CleanBoard plans gypsum drywall using solar thermal tech

San Francisco-based startup CleanBoard came out of stealth today with its contribution to the green building world: a drywall made of recycled materials using solar thermal technology.

CleanBoard initially plans to ship drywall made from recycled materials to California from two factories in the Shangdong province of China. CleanBoard plans to buy carbon offsets to make the building material qualify for points under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program of the U.S. Green Building Council.

But the startup has cleaner aspirations for its product. CleanBoard is currently raising venture capital to build a manufacturing facility in California's Mojave Desert using solar heat for industrial processes (SHIP), which collects energy in a similar manner to solar thermal electric power plants but uses the produced heat in the industrial process.

CEO Rod MacGregor told the Cleantech Group that a SHIP plant is more efficient than solar thermal electric and about one-tenth the cost. While solar thermal electric plants are 20 percent to 30 percent efficient, SHIP can use about 90 percent of the heat in the system, he said.

Drywall is an energy-intensive process, alone accounting for about 1 percent of U.S. energy use, or about 120 trillion BTUs in 2007. A third of the energy is used in the calcine process, while the rest is used in an oven that bakes the drywall, MacGregor said.

Drywall can also be a wasteful sector of building materials, with about 15 percent of new drywall being discarded as it's cut to fit buildings. 

MacGregor says his company can contract with builders to take that scrap drywall away to be used to make fresh drywall. More than 80 percent of the supplies for CleanBoard, however, are expected to come from coal-fired power plants. Those plants use scrubbers to remove sulfur from emissions, which generates calcium sulfate, the basis for gypsum.

While U.S. power plants are already required to scrub emissions, CleanBoard can offer a financial incentive to plants in China and other developing countries to install scrubbers, MacGregor said.

In that way, the product could reduce harmful emissions, prevent scrap drywall from entering the landfill, produce drywall without open-pit mining for materials, and produce drywall without using electricity, MacGregor said.

McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics projects that the green building sector will jump from $12 billion in 2008 and $60 billion in 2010, in part because of requirements for government and commercial buildings in California. Building materials such as wood, cement, drywall and metal account for 12 percent of U.S. emissions and provide a significant opportunity for cleantech companies.

Fellow Bay Area drywall company, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Serious Materials pulled in $50 million in financing in 2007 for its green drywall product using a secretive chemical process (see How green is your drywall?). That product is expected to go into volume production this year.

But MacGregor says CleanBoard has a leg up on its competition because it's using drywall that builders are already familiar with, and because the recycled product from China can be ready in about six weeks.

"The industry is very, very cautious and moves very slowly in adopting new materials," MacGregor said. "We won't have any of those issues because we're not replacing drywall. We are drywall."

CleanBoard expects to secure an undisclosed amount of financing from Silicon Valley venture capitalists this quarter to fund the 50-acre California plant. Samples of the product are expected this year, with volume production beginning in late 2010, MacGregor said. Initial annual production is planned at 50 million square feet of drywall, eventually expanding to 100 million square feet.

Until volume production begins, CleanBoard expects to generate interest in its recycled product from China.

The drywall process requires lower temperatures than concrete, and lower temperatures than are needed to convert solar to electricity in a solar thermal plant. The energy produced at the SHIP facility is embedded in the product, making it more valuable than energy sent to the electric grid, MacGregor said.

Eventually, MacGregor thinks the proprietary SHIP technology can be used in other industrial processes, such as textiles, metals, chemicals or pharmaceuticals. But MacGregor has several years' experience working in drywall and wanted to tackle that sector first.

The company currently has three employees in California and 12 in China, not including the workers at the outsourced manufacturing facility. To date, the company is self funded, MacGregor said.

The company is narrowing down where to buy its carbon offsets but plans to be transparent so that customers can use the drywall to meet LEED requirements. 

The initial drywall product will sell for roughly the same cost as premium drywall. Similarly, Serious Materials has said its EcoRock would sell for about 1 percent more than premium drywall.

Although California is the first market for CleanBoard because of the LEED requirements for government and commercial buildings, the company plans to expand to the Southwest and Texas, and even possibly the Middle East.

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