Builders Green up Their Act!

Since we are a company that believes in GREEN, we all try to do our part to see that we can help. I subscribe to so many publications because as President of the company I have to stay a top of what the industry is doing, plus I have a passion for my business and love reading the stories. Anyway, I ran across this grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat article in "Remodeling Online" and felt a dire need to share it. And to you I say,enjoy!

Chrisstopher Purnell
Founder & President
EZ Furniture Assembly & Interior Innovations, LLC

______________________________________________________________________________________
By Matt Nauman

By Matt Nauman IMediaNews Staff Writer

THE LAB inside Serious Materials' Sunnyvale headquarters resembles a kitchen. There's a mixer, a milkshake-making machine and a row of cake tins on a shelf filled with brown powders of various hues.

Lab technicians -- mostly scientists with advanced degrees -- measure and mix, pour and stir -- all in search of a better recipe.

But not for a cake. For drywall. Greener drywall. One that takes 90 percent less energy to produce and creates less greenhouse gas as a result. And one that could have a tremendous effect on the fight against global warming.

"The amount of CO2 we can impact is greater than any car company," says Kevin Surace, Serious Materials' chief executive officer.

BUILDIBusiness 2 Making drywall is a hugely energy-intensive process, accounting for about 1 percent of U.S. energy consumption and 25 billion pounds of CO2 in the air each year. In contrast, his greener drywall, EcoRock, is a zero-emissions product. The company plans to begin selling it this summer and ramp up to full production by fall.

Three venture capital firms -- New Enterprise Associates, Foundation Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners -- recently put down a $50 million bet that Serious Materials will find a big market for this and other green building materials, such as ultra-energy- efficient windows. That's a huge investment, but they're betting on a big payoff in the $1.3 trillion-a-year U.S. construction industry.

"This is going to revolutionize the (building) materials business," said Ted van der Linden, director of sustainable construction for DPR Construction, a $1.6 billion contractor based in Redwood City.

DPR hasn't agreed to buy EcoRock yet, van der Linden said, but his company will test it. DPR has seen green building projects -- ones that use Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards -- grow from less than 1 percent of its revenue in 2004 to 53 percent in 2007.

Those numbers don't surprise Tom Hicks, vice president of LEED at the U.S. Green Building Council. His organization has certified 1,184 green building projects nationwide, including five in San Jose.

"The annual U.S. market in green building products and services was over $7 billion in 2005 and is now over $12 billion and is expected to continue to increase," he said.

Going mainstream

Five years ago, according to Hicks, consumers and contractors had trouble finding environmentally friendly paints and compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Now even big-box home-improvement retailers offer them and similar products.

As Serious Materials' CEO, Surace brings a high-tech background (Perfect Commerce, General Magic) to the construction business. For a guy who builds and sells drywall and windows, Surace sounds an awful lot like Al Gore.

Ask him about his company and he'll launch into a 20-minute treatise on global warming that focuses on the construction industry -- the materials and shipping used to build homes and offices, and the inefficient operation of those buildings -- as huge contributors to carbon emissions.

The 'big kahuna'

"The big kahuna is CO2 production in buildings," he said, filling a white board with the words: "cement, glass, metal, drywall."

Drywall is made using a process invented in 1917. Gypsum, the main ingredient in drywall, must be calcined, or super-heated, using coal, oil or natural gas as the source of the energy.

Depending on who does the math, anywhere from 25 percent to 45 percent of drywall cost is energy.

EcoRock doesn't need to be calcined. Its components -- the specific formula is a company secret and a reporter was asked not to write down the name of the ingredients on various bins and buckets in the lab -- are mixed.

A foamer is added, the mix heats up, cools down and then is set into a usable block of drywall. Surace expects EcoRock to sell for about

what it costs to buy premium drywall.

Drywall market

In the United States, 40 billion to 50 billion square feet of drywall is made each year.

Serious Materials already has an existing business, the Quiet Solution line of noise-reducing wood, drywall, glue and other products that generates $20 million a year in revenues.

So, as opposed to a startup that must launch both a company and its initial product, Serious Materials already knows the people who buy and use building products. Its products are sold by 4,000 dealers.

Production of the Quiet Solution products was recently moved to Newark. EcoRock and other green products will be made in Sunnyvale as well as at a planned factory in Syracuse, N.Y.

The company is about to launch a new product with new financing at an opportune time. The building industry is facing "more and more pressure" to change its ways, to adopt more green practices and use more green materials, said Tristan Korthals Altes, managing editor of the Environmental Building News newsletter.

That's because, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, buildings account for 65 percent of U.S. electricity use and produce 30 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions and 30 percent of its waste

Originally published by Matt Nauman, MediaNews Staff Writer.

(c) 2008 Oakland Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.