Building Codes and “carbon-zero homes” (1)
USINFO | 2013-11-01 13:51

 

Michael Reynolds — rebel, environmentalist, visionary — has spent the last 40 years challenging the architectural establishment and local zoning codes to build “off-grid” houses that require little or no energy to construct and produce no greenhouse gases. Reynolds calls them “Earthships.” They are self-sustaining structures that make maximum use of renewable resources — sun, wind, rain, and snow — for heat, cooling, light, collecting and pumping water, treating sewage, even growing food in indoor greenhouses. Thanks to partnerships with individuals and with municipal and national governments, about 2,000 Earthships are in use around the world today.

Reynolds describes his Earthships as “carbon-zero homes,” largely built from natural and recycled materials found at local landfills — automobile tires, beer and soda cans, plastic and glass bottles, even panels from discarded refrigerators and washing machines. “Between 30 and 50 percent of the CO2 emissions are directly related to and coming from buildings,” says Reynolds. “Green development, carbon-zero development, must be fast-tracked if we are to keep up with global climate change,” he says.

The son of a homemaker and a milkman, Reynolds grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati. He moved to northern New Mexico shortly after graduating in 1969. Reacting to news reports about both the energy crisis and the nation’s overflowing landfills, he built his first house made of recycled beer cans in Taos, New Mexico, in 1971.

Soon, he was experimenting with tires, cans, and bottles packed with earth for insulation, stacked into walls, plastered with cement or adobe mud. His houses were powered by the wind and sun. He coined a new term: “Biotecture — the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability — a combination of biology and architecture.”

When he tried to build two Earthship communities outside Taos, Reynolds ran afoul of building codes and lost his state and national architectural licenses (he has since gotten them back). “The codes were not made for what we are doing,” he says. Local codes required that new housing be connected to centralized utilities — none could be off-grid. It took seven years of bureaucratic wrangling to get the Earthships legally approved.

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