A rammed tire is a heavy, stable block that's already on hand once the truck leaves. Start small, prove it works on your land, and scale up.
A course or two of tires on a slope, filled with soil and planted. Low risk, no permit usually needed, and a good way to learn how long ramming actually takes.
Stepped courses of rammed tires, each set back a little, with earth behind. Holds a cut bank, a driveway edge, or a pond berm. Face it with earthen plaster or plant it so the rubber isn't exposed to sun.
Tire bales set with a skid steer make a heavy, fast wall for a windbreak, a corral side, or a manure bunker. The bale is the block — no ramming required.
Three rammed-tire walls dug into a hillside, earth piled against the outside, a conventional roof and a front wall. The earth mass keeps it cool in summer and above freezing in winter — ideal for a root cellar or tool shed.
A small Earthship-style cabin: tire walls on the north side, glass on the south, rain off the roof into a cistern. A realistic remote-work studio on land with a Starlink dish and solar.
The full Earthship model. Well documented, very buildable, and the hardest to permit. South Africa's first Earthship used about 1,500 tires; bale-built homes have used far more.
Rules of thumb for planning a delivery — measure your own site and tire size before ordering.
| Project | Approx. tires | Form | Permit outlook |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden terrace, 30 ft long, 2 courses | ~30–40 | Loose | Usually none |
| Retaining wall, 50 ft long, ~4 ft tall | ~120–160 | Loose, same size | Often none under 4 ft; check county |
| Windbreak, 100 ft, 2 bales high | ~4,000 (about 40 bales) | Bales | Often ag-exempt on farmland; check county |
| Bermed shed / root cellar, ~10×12 ft | ~250–350 | Loose | Depends on size and county |
| Small Earthship-style cabin | ~800–1,500 | Loose | Needs permit; varies widely |
| Retaining wall backfill | ~100 per cubic meter | Shreds / TDA | Engineered use; follows ASTM D6270 |
Counts are planning estimates based on typical passenger-tire sizes and the bale and TDA figures cited on the opportunity page.
Highway departments use tire-derived aggregate — tires cut into 2–12 inch pieces — as backfill behind retaining walls and in road embankments. It weighs about a third as much as soil, pushes on a wall with roughly half the force, and drains far better than gravel. There's a published standard (ASTM D6270) with rules like limiting fill thickness to avoid self-heating. That gives a rural buyer a second, engineered way to use tires alongside the hand-built methods.
Tires last forever underground and out of sunlight. Exposed rubber in living space is where the off-gassing and fire concerns come from — plaster over it or earth over it. Some countries, like Belgium, restrict tire building over leaching concerns, so keep walls away from wells and drinking water.
The original Earthships were designed for the high desert. European builds had moisture and mold problems and lost heat into the ground. In the Midwest, add insulation between the tires and the living space and design drainage carefully.