Green Homes

Green Homes are not the like the house your "tree hugging" neighbor has because he or she added solar panels to the roof of his or her house.

Green Homes are completely sustainable houses made of entirely recycled materials. They have little to no carbon footprint. They do not tap into city power or water. How? The people who build them use the materials around them for example tires.

Tires have gotten a bad rep. People used to believe that they were a "green" material because they could be recycled. Americans throw out around 250 million tires per year. However, no plan has been put in place to recycle tires, now they fill up landfills and pollute the environment.
But, what if there was a plan?

Tires can be used as an excellent building material. This would make sense since they are made of rubber. Not to mention, they are easily stackable. The way to make tires into building blocks would be to pack them full of dirt. This process is called "earth rammed tires" and using them as walls are called tire walls. Tire walls provide sound insulation because they are thick and are naturally insulated with earth.

Green Homes also use glass bottles as windows. Again, seems like a super simple principle, use the recycled materials around you as building materials. Glass bottles windows are incredibly beautiful, think of stained glass windows without the incredible cost. The glass bottles are stacked and then mortared together with an earth mixture. They are incredibly durable because the glass used to make these bottles are very thick, maybe even thicker than most commercial grade windows. Plus glass bottle windows are thicker, not by length or width, of depth. They could be easily 4 inches thick depending on the type of bottle used.

Green Homes have to supply their own water and electricity. They could do this in two ways, collection or scavenging. The collection of water is a process that starts with the building of the roof. The roof is built so that it collects water to a single point into a tank. Then it is filtered through the house, and it ends up in a garden in the house where eventually it sinks back into the ground. Essentially, except for the water in the toilets, all is directed towards the house gardens. The way they might "scavenge" for water would be to dig a well, which is commonly used in residential areas. This process is not as efficient or "green" as the collection method.

A Green Home may have multiple ways of getting electricity. They may have to combine solar energy and wind energy with perhaps some use of geothermal energy. Geothermal energy comes from digging into the earth and is the most environmentally conscious way to heat a home because the process extracts hot air from deep within the earth.

Green Homes could be the way of the future. Maybe when I got to buy my first house the walls will be made of tires and the windows of glass bottles.