THEY may be made of mud, old tyres and tin cans but Britain’s first self-sustaining eco-houses could set back new owners as much as £500,000 for three bedrooms.

The 16 buildings, called earthships because they are designed to be completely self-sufficient in energy, are part of a £5m development planned for a hillside overlooking the Channel near Brighton marina.

Electricity will be provided by wind turbines and solar panels. The 3ft-thick outside walls will be made of earth-filled tyres, while internal partitions will be made from old bottles and cans.

Permission for the houses is expected to be given this Wednesday by Brighton and Hove city council. Six of the homes, due to be ready by 2010, are to be made “affordable” for rent through Chichester Diocese Housing Association.

Corinna Cope, 35, who lives in Surbiton, Surrey, with her fiancé Andy Sunderland, a lawyer, plans to buy one. “We are not prepared to become hippie tree-huggers and we don’t walk around in sandals,” she said. “We like the trappings of modern life but, at the same time, we have a conscience and we want to integrate green technology into our lifestyle.” Earthships were pioneered in the 1990s by Mike Reynolds, an architect, in the deserts of Taos County, New Mexico, where there are now more than 200. He described them as “independent vessels to sail across the seas of tomorrow”.

More than 1,000 have been built around the world. The Hollywood actresses Cameron Diaz and Daryl Hannah live in similar “off-grid” houses.

The original idea was that earthships should be completely self-sufficient, powered by solar and wind energy, saving rainwater and reprocessing sewage through plant beds where fruit and vegetables could be grown. In practice the homes in New Mexico have had to bring in water by tanker.

Jo Wunsch, 40, of Hastings, East Sussex, lived with her family in the Taos colony for six years. “Living in an earthship is a very positive experience,” she said. “You feel you are putting something back rather than just taking. Living in a house half buried into the earth and with the sun streaming through the glazed wall, you feel much more exposed and in touch with nature’s resources.”

In Britain lack of sunshine is likely to prove more of a problem than water shortages. Environmental health rules do not allow the use of rainwater for drinking, so the Brighton earthships will have to have piped water. They will also be required to be connected to main sewers.

The developers, who claim that the Brighton homes are 10 times oversubscribed, acknowledge that owners will have to be thrifty to remain self-sufficient in electricity. Residents will be advised to use energy-hungry devices such as washing machines only on windy or sunny days and certainly not during a still and murky night. Wooden floors will be preferred to carpets to avoid the need for vacuum cleaners.

Daren Howarth, development director of Earthship Biotecture, the firm building the homes, said: “This might have seemed extreme when we started this project in 2000, but now everybody is talking about hitting new carbon targets in the home and this is the kind of behaviour we will have to see.”

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