In 1972, architect Michael Reynolds came up with an unorthodox approach to solving what he perceived as a catastrophic ecological crisis. It was a mere two years after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, long before conversations about eco-conscious design became fashionable. Still, the newly graduated architect took one look at the sheer volume of garbage the United States was producing and decided to take matters into his own hands—quite literally. The result was the Thumb House, a desert dwelling built out of roughly 70,000 discarded beer and soda cans that were wired and mortared together. “The Thumb House was all over the press, but it wasn’t a story about recycling. It was about a crazy idiot on the mesas of New Mexico building a home out of garbage,” Reynolds says with a laugh. “I was called a disgrace to the architectural community.”

Undeterred, Reynolds continued to tweak his approach to what he calls radically sustainable architecture. In the intervening decades, his designs have grown more sophisticated and his ideas more widely accepted. To date, Earthship Biotecture, his firm headquartered in Taos, New Mexico, has created more than 1,000 highly energy-efficient houses in more than 40 countries around the globe, used for everything from luxury rentals to disaster-relief shelters.

Michael Reynolds in the 1970s, while working on the Thumb House.

These Earthships, as Reynolds calls them, take the rudimentary concept of the Thumb House to a whole other level. Made of repurposed tires, bottles, and cans bound together with natural materials like adobe, each building generates its own electricity, processes its own sewage, collects rainwater, and maintains temperature without any additional fuel. More advanced Earthships also have the capacity to grow hydroponic plants for food, which renders them largely autonomous from the rest of society.

“We pay for power, water, sewage, food, which fuels the economy and makes corporations get richer while people get poorer,” Reynolds says. “If each home were to address what humans need for basic sustenance, we wouldn’t need all that infrastructure. Each building would be an independent vessel, like a ship in space or at sea.”