Rosalba has found an article on the Earth Garden website showing different ways of creating footings for buildings. One method that has caught our eye is using recycled car tyres. Considering that there are millions of tyres each year that need to be disposed of, this may help a little bit.
The method described basically consists of digging a hole wide enough to take a tyre lying flat on it's side. The hole needs to be dug deep enough to rest on a stable basis. Once the hole is dug, tyres are place in the hole so that they lay fat on top of each other and all the tyres are then fill with compacted dirt and rubble. According to the article on the Earth Garden site, such a footing will outlive cement footings for thousand of years.
I have just sent of an email to our architect to find out if this type of footing would be sensible for our house. Once I hear from the architect I will you know on this site.
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