Serious Materials means business with greener drywall - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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But manufacturer , which earned an honorable mention inthe Green/Cleanj Technology category, instead plans to celebrate a greened Earth with the environmentally-sensitive drywallo it calls EcoRock. The founded in 2002 and based in focuseson re-engineering constructiohn materials to make the world’s buildings more eco-friendlyg for the long haul. Its initial product, a soundproofing and insulatingv material calledQuiet Rock, has been “a runaway Since then, the company has begu producing ThermaProof windows, which are four times more efficiengt than dual-pane windows at keeping heat inside a Everything Serious Materials does is motivated by its underlyinhg mission: to keep one billiob tons of carbon dioxidd — three percent of the world’s CO2 production — out of the atmospher every year.
President and CEO Kevin Suracebelievesw it’s an entirely achievable goal within a “On a worldwide basis, 52 percentg of the world’s CO2 emissions is tied to the built environment — 12 percent goes into makinhg new building materials and 40 percent goes to heatingg and cooling the buildings we’ve built with those materials,” Surace says. Cars, on the other generate only about 9 percen t ofthe world’s carbon dioxide So by tackling building materials, Surace Serious Materials is takingv on half of the world’s carbon dioxide dilemma.
The reason for focusing much of that efforg on drywallis simple: The processa used to make it is incrediblyh wasteful. Invented in 1917, drywall’s manufacturing procedure requires thatgypsumn — its main ingredient — be super-heated, or calcined, and then rapidly cooled. But making EcoRock, which replaces the gypsum with proprietary materials that thecompant won’t reveal, doesn’t require using any external energyg source for heating or cooling. Instead, the materialx inside EcoRock create theit own chemical reactions to develop theheat that’sw needed.
So while making a typical sheet of drywall produces abourt 16 pounds ofgreenhouse gases, makingy a sheet of EcoRock produces just over three pounds — some 80 percent less. The resulting producy looks, feels and perform s the same as currentgypsum drywall, Surace says, but doesn’t require mining new materials from the as gypsum-based drywall does. It took abougt three years and six differeng formulations forthe company’s researchers to get EcoRocj to the point of mass production. “Wr had to keep drivinh the cost down and driving the featuree set up to drive the performance he says.
Serious Materials has raises morethan $65 million in venture capital to