Imagine a home that is self sufficient in water, energy, sewage and perhaps even food. Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. And it can be made from recycled material to boot. Libby Peake gets her hands dirty learning how to build an earthship

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.