Serious Materials means business with greener drywall
Emerging Tech runner-up: Clean/green technology
Green drywall? Sounds like something construction workers would use to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
But manufacturer Serious Materials Inc., which earned an honorable mention in the Green/Clean Technology category, instead plans to celebrate a greener Earth with the environmentally-sensitive drywall it calls EcoRock.
The company, founded in 2002 and based in Sunnyvale, focuses on
re-engineering construction materials to make the world’s buildings more eco-friendly for the long haul. Its initial product, a soundproofing and insulating material called Quiet Rock, has been “a runaway success.”
Since then, the company has begun producing ThermaProof windows, which are four times more efficient than dual-pane windows at keeping heat inside a structure.
Everything Serious Materials does is motivated by its underlying mission: to keep one billion tons of carbon dioxide — three percent of the world’s CO2 production — out of the atmosphere every year. President and CEO Kevin Surace believes it’s an entirely achievable goal within a decade.
“On a worldwide basis, 52 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions is tied to the built environment — 12 percent goes into making new building materials and 40 percent goes to heating and cooling the buildings we’ve built with those materials,” Surace says.
Cars, on the other hand, generate only about 9 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. So by tackling building materials, Surace says, Serious Materials is taking on half of the world’s carbon dioxide dilemma.
The reason for focusing much of that effort on drywall is simple: The process used to make it is incredibly wasteful. Invented in 1917, drywall’s manufacturing procedure requires that gypsum — its main ingredient — be super-heated, or calcined, and then rapidly cooled.
But making EcoRock, which replaces the gypsum with proprietary materials that the company won’t reveal, doesn’t require using any external energy source for heating or cooling. Instead, the materials inside EcoRock create their own chemical reactions to develop the heat that’s needed. So while making a typical sheet of drywall produces about 16 pounds of greenhouse gases, making a sheet of EcoRock produces just over three pounds — some 80 percent less.
The resulting product looks, feels and performs the same as current gypsum drywall, Surace says, but doesn’t require mining new materials from the earth, as gypsum-based drywall does. It took about three years and six different formulations for the company’s researchers to get EcoRock to the point of mass production. “We had to keep driving the cost down and driving the feature set up to drive the performance up,” he says.
Serious Materials has raised more than $65 million in venture capital to date.