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Why Build with Earthbags?
by Dr. Owen Geiger

Earthbag building (sometimes called sandbag building) is rapidly gaining in popularity as people discover the benefits. It's one of the simplest, lowest cost building systems in the world. Very few tools and almost no special skills are required. It boils down to filling bags with soil or gravel and tamping the bags solid. What could be simpler?

The military have been building bullet and blast resistant structures with sandbags for about a century. Lately, homeowners and professional builders have constructed homes, clinics, schools, orphanages, shops and other structures this way.

Earthbag buildings are safe, quiet, nontoxic, rodent proof, and fire, hurricane and flood resistant. They can be designed for any type of climate simply by changing the fill material in the bags – soil or gravel for hot climates, insulated material such as volcanic rock or vermiculite for cold or hot climates.

Earthbags are very adaptable and so you can build almost any style or shape of building imaginable: domes, vaults, structures with vertical walls, curved ‘organic' designs, roundhouses, you name it. In addition, you can build planters, benches, privacy and retaining walls, to name but a few.

Because polypropylene bags are designed for flood control and not affected by moisture, you can build underground structures such as earth-sheltered homes, storm cellars and rootcellars.

Earthbag buildings are sustainable since they are made primarily of earth or aggregate from or near the building site. Earthbag domes do not require wood, thereby reducing pressure on our forests. Expensive concrete foundations are not required if you use gravel-filled bags.

And the list of advantages goes on and on. Do yourself a favor and look into how you can benefit from earthbag building. You can save money, do less harm to the environment and have a more durable structure.

Owen Geiger, Director of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building at GRISB.org and Kelly Hart have teamed up to create EarthbagBuilding.com and Earthbag Building Blog at earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com to better focus and keep track of the rapid growth of this novel building method.

This article was first published at IdeaMarketers.com: www.ideamarketers.com/?articleid=487470&CFID=77037763&CFTOKEN=80350268

 

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