A Simple Earthbag House in Jamaica

This environmentally friendly house was built with durable, empty bags filled with raw earth. The structure employed rice bags with local soil from the site (with additives), along with barbwire acting as tensile strength. Earthen plaster was then applied to the exterior for a smooth finish. Earthbag construction has remarkable strength and longevity. It can … Read more

Affordable Earthen Homes

inhabitat.com presented a collection of eight small “earth homes that almost anyone can afford” and half of them are built with earthbags! La Casa Vergara’s dome shape may captivate the eye, but what’s underneath is most impressive. The Bogota home, built by architect Jose Andres Vallejo, is made from earthbags, or tubular bags stuffed with … Read more

Earthbag Building for Climate Resiliency

Thousands of people in Puerto Rico were still living under blue tarps three years after Hurricane Maria struck the island, and more than 30,000 families asked the government for assistance after the storm destroyed or damaged their homes.  This is why Paula Paoli and Owen Ingley are in Las Marías, Puerto Rico, and hope to … Read more

Alternative Building to Address Homelessness

The four houses shown above are completely different in size and style, but they are all environmentally friendly, cheap, and fast to construct because they are made with earthbags. The four earthbag dwellings above are, clockwise from top left, in Veracruz, Mexico, Capetown, South Africa, Ahwaz, Iran and Durban, South Africa. Many countries with urgent … Read more

How to Build an Earthquake-Resistant Home: An Earthbag Construction Manual

The folks at Good Earth Global prepared a guide titled How to Build an Earthquake-Resistant Home: An Earthbag Construction Manual for Engineering for Change’s members and readers and it was published at engineeringforchange.org It starts out with this introduction: Earthbag technology has emerged as the building method best suited to rebuild rural Nepal after its … Read more