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Building Better Retaining Walls: When you need to to hold back the surrounding soil from a driveway or an excavated area for a terrace, you need to have a retaining wall built. Retaining walls are also used to support vertical grade changes, to prevent soil erosion and downward slope movement and for constructing landscaping tiers. Masonry, interlocking block, natural stone, brick, concrete, steel, timber and vinyl are the principal materials that are most commonly used to build retaining walls.

Gravity retaining walls rely on the burden of their weight to hold back the forces of the soil behind the wall. The stability of the retaining wall is enhanced by sloping of the face of a wall to create a setback or batter. Because the internal leverage of earth pressure can be quite significant a gravity wall could fairly easily topple if it is not properly constructed. Interlocking blocks can be dry stacked when the retaining wall is a low landscaping wall.

Sheet piling retaining walls have sheet piles driven into the ground. These sheet piles are made out of plastic sheets, vinyl, fiberglass, steel or wooden planks. A sheet pilling wall can handle high loads when the piles are able to resist the bending forces from soil on both sides of its lower length. Generally, only one third of the sheet pile wall is above ground. Anchors are usually required on taller sheet pile walls. Improper drainage behind this kind of retaining wall increases the hydrostatic pressure and could cause wall failure.

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