The Abrams Clean Tech Report

 

Talking Change With Kevin Surace, Serious Materials

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

I’m always fascinated by game-changing technologies and companies and their leaders – those companies that turn industries on their head, challenge the status quo, build solid businesses, and are those which you know will always be the instigators of change in industries that are traditionally slow to move to their next evolution of growth. And there’s always a company or two in every industry that really stand out when it comes to innovation…some company doing something really smart that inevitably causes others to follow suit. It takes quite a bit of courage to be that company, you might say, but that’s what change takes. One company that’s making a serious dent in the building materials world is Serious Materials.

Some may say Serious doesn’t need any more press or attention because of all the press they’ve already received. (Which I chalk up to great product, which makes it easy for a well-trained marketing and pr team to execute, combined with a well-trained team and something that just blows the socks off anything else around it). I say the company’s products and technologies aren’t getting enough of either. And Serious is concerned that that there isn’t enough awareness around the built environment, too, and what it’s contributing to global warming. And that’s really where Kevin Surace and I started our conversation last week, talking about the fact that the story that compelled Serious into existence isn’t one that’s well told, nor one well understood by consumers.

A little background info for you all:

The built environment is responsible for generating – and requiring – more energy than any other sector there is. 52% of CO2 worldwide each year goes just to making and occupying buildings (12% to make materials and 40% to operate buildings). Gypsum drywall, as most of us know, was designed almost 100 years ago. Gypsum drywall takes huge amounts of energy to manufacture. A large drywall plant uses 5 trillion BTUs of natural gas a year and generates as much CO2 as do 66,000 cars on the road. That’s just a mind-boggling set of numbers.

There are more than 85 dry wall plants operating today in the U.S., making 30 billion + square feet of product every year, and over a billion panels a year are manufactured in the United States alone. The market is huge. Note: the EPA doesn’t regulate CO2 today for drywall plants, or any other plants yet, as far as I know.

Contributing to that 52% in CO2 emissions is the energy which has to be generated additionally – due to inefficient windows which let our heat (or air conditioning) literally out the window. The window industry is a $22 billion dollar industry, roughly split in half: half in residential, and half in commercial. That half that’s residential is largely a retrofit market opportunity, but this is an industry that’s not the fastest-moving boat in the river. Current Energy Star window ratings actually desperately need to be increased if they’re to really make a dent in pushing CO2 emissions lower. And the majority of consumers don’t know enough about windows, window Energy Star ratings, or how their windows are contributing to increasing CO2 emissions to know they need to be voicing their concerns and pushing for change.

So with an eye on development of environmental products, and a mission to rewrite the book on building materials in order to reduce the amount of CO2 being generated in the production of these products, Serious Materials went to work first on redesigning gypsum using recycled materials and virtually zero CO2. The company today is getting set to launch the drywall technology they’ve developed called EcoRock, which is the first zero-CO2 drywall manufacturing process to come to market – made from 80% recycled material (pre-consumer waste combined with other raw materials. “It heats, cools and finishes itself in a long line, so there’s no need for dryers, calciners, natural gas…nothing,” says Surace, meaning that very little energy is used during the product’s core production, which translates to virtually zero CO2 emissions, and billions of pounds in C02 emissions saved each year. Additionally, Surace says, Serious Materials can add features into drywall that people could never get before. “Drywall is really a decorative product.” I can only think of lots of very inspired architects and interior designers suddenly.

The company is also coming out with a line of high performance windows – note their recent acquisition of Alpen Windows. Alpen was named a 2007 Top 10 Green Building Product by Building Green, and Alpen Windows and Alpenglass deliver center-of-glass R-values up to R-20. Current single pane windows have an R-value of R-1. Double pane glass windows with low emissivity coating have an R-value of only R-2 to R-3. “Consumers need to start asking for full frame R values on the windows they buy, and requiring R-5 or higher,” says Surace. (More on R-Values here: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)].) “And the public should be demanding a carbon footprint on everything the public buys!” I couldn’t agree more.

I asked Kevin where he thought things would be in 10, or say even 20 to 50 years. He said to me, “Lara, in 30 years we’re out of oil and virtually out of gas; cars will go to the grid, and the vast majority of our materials are going to be made with zero energy. Now, everything has come out of the Industrial Revolution, which consumed tons of energy. But just because we said then that that was the right formula doesn’t mean it’s the right one today. One has to consider – energy costs have gone up, so the fact that we said we’d use lots of energy and hardly any labor might no longer be the right formula. There’s no business case for energy use today. And you really don’t want to be on the wrong side of the energy/carbon curve – it’s dumb. So not only are we doing the right thing regarding carbon emissions – we’re doing it better.”

As I said, when I see a company that’s an innovator, building a solid business, with a game changing technology/approach to an industry, I’m always fascinated – largely because I find it interesting to watch what happens to the rest of a ‘system’ when a catalyst of change is introduced into the dynamic. Change is interesting. It’s certainly not boring, and it means growth.

So if you ask me, I can think of two industries who I hope are up to the challenge to change: the drywall industry, which would be exceptionally smart to follow Serious Materials’ lead, and the windows industry. Somebody should put into motion an R-5 national window-retrofit program that a green corps can then go execute.

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