Rammed earth

Rammed earth is now a BREEAM A+ rated material. Click HERE

This is the link to the 2010 ASTM E2392 / E2392M – 10e1 Standard Guide for Design of Earthen Wall Building Systems
http://www.astm.org/Standards/E2392.htm

The Standards Association of Zimbabwe now have a watermarked PDF version of SAZ 724:Code of practice for rammed earth structures and can supply copies of this when required. The electronic version price is US$ 42.00. Enquiries for this should go to info@saz.org.zw

Earth building standards

The Dachverband Lehm e.V. can now present the final draft of the new DIN standards “Earth building” according to the German / EU standards for certification of building products. The drafts contain two groups of earth building products: earth mortars (earth plasters and earth mortar for masonry walling) and unstabilised earth blocks. There is also developed a guideline for quality control of soil suitable for earth building.

Now the drafts are open for discussion at www.dachverband-lehm.de/forum. Unfortunately all documents are only in German at the moment. We have included in the discussion a large number of experts including several European national earth building associations. A final discussion of the drafts will take place at 22th January 2011 at Bauhaus University Weimar. After the final discussion we will organize a Technical committee at the German Institute for Standardisation DIN for implementation of the drafts as DIN standards “Earth Building”.

This is a “historical” situation for us: After decades, earth soon will be again a standardized and accepted building material like brick, concrete, cement etc in the German building practise. Its use as an ecological and sustainable building material is “secured” also in the future. This is the result of two years of hard work of our association