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I want to report on something that has happened to me personally since the last issue, that could have an impact on the extent to which earthbag building technologies are utilized around the world. I got an email from CalEarth, Nadir Khalili's organization in Hesperia, California, demanding that I arrange a contract with them in order to sell the videotaped program that I produced called, Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete House. They claimed that I would otherwise be infringing on Khalili's U.S. Patent on this process.

This surprised me because I had no idea that he had patented the idea of making structures with bags and barbed wire; nor did I think that the concept was even patentable, since the military of many countries has been utilizing sandbags for building for longer than I can remember. Having been granted a U.S. patent myself many years ago (on a process and apparatus for making animated movies), I knew that the patent office is generally very strict about what can be patented. Out of curiosity, I went to the website of the U.S. Patent Office, and with a little searching, I did indeed find Khalili's patent, issued in 1999. The claims are very broad, saying that bags or tubes (of any material) filled with virtually any kind of material, when used in conjunction with barbed wire, can be stacked to create structures. Very simple and very comprehensive.

Then I got to thinking that I actually started building my earthbag/papercrete house a couple of years before this patent was issued, so how could it apply in my case? A little more searching on the internet yielded a patent attorney who offered to answer simple questions online, so I asked him about this. The response was that Khalili's patent may be invalid if the process were generally known for more than a year before he applied for it. It didn't take long to find the actual language of the U.S. Patent Law that pertains to this, stating quite explicitly that this is the case. Khalili applied for his patent in 1998, and I found in my files copies of articles, describing clearly what he had patented, that were published in various periodicals as early as 1994. It would appear that this patent should never have been issued. I know that other people who have a direct involvement with earthbag technologies have also been contacted by Mr. Khalili.

This idea of building with earth-filled bags bound in a matrix of barbed wire is so elegant and potentially valuable for mankind, that it should not be hindered by contractual requirements. Nadir Khalili deserves considerable praise and acknowledgement for his inspired idea, but I think he should truly allow it to be available for mankind.

Site of the Month
This month's featured website is http://www.geocities.com/flyingconcrete/ where you can find the most wildly fanciful house designs imaginable. Greenhomebuilding.com has a page devoted to lightweight concrete, with many images taken from this site, but it is definitely worth browsing here to immerse yourself in Steve Kornher's world of habitable sculpture. Lightweight concrete is any form of concrete that uses material lighter than the usual stone and sand aggregate; this might include pumice, scoria, perlite, vermiculite, diatomite, etc. Steve lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, so most of the buildings are from this region.

The links to pages at this site include:

Book of the Month

Building with Papercrete and Paper Adobe: A Revolutionary New Way to Build Your Own Home for Next to Nothing, by Gordon Solberg, 2002 (Remedial Planet Communications). This is a new edition of this book, originally published in 1999. Gordon and Laura Solberg published such periodicals as Dry Country News, Earth Quarterly and Papercrete News, and this book is a compendium of all of the articles that appeared in these periodicals that pertain to papercrete. The collection chronicles the pioneering spirit that has accompanied the development of this very new technology. There is much to learn from the experiments and passions that are described. This spiral-bound book will not likely be found in bookstores, and I am selling it at a $6 discount from the list price. See http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/store.htm for more information.

I have made fairly good progress on this project during the last month, mostly working by myself, since I have to juggle the building with all of the other demands on my time, and only go out to work on when I can. Each arched section is composed of five pieces, and there are 17 sections, so it entailed a lot of ladder work to bolt the thing together one piece at a time. Fortunately I figured out a way to tighten each bolt from one side, using a pair of vise-grips to pull some friction on the little neoprene washer to keep the bolt itself from just turning.

You can see from the photo that I have started to stack earthbags (filled with crushed volcanic rock, or scoria) up the side of the metal vault. I put a liner of plastic between the bags and the steel, not for moisture protection, but to protect the steel from the possible corrosive action of the the rather acidic scoria. I will be keeping the bags covered with tarps until I have a chance to papercrete them. So far I am satisfied that the whole concept will be fine structurally; only time will tell, since this is definitely an experimental structure.

General and Unsubsrcibe information
Greenhomebuilding.com E-zine is copyright Hartworks, Inc. 2002. Please feel free to use excerpts from this newsletter as long as you give credit with a link to our homepage http://www.greenhomebuilding.com .