BioSIPs feature a unique 3D structural core that other SIPs don’t have, which performs like studs to add internal rigidity, and they are the only SIP with a 100 percent chemical-free skin.
ARCHITECT, PROFESSOR, INVENTOR, RESEARCHER AND FOLLOWER OF NATURE, JULEE HERDT wears a lot of hats. As a Professor of Architecture and researcher at the University of Colorado for 29 years, Herdt has been an informative figure in the design education of three generations of CU students. Before that, as a licensed architect she worked throughout the U.S. and in Europe with several acclaimed design practices including Morphosis, Frank O. Gehry and Coop Himmelblau. As a researcher, Herdt’s work focuses on the intersection of design and material sciences with a particular interest in waste-based, bio-building materials.
“I grew up in Kentucky and learned to respect the environment around me as part of everyday life. I’ve made that integral to my practice in all its forms,” says Herdt, whose career stretches back to the late 1970s. “In the 1980s and 90s, a lot of money was pouring into the design and building industry, which generated a tremendous amount of waste. My choices were to complain about it or try to do something about it. So, I started developing environmentally-sound building materials from waste. I’ve been on that journey ever since.”
“I grew up in Kentucky and learned to respect the environment around me as part of everyday life. I’ve made that integral to my practice in all its forms,” says Herdt, whose career stretches back to the late 1970s. “In the 1980s and 90s, a lot of money was pouring into the design and building industry, which generated a tremendous amount of waste. My choices were to complain about it or try to do something about it. So, I started developing environmentally-sound building materials from waste. I’ve been on that journey ever since.”
Herdt’s journey into material science began where the by-products of her architectural work ended up — as material and packaging waste in the contractor’s job site dumpster. She observed plenty of discarded wood waste, odds and ends of corners cut off particle boards, and 2 x 4s along with paper waste of all types. Not only was this sort of waste abundant, but it was also already being routinely gathered and could be acquired as feedstock at virtually no cost.
“What I imagined was reconstituting bio-based waste as engineered molded fibers,” says Herdt, of what has become the heart of her design process ever since that epiphany moment three decades ago. Just as oriented strand board (OSB) is made by compressing and adhering pieces of forest-harvested wood together with toxic resins to create structural wood panels, Herdt sought to replicate the process using non-toxic, bio-degradable materials drawn from waste sources.
“I started collaborating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, on using recycled cellulose, waste wood and fiber residues of many types as a material source for a new kind of fiberboard. The primary difference is nothing was grown as a fiber source, which meant anything we produced would be inherently carbon negative,” says Herdt of the expedition from idea to actualization.
Along the way, she has continued to experiment with a wide array of different waste sources. Cow manure fibers mixed with cardboard and old newspapers are just one type of board she uses to make building materials. What she has found is somewhat surprising. One after another, it turns out that boards made from waste materials are just as strong, if not stronger, than similar manufactured boards from harvested wood.
With proven processes in place to strand-orient waste fibers, Herdt and the FLP team moved on to manipulating their new waste-based boards into three-dimensional forms. With an ultimate ambition of mainstreeting bio-waste into everyday lives without making a fuss, Herdt now finds herself all but ready to go to market with a signature invention.
“BioSIPs are the result of two first-ever patents for the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning and myself,” says Herdt with pride. Building on the widely understood concept of Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs), Herdt’s patented BioSIPs not only differ in their raw materials but also in their structural capacity. “BioSIPs feature a unique 3D structural core that other SIPs don’t have, which performs like studs to add internal rigidity, and they are the only SIP with a 100 percent chemical-free skin.”
Key Benefits of BioSIPs
- lightweight, green alternative to wood framing
- structurally rated for extreme winds and seismic and other loads
- modularity facilitates rapid deployment, pre-fabrication and ease of installation anywhere
- can be insulated with conventional or organic materials of many sorts
- made from waste, they are recyclable, repulpable and renewable
Herdt shares that the core shape of the BioSIPs can be varied according to the intended application allowing these building-block-like units to become floors, roofs, exterior or interior walls, doors, cabinets, furniture or basically anything that manufactured board can be. Like other types of structurally insulated panels, BioSIPs are designed to be insulated, which is where they gain tremendous economy of process for builders who install one product as an outer wall assembly rather than several layers of products. Herdt plans to put BioSIPs and a range of other products she has developed to the test in a custom home she is designing and building for herself.
“I’ll be building a small BioSIP home in Boulder, Colorado to live in as a demonstration,” continues Herdt of what’s next. “As we’ve designed and modeled it, my BioSIP home is expected to use 70 percent less energy than a traditionally built home of the same size. It will also be carbon negative and is predicted to show a minimum of 40 percent lower carbon overall. Each BioSIP will consume about 86 pounds of waste material, so it’s a tremendous win for the environment.”
The manufacturing process doesn’t require any formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds, resins or other off-gassing agents and nothing is harvested or grown specifically for BioSIP production. Herdt’s ambitions to innovate don’t stop there. She is also exploring a variety of innovative organic insulation mediums to fill the interstitial spaces of the BioSIP’s structural core. So far, she has used sheep’s wool and mycelium, the vegetative filament root structure of mushrooms. Within the home she will build, Herdt plans to use panels filled with various insulating mediums, side-by-side, to determine how each performs in identical conditions.
“Polyiso and polystyrene are typically used to insulate SIPs, and I’m trying to avoid using those kinds of toxic chemicals,” she continues. “The super-insulated BioSIP can get an R-value between 3.5 and 7.5. The higher the R-value, the skinnier the wall assembly, which translates to bigger rooms. BioSIPs go up fast, can be built with existing tools, and can be finished in any conventional wall covering like drywall, wallpaper, tile or plaster. I think it’s beautiful even unfinished.”
So far, Herdt’s BioSIP has garnered attention through academic, professional and product research initiatives as she looks for business investors to take her invention to the next level. Through her role at the University of Colorado, Herdt led teams of students to win first place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon two years in a row. In these international competitions, CU students proved that bio-based construction powered by renewable energy can compete economically with traditional, carbon-intensive building materials while exceeding environmental standards. BioSIPs were also acknowledged by the Colorado Chapter of the U.S.G.B.C. and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for their contribution to the future of building materials.
Meanwhile, Herdt and the students she works with all continue to push toward the elusive edge of innovation, ever on the horizon.
“I teach a design studio at CU where students explore new building methodologies and materials of their own,” says Herdt of what’s next. “One student is experimenting with an existing technology called healed wood that joins dissimilar wood together. There are ideas to turn recycled rubber into entire building surfaces, and one student group pressed unsorted, chopped wood waste into a structural beam using non-toxic glue. Bio-based building materials offer a lot of good answers to the questions architects like me have been asking for a long time.”
