What is Ecorock?
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What is Ecorock.?Is it a wall board with a formaldehyde free glue or other non outgassing glue or binder? Where can I get information on this product?
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Google.
It's a canned meat product.
It's wallboard claimed to be made with 80% less energy than standard and 80% recycled content. It is made by Serious Materials, who also claims to make R-7 windows that I think are being used in the Empire State Building renovation, and QuietRock, an innovate sound proofing solution. I'm not sure how these products perform, but like the idea of rethinking products from scratch rather than trying to tweak old ideas. http://www.seriousmaterials.com/html/ecorock.html
It's "pink" insulation (advertising.) Seriously... it is what you say it is. Read your own post. Is there an eco, echo... here?
The link above states they had sold out the Beta test run of EcoRock.
Since there hasn't been even a press release from Serious about EcoRock since 2009, I'm starting to doubt its viability.
Damon is correct. Turns out that making sheetrock in the usual way is an ernergy intesive process. The raw material first has to be mined, then it is heated ti high temperatures twice to get to this finished product. Some factories have recently converted to making "synthetic" sheet rock using fly ash from our coal fired electric plants. When I last checked about a year ago there were only two factories in the states that were doing this, so importing from far away, if you aren't fortunate to be close to one of these factories would offset any CO2 savings. Some factories were starting to use evacuated solar thermal panels to do the cooking, instead of using electricity or gas to do the job, but once again when I checked a year ago this was "in progress". It seems bit of a shame that more factories aren't using the fly ash approach, since it tends to build up and cause enviromental disasters like the one in Tennessee a few years ago.
Kevin,
Fly ash is not used to make drywall; the ingredient you are thinking of is gypsum, not fly ash. Gypsum can be mined, or synthetic gypsum can be used; the synthetic gypsum can be processed at flue scrubbers at coal plants that use calcium carbonate to remove sulfur dioxide from flue gas.
More information here:
http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/2010/7/30/Synthetic-Gypsum/
The president or sales manager from Ecorock called me. Ecorock is formaldehyde free and free of any out gassing chemicals that could be harmful They are NOT producing Ecorock now ( although it is a good product) because the housing and construction market in the US is so poor that it is uneconomical to produce in small volumes, He said they have to make it in large volumes to be profitable. They have made sheets of Ecorock so if the market turns, it is ready to go. But for now product is on HOLD. This is a shame. It is the 1st drywall product that I found that is really GREEN. It looks like they put a lot of research and development and effort and money into bringing this product to market, only to have a market now that will not support production.
I called the company's customer support line and they verified what Frank mentioned above. No longer producing the Eco-rock production and are now concentrating on energy efficient windows since that's where the growth is.