We lean on it, hang our pictures from it, and generally depend on it for the finish construction of interior walls and ceilings in our homes and offices.

But do we know how drywall is made?

According to Kevin Surace, president and CEO of Sunnyvale, Calif.'s Serious Materials, the current manufacturing process produces 51 million tons of greenhouse gases, almost 1 percent of all U.S. energy consumption.

Serious Materials is out to change that. Founded in 2002 and backed by Rustic Canyon Partners, it already makes soundproofing drywall and windows, and plans to start making EcoRock drywall next year with a process that produces no carbon dioxide.

The company reportedly has a Series B round of $40 million to $50 million in financing underway.

Right now, Serious Materials is the only company with green drywall.

Kevin Surace, changing the face of construction

Surace, who said 6 percent of commercial structures are green this year, and that he sees that hitting 40 percent in the next three to four years, spoke with Cleantech.com about his company's EcoRock, thinking big on reducing CO2, and why Silicon Valley can build a better sheetrock.

Where are the plants you're building?

We have two plants today for our noise pollution product line, QuietRock. One is in Sunnyvale, Calif., one in Newark, Calif. The EcoRock plant is going into Stockton, Calif.

It's 240,000 square feet. It's a good size facility. Ultimately that plant will produce between 300 million and 500 million square feet of product annually.

So it's going to make a lot?

It's actually not as much as you think. The drywall industry is upwards of 30 to 40 billion square feet in the U.S. alone. It's a drop in the bucket when you consider the size of the industry.

And that's the thing; these industries are so large, whether you're going after this, or glass, or metals, or concrete or whatever you're doing, these industries are so large you practically can't go after more than a small percentage. It's specifically targeted at the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and green building market today.

Drywall is one of those calcined products, like cements, that have to be cooked. Basically, it's calcined (a thermal treatment process) and then dried. The doing of that generates some 20 to 30 billion pounds or so of CO2 annually.

We're attacking that by developing a process using new material science that generates zero CO2, literally zero in the plant. So it's an absolute carbon-free process, as opposed to a lot of the products that we use.

Everywhere you look around you, everything has a carbon footprint, and we're trying to generate something that at least through it's manufacturing doesn't have any carbon footprint. It'll have to be transported to you, unfortunately. Can't solve them all, but we've got to click it off one thing at a time.

Can you talk about the process that you use to make this drywall?

All I can tell you right now is that it's using some advanced material science, and the reduction in carbon footprint through manufacturing is significant. The energy used to make a standard sheet of drywall is 100,000 BTUs or more per sheet, 4x8, and we've developed a process that really takes, in essence, none.

A little bit of electricity and absolutely no natural gas. So there's no burning of fossil fuels, which there is in a normal drywall process.

Have you made any of this drywall?

We make it all the time, but we only make it in the lab, in lab quantities. It's not on the market at this time, but it looks and smells and feels like gypsum drywall. You would not know the difference. You'd only know because I'm talking to you and telling you, but other than that, other than the logo on it, you wouldn't know the difference.

What about cost? Is it competitive with other drywall?

Today the market for high LEED-point items is higher than commodity pricing, and so I would expect that this will follow that market pricing in terms of some increase above the cost of commodity low-cost drywall. The range of drywall pricing is very large, actually. You've got mold-resistant products that are twice the price of the regular products, so there is a range.

The lowest cost material, I don't think that it will be the same price as that, and that's certainly not our intent. And it doesn't need to be, because the demand for this from our channel is huge. It's wonderful.

Almost one third of CO2 in this country comes from the manufacturing of goods, comes from industry. About one third industry, about one third building heat loss and cooling, and about one third transportation. I think when people wake up to that, they'll go "Okay, what can I buy that was manufactured in a way that doesn't generate CO2?" And it turns out that's hard to find today.

With awareness comes more market demand, but we already see the market demand in the commercial LEED spaces to be higher than we can meet.

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