How long does the typical earthbag house last?
Nobody really knows, since the use of earthbags for building structures like this has been attempted only in the last couple of decades. The polypropylene material, if kept out of sunlight, will last a very long time; moisture and rot are not generally a concern, and mineral fill material will not decompose. I expect the earthbag house that I built to last at least a century. In the case of filling the bags with cement-stabilized soil or good adobe soil, the bag material can actually be burned off after the house is built, because it is no longer needed structurally. Q: Can the walls (skeleton) of a super adobe dome resist a lava flow without melting and collapsing? A: It is an interesting question about the durability of earthbag construction in the path of a lava flow. I think it would depend on what the bags were filled with. As with any masonry material (like stone, concrete, bricks) earthbags that were filled with well-compacted and consolidated soil (like adobe or cement stabiliz
