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History of Sandbag Building

At the beginning 21st century the building industry is marked by the development of more and more highly technological and specified new building materials. Trying to solve the world´s environmental and energy problems by producing expensive artificial materials in centralized high-tech factories seems to be the trend of time. Simultaneously the on-site building processes getting more and more complex and difficult and it which requires highly skilled and very expensive labour.

Contrary to this, a revolutionary simple and easy building system was invented in South Africa: building houses with sandbags. While providing a high quality home for the customer, the system shows up to be enormously ecological and economical at the same time.

The combination of these two qualities inspired to the names Ecobag and Ecobeam for the patented technologies of building by bags and making a very inexpensive beam structure. In all aspects like stability and thermal behavior the sandbag wall is even superior to a conventional brick wall of the same thickness.

The sandbags in combination with a light Ecobeam structure can be seen as a modified timber frame house. But once the roof is in place and the building is plastered, the whole structure performs monolithic and appears exactly like a common brick house.

The system is not dependent on any kind of industrial grid measurements. That means that any specific measurements that are wanted for wall thickness, size and height of the building or for wall openings, can easily be achieved. This is just one of many more advantages, that makes this new building technology perfectly suitable for building projects around the world.

Using sandbags to pile up a kind of wall is nothing new. For decades or even centuries people are aware of the good qualities of sandbags for flood protection, for sound insulation or in providing shelter against bullets.

But the idea of using sandbags as a construction material for ordinary housing is pretty young. It was developed as a complete building system during the last twenty years in Cape Town, when Michael Tremeer and his Company Ecobeam Technologies searched for a cheap way to assist South Africa in its endeavor to house millions of homeless residents. The result was the simple idea of building the walls of houses out of sandbags.

2. Why Building with Sandbags?

To say it in one sentence:

Because with sandbags you can build better quality houses for less money by using absolutely ecological and healthy materials.

2.1 Ecological Reasons

In contrary to most other building materials there is no need to process the sand. No energy consumption for burning bricks or producing cement. The energy required for making the polypropylene bags can be neglected as the bags are very thin and make up the smallest amount of materials. The same is true for the metal used in the Ecobeams. So the impact on environmental

influence is tremendous: The carbon dioxide emission of one square meter sandbag wall drops by 96% compared to a conventional brick wall. And if you use a natural material like hemp for the bags instead of a geo-textile it can be reduced even more. The metal lattice ,at least that one of the non structural wall beams, can be exchanged very successfully by a recycled polypropylene material.

Sand can be found locally nearly everywhere around the world, in some regions even directly on the construction site. As there is no need for centralized processing you have always very little transportation of materials. The sand makes up 98% of the weight of the wall materials.

An earthen plaster is the ingredient to make the building completely green. The clay sticks perfectly to the open porous structure of the bags and no wire mesh is necessary to reinforce the earthen plaster.

The roots go back to the early 1970s when the innovative Michael Tremeer served as a civil engineer in the Rhodesian army. Adding a layer of sandbags to the poor sheet metal shacks was an easy job but had a tremendous impact on the living comfort. In the late 1990s after the brake down of the Apartheid system in South Africa millions of people went to the cities and startedbto live in squatter camps under poorest conditions.

Feeling a need to help, Tremeer invented the Ecobag system to provide an absolute low cost building system. Now housing was available for only two thirds of the cost of an conventional brick house. But the idea was too simple. Due to political pressure and the influence of the cement and brick industries the system could not prevail in public housing projects.

But Ecobeam Technologies kept on developing the system, a lot of lab testing was done and general building approval for the Ecobag system could be reached in South Africa. And in contrary to the original intention more and more richer people wanted to build ecological buildings by using sandbags. Over the last ten years about 200 houses were realized all over the south African countries.

With the change of consciousness to more environmental concerns in the building sector all over the world, 2008 started to bring a big boom to the sandbag system accompanied by a broad media coverage with articles in the most important South African magazines.

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