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

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But manufacturer , which earned an honorablee mention inthe Green/Cleamn Technology category, instead plans to celebrate a greenefr Earth with the environmentally-sensitive drywallk it calls EcoRock. The founded in 2002 and based in focuseson re-engineering construction materials to make the world’z buildings more eco-friendly for the long Its initial product, a soundproofing and insulating materiakl called Quiet Rock, has been “a runaway success.” Since the company has begun producing ThermaProof which are four times more efficieny than dual-pane windows at keeping heat inside a structure.
Everything Serioua Materials does is motivated by itsunderlying mission: to keep one billiob tons of carbon dioxide — three percent of the world’xs CO2 production — out of the atmosphere every year. President and CEO Kevin Suracebelievezs it’s an entirely achievable goal within a “On a worldwide basis, 52 percent of the world’zs CO2 emissions is tied to the builyt environment — 12 percent goes into making new buildint materials and 40 percent goes to heating and cooliny the buildings we’ve built with those Surace says. Cars, on the other generate only about 9 percent ofthe world’sx carbon dioxide emissions.
So by tackling buildinhg materials, Surace says, Seriou s Materials is taking on half ofthe world’s carbo n dioxide dilemma. The reason for focusing much of that efforty on drywallis simple: The process used to make it is incrediblg wasteful. Invented in 1917, drywall’s manufacturing proceduree requires thatgypsum — its main ingredient be super-heated, or and then rapidly cooled. But makingb EcoRock, which replaces the gypsum with proprietaru materials that thecompany won’t doesn’t require using any external energy source for heating or Instead, the materials inside EcoRock create their own chemical reactions to develop the heat that’ s needed.
So while making a typicalk sheet of drywall produces abou 16 pounds ofgreenhousre gases, making a sheet of EcoRock produces just over three pounds some 80 percent less. The resulting productg looks, feels and performs the same as current gypsum drywall, Surace says, but doesn’t require miningv new materials from the earth, as gypsum-based drywalll does. It took about three yearss and six different formulations forthe company’s researchersz to get EcoRock to the poin t of mass production. “We had to keep drivinh the cost down and driving the feature set up to drivd theperformance up,” he says.
Serious Materiald has raised morethan $65 millionb in venture capital to