The argument for building with tires. April 2010

Building with used tires seems like a sensible plan.They are ubiquitous. Producing and distributing them consumes considerable resources but “re-purposing” them gives them a second life, stretching the carbon footprint of the materials and energy expended in initial production.

And what do we do with used tires anyway? Once their usefulness has ended we want them as far from us as possible. They become trash-heap bound in the length of time it takes to punch in AAA. Keeping them around when their usefulness has expired is considered hazardous to health and environment given their potential to pollute our rivers or breed deadly mosquitoes on our lawns.

Better to hide them in walls, like our ancestors did with old newspapers. I understand from my conversations with Adam Howland, primary builder with the non-profit Long Way Home, that using tires packed with earth will improve the thermal mass of any wall to an R value as high as 50.

When Long Way Home builds with tires, as they are now doing in the construction of a vocational school in Comalapa, Guatemala, (http://www.longwayhomeinc.org) they are following indications set out by architect Michael Reynolds.

Reynolds has written 7 books on using “harvested” or “indigenous materials”  such as tires and aluminum cans. He has compiled knowledge acquired over the past 35 years in a series of books entitled “Earthship, How to Build Your Own“, volumes 1-7. by Michael E. Reynolds, Solar Survival Press.

Reynolds makes good sense when he argues that the current custom of building with trees is essentially self-destructive. He notes that trees are a primary source of oxygen, an element necessary to the continuity of life itself. Building with wood is like depleting a life-giving resource without a plan for replenishment. He recommends instead that building materials meet life-giving criteria.

Reynolds has compiled the following checklist of requirements for materials:

• Indigenous. Materials that do not need to be shipped long distances are ideal, saving wasteful energy expenditure.
• Able to be fashioned with little or no energy. This keeps these materials available to the common person.
• Mass. Materials need to be able to store heat required to provide an environment that can support plants and animals (humans).
• Durability. Reynolds states that buildings should have durability built in rather than “painted on,” as is the case with wood where we are required to treat it with chemicals to prevent its porous and biodegradable nature from getting ahead of us.
• Resilient. Being able to move horizontally and shake without breaking is an important protection against earthquakes.
• Low specific skill requirements. Ideal materials would be easily fashioned into an essential building block without requiring complicated technical skills. Therefore, building becomes accessible to all people and can be democratically accessed without concern for technical skills, education or investments in expensive energy dependent machinery.

So I decide that tires meet these requirements and can be used in the construction of our new two-car garage. We will remove a number of used tires from the waste stream, make something useful from low-tech materials considered trash, improve the insulation factor of our walls, gain protection against earthquakes and the walls will probably outlast our home.