New Building Materials and the Battle Between Sustainability and Affordability
By: Jenna Louie, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at Ivory Innovations
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We’re trying something new at Ivory Innovations – sharing a perspective about a recent trend or issue area we’ve seen in the housing world. But we don’t just focus on issues at Ivory; we focus on solutions. So in each post you’ll hear about some of the innovators we’re meeting through the Ivory Prize and how they’re changing the industry.
This is a perspective. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Sustainability in Construction: International Builders Show
Last week, 76,000 people were in Las Vegas for the International Builders Show, one of the largest industry events for the building and construction sector in the world. Our team was there to judge the Start-Up Zone, which recognizes most groundbreaking start-up businesses within the residential construction industry. Through the Start-Up Zone and the Ivory Prize, we see pitches from dozens of companies. Every year there are innovators focused on new building materials. Many of them are focused on sustainability; the building sector contributes to 37% to 42% of global carbon emissions, with building materials contributing to 11% of that total. No matter who you ask, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
And there are a lot of exciting new ideas: in the last few years we’ve seen dome homes, rammed earth homes, geopolymer homes, and plastic blocks that turn into homes, to name a few. These founders speak passionately and convincingly about sustainability, affordability, waste reduction, and even health improvements for the people living in the homes. They are doing incredible work, and I wish them well.
Innovative Construction Materials: The Search for Solutions
But this is my perspective: many new materials innovations are solutions still searching for their place in the industry, rather than products developed to meet today’s key industry needs and processes. Because to meaningfully address any of the myriad challenges we have in the housing industry requires a laser focus on either solving a critical industry need or quickly achieving cost parity. And both require easy integration into the existing, highly fragmented building systems process.
As much as I’d like to believe the Tesla model will work for housing, where you can start expensive for a few buyers then move to mass production, I’m unconvinced – homes are orders of magnitude more expensive, more regulated, and significantly more complicated because of how many stakeholders actually touch that house as it gets built.
So for any of these new, more sustainable products to matter, they have to reach scale quickly. And to reach scale quickly means working with the largest builders in the industry or being both better AND as cheap as status quo products. Out of hundreds, we’ve only found a select few companies that are successfully threading this needle.
Companies at the Forefront: How the Environmental Impact of Building is Being Addressed
1. Plantd
Take Plantd – a company producing “carbon negative materials for every new home and building on earth.” DR Horton, America’s largest homebuilder, invested with Plantd on the strength of their grass-and-resin panel innovation because it solves a fundamental construction issue – mold – with status quo products in homes in hot and humid parts of the country. By solving a critical issue for the nation’s largest homebuilder with a product that easily replaces the status quo alternative, Plantd is bringing a “carbon negative” product mainstream – not because it’s carbon negative, but because their product meets a critical industry need.
2. Timber hp
The other option is to be better AND cost comparable to the status quo. Timber HP has managed to achieve this difficult balance by manufacturing a well-known, high-sustainability, high-performance product from Europe – wood fiber insulation – that simply wasn’t available in the US because it was too expensive to ship across the Atlantic. Timber HP manufactures their product in Maine, where there are plenty of trees, a lot of skilled labor, and available facilities. In doing so, they’ve blown the market wide open for a highly sustainable product that is easy to use and cost comparable to status quo insulation products on the market.
Implications for the Building Industry
These products are what changing the building industry looks like. They are companies positioned for making an impact at scale. Rather than solutions searching for a problem to solve, they have created products that builders need and can use today without significant additional cost. These are the innovative materials we need to address both environmental and housing affordability challenges today, at scale.