Eco-friendly Building Materials

by Jordan Yerman | February 20, 2007 at 04:05 pm

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I used to work in real estate, and I'm here to tell you that the sheer amount of drywall used in apartment renovation alone is staggering. The real mission is convincing penny-pinching (to put it nicely) management companies to pay a bit extra for a more responsible product.

Drywall, cure thyself.

That's the idea behind EcoRock, an ecologically safer form of drywall coming from Serious Materials. Conventional drywall is made up of gypsum, and making it requires a lot of heating and mixing stages, said Serious CEO Kevin Surace in a conversation at the Cleantech Forum taking place in San Francisco.

"Drywall is the third largest producer of greenhouse gases among building materials. It's behind cement and steel," he said.

200 million tons of carbon dioxide gets injected in the atmosphere a year through drywall production, he added. In the U.S., 50 billion square feet of drywall get produced every year. California and a few other states have also put curbs on opening new gypsum processing facilities. (I do love the crazy facts you get at conferences like this.)

EcoRock is much simpler to manufacture. When the materials used to make EcoRock get mixed together, the chemical reaction takes place on its own. (A lot of chemical reactions take place this way--think of what happens when sodium hits water. Sparks fly without added heat.)

By eliminating heating stages, fossil fuel emissions are cut drastically.