Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/one-mans-trash-another-mans-earthship Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript In the latest installment in his series on innovation during the recession, Tom Bearden examines how one architect is turning unlikely items into environmentally friendly homes he calls "earthships." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: Now, another in our series on innovation in a time of recession. Tonight, a blueprint that reduces the carbon footprint. NewsHour correspondent Tom Bearden has our Science Unit story. TOM BEARDEN: At first glance, this construction site in eastern Montana looks more like a garbage dump than a new home being built: stacks of old tires, hundreds of empty bottles and aluminum cans.But to Mike Reynolds, it's a thing of beauty. An architect by training, he has spent his life developing almost completely self-sufficient homes he calls Earthships. No connections to the electrical grid, no water line, no sewer. MIKE REYNOLDS: So we have a building that will have a guaranteed utility bill, annual utility bill of less than $100, guaranteed annual total utility usage, power, water, sewage. And that speaks for, one, the economy of running the building, but more than that, the effect, the light touch that it has on the planet. TOM BEARDEN: Discarded tires are tightly packed with dirt and stacked in a U-shape. Spaces in between are stuffed with cans, bottles and cement. When the wall is finished, it's covered with dirt. MIKE REYNOLDS: The rationale there is that, one, we have so much of these materials — bottles, cans and tires — that we don't know what to do with them. They're filling the municipal landfills. We have more tires on this planet than we have trees.So we're trying to use the products that we don't know what to do with rather than the products that we really desperately need for life on this planet. To cut down trees is ridiculous when you can build with tires. TOM BEARDEN: The open end of the U will be closed off with a glass wall, which must face south, because Earthships are designed to use solar energy for heating. Reynolds says the design keeps an Earthship's interior around 70 degrees, regardless of whether it's 115 outside or 20 below, without heating or air conditioning. MIKE REYNOLDS: The warmth of the interior space comes from the sun, obviously, coming in from the south. Now, in the summertime, the sun's much higher in the sky, and the overhang is set up so that the spaces remain shaded. So we're tracking the angle of the sun, so that in the summer, those spaces are super cool, and in the winter they're super warm.