Tire Bale vs Straw Bale

I posted some pictures of a tire-bale house that I built, under the Earthship category. This isn't the rammed-earth style earthship. This one uses tire bales. Our tire bale walls were set in place in 2 days. There is a lot of hype about straw-bale, but I think the tire bale approach is more sound. The bales are 5'x5'x2-1/2', and they weigh a ton each. They have between an R-45 and R-60 insulation factor. They are stacked with a skid steer. The mass of the finished structure is incredible, and this becomes thermal mass for heat and cooling retention. They are great for building a bermed structure, because they are so solid.

Before we built, we looked at a number of different types of green homes, thinking that we might buy one that is already completed. The straw-bale homes that we looked at, invariably had water issues, and mice. I'm sure this isn't always the case, and I don't mean to be negative, but your home is one of the most important decisions you'll make in your life. You owe it to yourself (and your family) to check out the alternatives.

This is interesting. If you are still on here will you give an update on the house?

My concern is the offgassing of the tires. I personally wouldn't consider tires in bales suitable for my own personal house, where I live, sleep, and breathe, but that doesn't mean they can't be used.

If I had to, I would treat any such structure like ones using the 70s-era formaldehyde insulation, where you had to overpressurize your structure so that any offgassing was pushed outside of the building envelope. That, coupled with encasing the bales in some covering that keeps them from contact with the elements, and it should minimize pollution of the surrounding environment.

I understand sequestration from the waste stream, but I honestly would eschew the tires as someone else's problem until or unless I had a viable way of breaking them down into fuel, or some other method that yielded energy and perhaps some CO2 and water (a sufficiently hot pyrolysis, sans oxygen, at glass furnace temperatures to break down all components to their base materials), and build rammed earth with insulated concrete forms, or a diy that resembled them in form and function, but better-suited for rammed earth.

-CK