities.
We talked with him about his claim to fame and the solutions he's contributing in the race against global warming and environmental degradation.
Q: How did you get the moniker “Garbage Warrior?”
Reynolds: Oliver Hodge, the producer of the film "Garbage Warrior" came up with that name. I’ve been called King of Garbage, Garbage Architect … things like that. After the tsunami, when we went to India, the locals called us Tsunami Warriors.
What is an earthship?
Earthships are a highly energy-efficient, resilient and earthquake-proof method of building. We use mostly discarded materials rather than new materials. Studies show that an earthship-style home can last a thousand years.
You can rent one of our earthships in Taos, New Mexico. We also offer workshops on building with byproducts of our society, and on related topics like solar thermal heating/cooling and solar and wind electricity.
What inspired you to build with tires and mud?
Everything we are doing comes from a response to the media. As early as the 1970s, I read that we are running out of fuel and water. I was inspired to create a way of life that responds to those problems.
There are mountains of tires around the world, and no one knows what to do with them. Hawaii actually ships its used tires to California. Once I added the concept of thermal mass by beating dirt into a tire, I created a low tech, readily available and easy to learn method of building. I couldn’t have conceived of a better material than tires to build with.
What other materials go into your earthships?
We now go to the garbage dumps and harvest the mountain of appliances, refrigerators, washing machines and dryers — we take the baked-n enamel covers and use the panels as scaled roofing to help capture the water. We are constantly finding new materials that are thrown away that can be built into houses.
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