Z.Z.Daily Construction

We see more green remodeling ideas everyday, particularly in the area of earth-friendly building materials. We found another company in a similar category to Serious Materials, the maker of EcoRock – a new alternative drywall solution, that we brought to your attention recently.

Cleanboard, a San Francisco based drywall startup, is a new company with a slightly different twist on a drywall product manufactured using a more environmentally friendly process. Cleanboard promotes their ecology friendly drywall product as “the most environmentally friendly drywall on earth“.

CleanBoard has created a solar powered system that uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a heat collector which heats a transfer fluid to store the sun’s radiant energy. The heated transfer fluid heats the drywall baking ovens up to 200 degrees Celsius. And the transfer fluid can store the heat in pressurized chambers up to 24 hours enabling the company to manufacture drywall even on days when the sun isn’t shining.

The traditional gypsum drywall manufacturing process typically relies on fuel expensive gas fired ovens that represent a significant carbon footprint. Moving to a solar based technology to heat the ovens provides a carbon free solution and should reduce the energy costs to manufacture the drywall by more than 50%.

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We hear a lot about eco-friendly green remodeling lately. As the sustainable building trend picks up momentum, many companies and manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon and bringing new and improved green building material products to market.

One such company, Serious Materials, has released a new drywall product they call EcoRock. The company claims this is the first significant change in the way that sheetrock is manufactured in over 100 years, and has recently won the Popular Science GreenTech award for best of what’s new in ’08.

For environmentally conscious home builders and home remodelers that are looking for better sustainable building materials solutions, EcoRock may be an interesting advancement worth looking into.

EcoRock improves on traditional gypsum sheetrock in several ways.

• Uses 80% less energy to manufacture than gypsum drywall.  Traditional gypsum wallboard manufacturing processes uses energy intensive drying ovens to fabricate drywall. EcoRock is naturally dried and cured using an oven-free process that consumes much less energy to manufacturer.
• Made of 80% recycled materials - made using recycled industrial waste products including waste from steel and cement plants. No gypsum is used to manufacture EcoRock.
• Mold and Termite resistant – outperforms all other mold resistant drywall as much as 50%. And no harsh anti-fungal chemicals are used to make EcoRock.
• Can be fully recycled at end of life – can be used as a pH additive for soils and can be returned to the production of EcoRock and other building materials as a useful raw material. And unlike gypsum drywall materials, EcoRock can be safely disposed of in landfills if necessary.

According to the manufacturer, EcoRock should be available from building material suppliers in the Western states later in 2009. The manufacturer indicates there is no difference in hanging, taping and installing EcoRock over standard drywall products.  The cost for the new drywall building material is not currently published, but expect it to be higher priced than gypsum based wallboard.