Upon learning that I was writing an article about building earthships, most of my friends simply nodded in a noncommittal way, indicating their complete unfamiliarity with the concept. One asked if I’d joined a cult. It’s clear from these reactions that the idea of an earthship – ‘radically sustainable’ housing normally made from used tyres and other waste that ‘floats free’ of the pipes and wires that connect most homes to sewage, electricity, gas and water services – has yet to gain much ground with the general populace in the UK.

And yet, earthships are not new. The ideas behind them started germinating in the mind of their creator, American architect Michael Reynolds, in the 1970s, and he built his first in 1988 in New Mexico. There are now more than 3,000 earthships worldwide, which incorporate the key design features of: passive solar/thermal temperature control; solar and wind electricity production; contained sewage treatment; use of natural and recycled building materials; water harvesting; and food production.

Though there are a few earthships in Europe, their uptake this side of the Atlantic has been slow. Kevan Trott, who saw Reynolds speak in 2003 and began advocating earthships immediately thereafter, notes: “I’ve been doing this for eight years now and I thought the popularity would have grown. But there is a lot of interest. It’s just transferring that interest into actual projects now.” Faced with ever dwindling resources – both in terms of building materials to make housing and energy to run it – people may well be forced to embrace this type of structure in the near future. In anticipation of such a development in consciousness and building practices, Schumacher College employed Trott to run a two-week, hands-on course on building earthships this spring.

Driving me out to the build site – an organic vegetable plot atop a hill with breath-taking views over the River Dart – Anna Lodge, Marketing Coordinator at Schumacher, explains that the Totnes-based college, which for 20 years has focused on developing ideas on sustainability, is now introducing skills-based learning courses on climate resilience. The aim, she says, is to impart practical knowledge to a community that can then apply it in the real world.

When I arrive, the community of students, volunteers, teachers and staff are hard at work filling tyres with earth for the very thick walls of the earthship; some stand on top of tyres wielding sledge hammers while others dig up more earth from what will be the interior of the building. I arrive on a Monday and the group has been at this task since the previous Tuesday. It is physical labour and quite time consuming (it takes 20-45 minutes to ram each tyre full of the right amount of earth), but now, everyone feels a sense of achievement because the walls are nearly completed. The tyres are simply stacked layer upon layer, and then cemented with a bit of lime; later they will be covered in natural clay adobe.

“For most people, the thing that is synonymous with an earthship is the tyres”, explains Trott. “But you can actually use any standard material, so long as it has that density and creates that thermal mass. If you’re going down the eco line, though, it’s nice to use something that’s readily available, is free, and is a waste material, especially as we burn them.”

Indeed, the UK currently burns 40 million tyres a year, enough to build tens of thousands of earthships (though finding tyres of the right and same size is crucial – it took Rosalind Turner, one of the course’s facilitators, more than three weeks to collect enough for the project). The small earthship being built on the course, which will be used as an agricultural store upon its completion, required an astounding 300 tyres for its walls. Trott, who worked with Reynolds to build his own three-bedroom earthship in France in 2007, says his required 750.

Procuring so many used tyres is no easy task, but even more of a hurdle at the moment is getting permission from the Environment Agency (EA) to use them. Inga Page, Schumacher’s Programme Manager, who dealt with the EA in preparation for the course, explains: “Tyres are hazardous waste, so technically you need to have a hazardous waste licence if you do anything with them, and that costs something like £20,000. We only wanted to do this as a one-off, so eventually they came up with the idea that we could do it as a trial. Basically, they want us to measure the soil for contaminants leaching out of the tyres.”

It’s not just the threat of leaching that makes the EA apprehensive about using single tyres in walls (it already permits the use of tyre bales in construction), but also the issue of flytipping, which is rife in the sometimes seedy world of used tyre handling; as Trott puts it: “Dubious people could at any time say, ‘Oh, we’re building a house in that field’ and have 1,000 tyres dumped there, which would stay there forever.”

So, if Schumacher’s earthship proves a success as expected – a ‘bloody great membrane’ should protect the soil from contaminants – does that mean permissions will start rolling in from the EA? Not necessarily. Page explains: “They’re very carefully saying that it’s not going to set a precedent, but it certainly will be another step along the way.”

This is not actually the UK’s first earthship, though. One of about equal size was completed as a visitor centre in Fife in 2004, and a larger community centre earthship in Brighton opened in 2005. A country park outside Glasgow was also due to open an earthship visitor centre in 2010, but it burned down through arson (the unprotected tyre walls withstood the flames just fine while the timber around them fell) shortly before completion. What’s more, The Lizard project, a compound of 16 one- to three-bedroom earthships, which would have been the first in the UK to be used as homes, was given planning permission in Brighton in 2007. Unfortunately, the land on which it was meant to be built is protected by a 19th-century covenant that forbids building of any kind, and the council has so far been unsuccessful in lifting it.

Trott, who was involved in the project, takes heart because it demonstrated it would be possible to insure and get a mortgage for such a home. Trott’s background is in more conventional building and when asked to compare earthship building with ‘normal’ construction, he says: “Well, all the planning aspects and the gathering of materials require the same sort of effort. We’re building with tyres and that takes a lot more labour than building with reinforced concrete or bricks and blocks. Earthships use some weird and wonderful materials, but other than that there isn’t a lot of difference.”

In addition to tyres, the earthship being built on the course will incorporate recycled wood in its roof, recycled window frames (the entire south-facing wall is glass-lined
to increase solar gain; in residential earthships, this allows for food production throughout the year), and some glass bottle bricks, as well as jars and plastic bottles, for decorative internal walls. While we’re eating lunch, Page turns up straight from the tip with piles of used carpet which will be used along with recycled railway sleepers in what will be the turf-covered roof. Trott explains that for a fully-fledged earthship, there are even more options for reuse – the roof insulation in his is predominantly used clothing, for example.

Because of this use of waste materials, “People do think they should be able to build them for nothing”, Trott says. “That’s not true because there are aspects of them that cost money – you’ve still got to buy solar PV and solar thermal and so on.” Pressed for a sum, Trott comes up with the ballpark figure of about £1,000 a square metre for a fully sustainable earthship including some labour (a two- to three-bedroom earthship would take a professional crew three to four months to build). That figure is slightly higher than for ‘normal’ housing, but Trott points out that “it’s not a like-for-like comparison” as earthships require no heating or cooling, generate their own electricity, capture their own water (which is potable when filtered) and deal with their own sewage (either through the use of composting toilets, or, in the case of flush toilets, through the use of enhanced septic tanks that eventually feed water into black water planters). Once the earthship is built, “you start recouping the benefits straight away”, Trott says. And indeed, it should be clean sailing from there on out.