Breathaboard

An innovative new plasterboard made with agricultural waste is providing a sustainable alternative to one of the most widely used building products

Plasterboard is one of the most widely used building products in the world, but it comes at an environmental cost.

Traditionally made by sandwiching gypsum plaster between layers of heavy-duty paper, its production uses significant amounts of natural gas and its disposal can be costly as plasterboard waste can’t go to regular landfill. Supplies of gypsum are also dwindling; a small proportion of raw material is sourced from depleting mines, but the majority of manufacturers use synthetic gypsum, a by-product of coal power generation, which is reducing in availability in the transition away from fossil-fuel based energy.

Adaptavate, a business specialising in carbon-negative construction materials, has developed Breathaboard, a sustainable plasterboard that eliminates the need for gypsum. The company won £820,000 funding through the Transforming Foundation Industries Investor Partner programme to build a pilot line for Breathaboard, taking the innovation from lab scale towards commercial production.

Better for people and planet

Made with agricultural crop waste and a lime-based binding agent, Breathaboard is completely biodegradable and non-toxic – off-cuts can even be used as soil conditioner.  Given that 39% of annual CO₂ emissions are attributed to the building and construction industry globally, Breathaboard’s innovative production process also offers crucial carbon savings.   

Unlike traditional gypsum plasterboard, the process does not require burning of natural gas. Instead, Adaptavate has developed a unique method that not only stores carbon in its aggregates, but also absorbs low concentrations of CO₂ during its innovative curing process.

The product is better for people, too, says Adaptavate’s Chief Technology Officer Jeff Ive. “Gypsum is less permeable, so condensation can build on traditional plasterboard, causing damp and mould, which is bad for people’s health. By contrast, Breathaboard’s bio-based materials are breathable. In recent tests, the product also demonstrated equal or better acoustic airborne sound reduction than traditional plasterboard, contributing to more comfortable living spaces.”

Scaling production

The project focussed on enhancing Breathaboard’s design for manufacture and technical validation, enabling a commercially viable product poised for worldwide adoption.

By building a pilot line at its development centre in Bristol, the company demonstrated the potential to manufacture at a much larger scale. “It enabled us to take the process from lab-scale production of a single board to manufacturing on a continuous extrusion production line. This represented an increase in capacity of ten-fold order of magnitude. This is only limited by available space; we are able to show that a 50-fold increase would be possible. The pilot line serves as a platform for future process development, optimising the process for further scale up,” explains Ive.

The project team also developed an accelerated curing process, which used low-grade industrial emissions or captured CO₂. This reduced cure time by more than 50%, with a pathway to further reductions, and makes the product a form of carbon utilisation, where every square metre of Breathaboard can save around 4kg of CO₂ and take just under 1kg out of the atmosphere.

Building confidence for industrial partners

The team was able to test the product in a real-life environment, and against the incumbent’s standard, accelerating the product technology readiness level. Validating the continuous production process and demonstrating Breathaboard’s performance was key to Adaptavate’s aim of collaborating with global production partners. “Plasterboard is a low-cost, high-volume product with production capacity for more than 300million m² in the UK every year. The market is dominated by a handful of companies, so Adaptavate’s vision was never to compete with them, but to license our core technology for use in their processes, utilising agricultural waste materials from their locale. It’s the only way to achieve the scale of carbon impact at a pace the planet requires,” says Ive. “The project has given us and potential partners the confidence that the product is technically scalable.”

Support for innovation

Ive believes there is currently a gap in the policy funding landscape for innovation in capital-intensive, carbon-heavy industries, such as manufacturing construction materials. “To have impact in these industries, any innovation needs to achieve at a massive scale, which requires large capital investment. The Transforming Foundation Industries Investor Partner programme was vital not only in terms of funding the transformation of a good idea to a commercially viable, real-world solution, but also for attracting further carbon-centric venture capital to our business,” he explains. “In the past 50 years, innovation is minimal in these industries, but Breathaboard shows what is possible. Industry, policy and innovation need to come together in projects such as this to create the revolution we need in the industrial ecosystem to unlock ecological and economic impact for all.”