** This thread discusses the content article:
Old Tyres Recycled into New Home **
Normally when you see old tyres piled up on the side of the road or dumped on some beauty spot, they look like a complete eyesore.
But could the answer to recycling ugly scrap tyres be closer to home then we could have imagined?
After watching Channel 4’s brilliant Grand Designs programme we wonder how many aspiring homebuilders will be start looking at the abandoned tyres in a new light?
Darren and his partner Adi created a single-storey family house built from tyres ram packed with earth – a concept which originated in Mexico more than 30 years ago to create buildings which are dubbed ‘earthships’.
While the couple chose to build their dream home in France, because planning regulations are more relaxed and it was cheaper, there are already two eco-friendly ‘earthships’s in the UK and plans for a third.
The ‘earthships’ have already landed in Kinghorn, Fife, and Brighton, and now a feasibility study has now been commissioned into the possibility of creating an ‘earthship’ centre at Merkinch Local Nature Reserve.
Presenter Kevin McCloud summed it up as: ‘I suppose that, over the past ten years or so, we’ve got used to being able to buy our lifestyle - off the pages of a magazine, for example.
‘Whereas, of course, Adi and Darren haven’t so much bought what they’ve got here - they’ve made it. And in making it, that doesn’t just mean making everything from scratch; they have salvaged, recycled, reused and reincorporated stuff as they’ve gone along. Things - like that glass bottle wall - which are beautiful.
‘If this building is an exemplar, it isn’t so much about sustainable construction as perhaps, an example of how we all should be living.’
Denna Bowman, etyres Head Office
from etyres.co.uk
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