CEB Press Design Rationale, Product Ecology
"The CEB Press takes earth/dirt/soil and compresses it tightly to make solid blocks useful for building. Compressed earth blocks have many advantages as a building material: by making the building materials from the readily available dirt on the building site, they eliminate the need to transport bricks from elsewhere, reducing the financial cost and environmental impact of transport. Compressed earth blocks are very strong and insulate well against both heat and sound, making for very energy-efficient building (especially combined with the energy savings from not needing to transport them from offsite). Best of all, the material they use is already on-site and does not need to be purchased -- quite literally, dirt-cheap! The CEB Press satisfies many of the OSE Core Values OSE_Specifications#GVCS_Specifications.2FCore_Values
1. User Friendly. The CEB Press can be operated by one unskilled person and repaired by someone with a minimum of skill.
2. Closed-Loop Manufacturing. With the bricks produced by the CEB Press you can build a workshop in which you can built another CEB Press.
3. Industrial Efficiency. The GVCS CEB Press design exceeds the performance of other known open and closed source brick presses.
4. Ecological Design. The ecological respectfulness of CEB's is difficult to beat. They require a bare minimum of mechanical processing and they can last longer than other "green" building materials.
5. Systems Design. The CEB Press is not perfect on its own, but it does perfectly fill a niche in the GVCS system of systems.
6. Simplicity. With only a few moving parts the CEB Press just doesn't have enough "stuff" to create complications.
7. Village Scale. The CEB Press can produce enough bricks for a 1,000sqft structure in a single day. A single CEB Press could build a village in a few months.
8. Proven Techniques. Compressed Earth Brick construction is quite competitive in terms of thermal insulation, sound insulation, labor and maintenance.
9. Local Resources. What could possibly be more local than the dirt you're standing on? With the CEB Press you can turn your yard into a house.
10. Radical Abundance. There's so much dirt lying around our planet is named after it.