EarthShip

Gao, Charlie
November 17th 2010

Garbage Warrior is about designing house types that are completely self-sustaining and built from garbage.

So, summary of the ideas from Garbage warrior, forget the place, people, event. So, it is possible to build, by hand and primal tools, a house completely made from trash other people don't want-especially tires-and dirt, and have it be self reliant and require no infrastructure to function. So, the whole theory of these things started out with heating (blah blah blah, long to short), essentially, the guy figured out a way to heat houses by building them out of tires and dirt because tires, being rubber and what they are, contain heat for a ridiculously long time. And you could do this with a team of people and some sticks, hammers, nails, clubs, poles, and other stone age tools. Then you can buy some solar panels and once, a windmill which almost broke off and was too loud, stick them on, and you'd have electricity. Since the guy's an experienced architect, he figured out a way to make the plumbing work so that you could purify most of the water so long as you didn't use the washroom every hour of the day. He also had a nice little garden which gave produce so you didn't really need to go shopping, or foraging. So, there you have it, a house that has electricity, heating, food, water, and is comfortable all year round without any need of infrastructure to support it. Yes, you need a place where they throw out tires, and I guess beer bottles so you can make pretty lighting fixtures, and unused solar panels. But really, most of it is just reused trash. It can also be made to fit a lot of people, but its usually just a one family home. It looked really cool both on the inside and outside-very modern, cool lighting, spacial experience, etc. Funnily enough, for one of the projects, the heating became so effective that it melted the plastic in the kitchen-so yea, it takes a lot of fine tuning, but so do most good things.

I was thinking that it could be an existing example of alternative housing that really isn't all that difficult and certainly NOT expensive to built. It can be changed to fit large number of families or even be smaller to save space, I'd imagine, and probably pretty easily once you figure out how the heating works for that particular climate. It is also very clean, or could be kept extremely clean as the water is purified-he never explained the process, but I'm sure it works since people didn't die from waterborne diseases in the ones he built. Its surprisingly flexible in that you can do quite a lot with it aesthetically. Packed earth and tires also seem pretty damn strong. Or packed earth and some other kind of heat sinking garbage-it doesn't seem like it had to be tires, its just that the garbage in abundance was tires in Taos. Whats more, the labor comes from the person who will live in the house and others who collaborate with him (you help build mine, I'll help build yours too). It also gives a great sense of community. To be honest, the only thing that can go wrong with it is if we can't buy solar panels or make wind mills out of garbage to support the electricity-but I don't think lighting is something people in poverty are THAT concerned with at the moment.

By the way, can somebody help me cite the movie? Its garbage warrior, and the rest of the information is on the website, so, talk to me tomorrow or anytime. Another thing, can I ACTUALLY use this? It is all facts, he didn't use computer graphics to fake the whole movie, so its almost more like a documentary or autobiography...sort of. Or, should I find real examples of this in article form and lost all the visual fun?

GARBAGE WARRIOR. Film. Directed by Oliver Hodge. Seattle, WA: Morningstar Entertainment, 2007.