Green Building Materials

About 40 percent of our nation’s energy goes into running buildings, and another 12 percent to building them. To help developers achieve LEED certification, a new crop of green building materials has sprung up.

As part of our "next green thing" series, we asked Michael Kanellos to fill us in on some of them. He’s a senior policy analyst at GreenTech Media.

CalStar Cement’s founder, Mark Porat, says he’s developed "the biggest technological changes in bricks since the Canaanites." Instead of burning clay, CalStar will take fly ash, the particulate matter that ordinarily leaves smokestacks to enter the atmosphere, add some extra chemicals and make bricks. Rather than requiring high temperature cooking, the chemicals congeal into a solid, hard mass.

Serious Materials is doing the same thing with drywall. Instead of cooking gypsum at a high temperature to make drywall, Serious has a chemical compound that, when mixed with other chemicals, congeals into drywall at low temperatures. We also look at Integrity Block, a company in Palo Alto that's come up with a building block made out of mashed earth. It takes far less energy to make these than a regular cement block.

(Photo of Integrity Block CEO Trevor Stout courtesy of Integrity Block)