September 15th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

Attendees at this week’s Going Green Conference in San Francisco will hear from a CEO who may have placed second in a contest to get there but hardly needed the extra accolade: Kevin Surace’s Serious Materials has already been touted by Time, The New York Times and others as one of the hopes for a greener future — all thanks to his approach to an incredibly mundane material: drywall.

Drywall, one of the literal building blocks of the world around us, is a huge energy hog. According to Serious Materials, “a single sheet uses between 100,000 and 400,000 BTUs of energy to produce, depending on the age of the plant, producing 16 pounds of greenhouse gases per sheet.” And tens of billions of those sheets are made each year in North America alone.

Serious Materials’ “EcoRock,” on the other hand, requires none of the energy-intensive heating and drying involved in conventional gypsum drywall. It is made with 85% post-industrial recycled materials and at the end of its life is 100% recyclable. The company boasts that its plants burn no fossil fuel and emit no CO2.

No wonder the Going Green conference is eager to hear more about this potentially revolutionary construction material, which the firm expects to be selling later this year.

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