Florida Students Gather Materials for a Sustainable ‘Earthship’ House

Students at three Florida colleges are helping to collect 40,000 bottles, 40,000 cans, and 1,700 tires for a couple who are building an off-the-grid house out of recycled materials, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

The $300,000, 3,000-square-foot house will rely on solar panels for its electricity and will use methane from its sewage system to power kitchen appliances. Cisterns will collect rainwater, which will be used several ways—including to irrigate an indoor vegetable garden. The owners, Michael and Denise Pfalzer, hired as their architect Michael Reynolds, a New Mexico sustainable-building pioneer who has been designing so-called “earthship” homes for years.

The newspaper reports that the house, currently under construction, will resemble “an architectural blend of an adobe, a Hobbit hole, and a science-fiction home of the future.”

Students at Eckerd College, the Ringling College of Art and Design, and the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg are gathering materials for the house. The tires will be packed with dirt and will function as giant, round bricks in the exterior walls. The bottles will be used to create wall sections of colored glass that will admit daylight. The cans will be arranged into honeycombs and covered with concrete and plaster to form the interior walls. The general contractor, Bryan Roberts, said the house would be more than hurricane-proof. “If a bomb goes off,” he said, “this is where you would want to be.”