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Nice to see this on here – I used to live next door to Oli Hodge in Brighton, back when we built this:

https://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/earthship-brighton

and he started filming what became Garbage Warrior

Personally, I love the overall concept and particularly the systems packages…but the actual basic construction technique is not actually that efficient. Mixed cob/strawbale is a much faster, easier way to go, and requires less environmental disruption than a standard earthship build (there is still a relatively large concrete component in an earthship – we used an “eco-crete” in Brighton, but I haven’t followed developments in that area, as I am more interested in cob these days).

Mike R is awesome though.

For more on the lowest-environmental-impact version of cob, see http://www.cobcottage.com and their book, The Hand-Sculpted House.

There are other ways to do cob (“tractor cob”) – but this involves more damage to the surrounding land. Ianto at Cob Cottage makes the point it takes many years for the soil to recover after the compaction involved by the use of heavy machinery, and so they espouse only human-powered builds.

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