CleanBoard: Recycled drywall from a solar factory

CleanBoard has a novel idea to "green" your home: use carbon-neutral drywall that's produced in a solar-powered factory and made from the residue of coal-fired power plants.

The self-funded company, founded less than a year ago, this week started talking publicly about its CleanBoard product, which is now available. The company plans to announce funding this quarter.

The money, which will include venture capital and debt financing, will be used to open a factory in California capable of turning out its recycled drywall by year's end, CEO and founder Rod MacGregor announced Thursday.

Click on the image to see photos from November's GreenBuild Expo, where recycled building materials were featured.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News)

Getting green-building certification, called LEED for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has become much more commonplace, particularly for commercial buildings. Having recycled content in the building materials is one way that architects can rack up LEED credits, or points.

MacGregor said that CleanBoard can give builders eight LEED points because it's made almost entirely of recycled gypsum--what nearly all drywall is made of now.

The sources for the gypsum will be coal-fired power plants and unused wall board from construction jobs. Scrubbers in coal plants convert sulfur dioxide emissions from burning coal into calcium sulfate, or gypsum. Typically, gypsum for drywall is mined.

The paper covering on the CleanBoard is 100 percent recycled. Right now, the company is getting its gypsum from China but hopes to source some material in the U.S. to lower the embedded energy in the product, MacGregor said.

Lowering the amount of energy that goes into a product will give it more LEED points when the certification is updated, he said. More immediately, it lowers the cost of making drywall, which is one of the more polluting industries.

"Half the cost of making a sheet of drywall is energy-related," he said. "And drywall manufacturers will be impacted directly by carbon regulations."

MacGregor is coy about the solar technology he intends to employ at a planned plant in the Mojave Desert. The general idea is to use the sun's heat to run industrial processes. Concentrating-solar-thermal power plants also use the sun's heat but convert it to electricity.

Until its own operation is up and running, San Francisco-based CleanBoard is doing limited manufacturing at another site and is purchasing carbon offsets to help even out the pollution created during manufacturing.

Although green-building products are becoming more widely used--November's GreenBuild industry conference in Boston drew close to 30,000 people--there are fewer green-material technology start-ups than say in the solar or biofuel fields.

Serious Materials makes EcoRock, which is drywall made with 80 percent recycled material but no gypsum. At the GreenBuild conference in November, Serious Materials CEO Kevin Surace said the company is seeing strong demand for the product, which will be available in parts of the U.S. later this quarter.

[clayton_ok]

This seems to have a big potential. I really hope to see more and more green building materials, however I hate to think that some of these companies may be practicing "green washing" to push their products. I suppose time will tell with CleanBoard.

[AmbientShadow]

This is a load of crap. Flyash (that "recycled coal residue") has been used in drywall factories for years, many use it exclusively, and it's significantly cheaper to buy than try and mine real stuff because coal fired power plants typically pay millions to put it somewhere, some power plants give it away for free! And working at a drywall factory, I can tell you that (with at least ONE company, and in the interest of neutrality I will not say who) - the paper face and back is mostly recycled, and the rest of the additives make up so little of the sheet you can hardly count them and/or they cannot be recycled at all, so this is really... nothing new at all.

While it's true that most of the cost is energy (and it's a PILE of energy at that), using electric heat to calcine the Flyash and dry the board is going to put the cost of this drywall through the roof, at least until the colossal field of solar panels it is going to take to make even a slow drywall line pays itself off.

If this LEED business of points-for-greenness is supposed to attract people, don't be fooled. Drywall is expensive enough as it is, and what they're making is hardly different from anything already out there.

[Manhattan2]

January 20th, 2009 will be the biggest news day this century and it will not just be all about Barack Obama. Solar Transfer and "The Manhattan 2 Project" will be putting on display, on a number of media channels the solution to energy independence and some powerful security and public health products. Included will be the Seeing Aid, and the Haptic glove technology that will be needed to view or touch the solutions. Just Google Solar Transfer or Seeing Aid to find our Jan 20th announcement.